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The attractiveness of such speculations arises out of their true nature not being perceived. They are veiled in graceful language; they are not pushed to extremes; they stop where the human mind is disposed also to stop—short of a manifest absurdity. Their inconsistency is not observed by their authors or by mankind in general, who are equally inconsistent themselves. They leave on the mind a pleasing sense of wonder and novelty: in youth they seem to have a natural affinity to one class of persons as poetry has to another; but in later life either we drift back into common sense, or we make them the starting-points of a higher philosophy.

We are often told that we should enquire into all things before we accept them;—with what limitations is this true? For we cannot use our senses without admitting that we have them, or think without presupposing that there is in us a power of thought, or affirm that all knowledge is derived from experience without implying that this first principle of knowledge is prior to experience. The truth seems to be that we begin with the natural use of the mind as of the body, and we seek to describe this as well as we can. We eat before we know the nature of digestion; we think before we know the nature of reflection. As our knowledge increases, our perception of the mind enlarges also. We cannot indeed get beyond facts, but neither can we draw any line which separates facts from ideas. And the mind is not something separate from them but included in them, and they in the mind, both having a distinctness and individuality of their own. To reduce our conception of mind to a succession of feelings and sensations is like the attempt to view a wide prospect by inches through a microscope, or to calculate a period of chronology by minutes. The mind ceases to exist when it loses its continuity, which though far from being its highest determination, is yet necessary to any conception of it. Even an inanimate nature cannot be adequately represented as an endless succession of states or conditions.

Paragraph II. Another division of the subject has yet to be considered: Why should the doctrine that knowledge is sensation, in ancient times, or of sensationalism or materialism in modern times, be allied to the lower rather than to the higher view of ethical philosophy? At first sight the nature and origin of knowledge appear to be wholly disconnected from ethics and religion, nor can we deny that the ancient Stoics were materialists, or that the materialist doctrines prevalent in modern times have been associated with great virtues, or that both religious and philosophical idealism have not unfrequently parted company with practice. Still upon the whole it must be admitted that the higher standard of duty has gone hand in hand with the higher conception of knowledge. It is Protagoras who is seeking to adapt himself to the opinions of the world; it is Plato who rises above them: the one maintaining that all knowledge is sensation; the other basing the virtues on the idea of good. The reason of this phenomenon has now to be examined.

By those who rest knowledge immediately upon sense, that explanation of human action is deemed to be the truest which is nearest to sense. As knowledge is reduced to sensation, so virtue is reduced to feeling, happiness or good to pleasure. The different virtues—the various characters which exist in the world—are the disguises of self-interest. Human nature is dried up; there is no place left for imagination, or in any higher sense for religion. Ideals of a whole, or of a state, or of a law of duty, or of a divine perfection, are out of place in an Epicurean philosophy. The very terms in which they are expressed are suspected of having no meaning. Man is to bring himself back as far as he is able to the condition of a rational beast. He is to limit himself to the pursuit of pleasure, but of this he is to make a far-sighted calculation;—he is to be rationalized, secularized, animalized: or he is to be an amiable sceptic, better than his own philosophy, and not falling below the opinions of the world.

Imagination has been called that 'busy faculty' which is always intruding upon us in the search after truth. But imagination is also that higher power by which we rise above ourselves and the commonplaces of thought and life. The philosophical imagination is another name for reason finding an expression of herself in the outward world. To deprive life of ideals is to deprive it of all higher and comprehensive aims and of the power of imparting and communicating them to others. For men are taught, not by those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise above them, who see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like a bird in a cage, the mind confined to sense is always being brought back from the higher to the lower, from the wider to the narrower view of human knowledge. It seeks to fly but cannot: instead of aspiring towards perfection, 'it hovers about this lower world and the earthly nature.' It loses the religious sense which more than any other seems to take a man out of himself. Weary of asking 'What is truth?' it accepts the 'blind witness of eyes and ears;' it draws around itself the curtain of the physical world and is satisfied. The strength of a sensational philosophy lies in the ready accommodation of it to the minds of men; many who have been metaphysicians in their youth, as they advance in years are prone to acquiesce in things as they are, or rather appear to be. They are spectators, not thinkers, and the best philosophy is that which requires of them the least amount of mental effort.

As a lower philosophy is easier to apprehend than a higher, so a lower way of life is easier to follow; and therefore such a philosophy seems to derive a support from the general practice of mankind. It appeals to principles which they all know and recognize: it gives back to them in a generalized form the results of their own experience. To the man of the world they are the quintessence of his own reflections upon life. To follow custom, to have no new ideas or opinions, not to be straining after impossibilities, to enjoy to-day with just so much forethought as is necessary to provide for the morrow, this is regarded by the greater part of the world as the natural way of passing through existence. And many who have lived thus have attained to a lower kind of happiness or equanimity. They have possessed their souls in peace without ever allowing them to wander into the region of religious or political controversy, and without any care for the higher interests of man. But nearly all the good (as well as some of the evil) which has ever been done in this world has been the work of another spirit, the work of enthusiasts and idealists, of apostles and martyrs. The leaders of mankind have not been of the gentle Epicurean type; they have personified ideas; they have sometimes also been the victims of them. But they have always been seeking after a truth or ideal of which they fell short; and have died in a manner disappointed of their hopes that they might lift the human race out of the slough in which they found them. They have done little compared with their own visions and aspirations; but they have done that little, only because they sought to do, and once perhaps thought that they were doing, a great deal more.