All sciences are
advanced in proportion as they have thus organized their appropriate
matter in abstract conceptions and laws, and are backward in proportion
as there remains much in their provinces not yet so coordinated and
systematized; and in their hierarchy, from astronomical physics
downward, each takes rank according to the nature of the universals it
deals with, as these are more or less embracing.
The matter of literature--that part of total experience which it deals
with--is life; and, to confine attention to imaginative literature where
alone the question of idealism arises, the matter with which imaginative
literature deals is the inward and spiritual order in man's breast as
distinguished from the outward and physical order with which science
deals. The reason as here exercised organizes man's experience in this
great tract of emotion, will, and meditation, and so possesses man of
true knowledge of himself, just as in the realm of science it possesses
him of true knowledge of the physical world, or, in psychology and
metaphysics, of the constitution and processes of the mind itself.
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