he type of what will one day be
general.

At least, Deronda argued, Mordecai's visionary excitability was hardly
a reason for concluding beforehand that he was not worth listening to
except for pity sake. Suppose he had introduced himself as one of the
strictest reasoners. Do they form a body of men hitherto free from
false conclusions and illusory speculations? The driest argument has
its hallucinations, too hastily concluding that its net will now at
last be large enough to hold the universe. Men may dream in
demonstrations, and cut out an illusory world in the shape of axioms,
definitions, and propositions, with a final exclusion of fact signed
Q.E.D. No formulas for thinking will save us mortals from mistake in
our imperfect apprehension of the matter to be thought about. And since
the unemotional intellect may carry us into a mathematical dreamland
where nothing is but what is not, perhaps an emotional intellect may
have absorbed into its passionate vision of possibilities some truth of
what will be--the more comprehensive massive life feeding theory with
new material, as the sensibility of the artist seizes combinations
which science explains and justifies. At any rate, presumptions to the
contrary are not to be trusted. We must be patient with the inevitable
makeshift of our human thinking, whether in its sum total or in the
separate minds that have made the sum. Columbus had some impressions
about himself which we call superstitions, and used some arguments
which we disapprove; but he had also some sound physical conceptions,
and he had the passionate patience of genius to make them tell on
mankind. The world has made up its mind rather contemptuously about
those who were deaf to Columbus.

"My contempt for them binds me to see that I don't adopt their mistake
on a small scale," said Deronda, "and make myself deaf with the
assumption that there cannot be any momentous relation between this Jew
and me, simply because he has clad it in illusory notions. What I can
be to him, or he to me, may not at all depend on his persuasion about
the way we came together. To me the way seems made up of plainly
discernible links. If I had not found Mirah, it is probable that I
should not have begun to be specially interested in the Jews, and
certainly I should not have gone on that loitering search after an Ezra
Cohen which made me pause at Ram's book-shop and ask the price of
_Maimon_. Mordecai, on his side, had his visions o