It is the
touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both
worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is
power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the
conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the
most daring of human thoughts.
The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace
these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has
thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature
in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though
generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its
direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative
reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is
the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter,
which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's
faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet
to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of
mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on
the unworldly side of life, or interested in them.
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