His moral insight simply vivifies the scene that nature and the sciences
of nature spread out before him: they tell him what has happened, and his
heart tells him what has been felt. Only literature can describe
experience for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral
and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not
because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies,
but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into
pleasures and pains, and into many-coloured ideas. Yet at every turn there
is a possibility and an occasion for transmuting this poetry into science,
because ideas and emotions, being caused by material events, refer to
these events, and record their order.
All philosophies are frail, in that they are products of the human mind,
in which everything is essentially reactive, spontaneous, and volatile:
but as in passion and in language, so in philosophy, there are certain
comparatively steady and hereditary principles, forming a sort of orthodox
reason, which is or which may become the current grammar of mankind. Of
philosophers who are orthodox in this sense, only the earliest or the most
powerful, an Aristotle or a Spinoza, need to be remembered, in that they
stamp their language and temper upon human reason itself. The rest of the
orthodox are justly lost in the crowd and relegated to the chorus. The
frailty of heretical philosophers is more conspicuous and interesting: it
makes up the _chronique scandaleuse_ of the mind, or the history of
philosophy.
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