Such
knowledge is, without need of argument, of the highest consequence to
mankind. It exceeds, indeed, in dignity and value all other knowledge;
for to penetrate this inward or spiritual order, to grasp it with the
mind and conform to it with the will, is not, as is the case with every
other sort of knowledge, the special and partial effort of selected
minds, but the daily business of all men in their lives. The method of
the mind here is and must be the same with that by which it accomplishes
its work elsewhere, its only method. Here, too, its concern is with the
universal; its end is to know life--the life with which literature
deals--not empirically in its facts, but scientifically in its necessary
order, not phenomenally in the senses but rationally in the mind, not
without relation in its mere procession but organically in its laws; and
its instrument here, as through the whole gamut of the physical sciences
and of philosophy itself, is the generalizing faculty.
One difference there is between scientific and imaginative truth,--a
difference in the mode of statement.
Pages:
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88