e and friendship tend to set up in the relations of
persons, tolerance taking on the vesture of sympathy; and it no more
makes for Gradgrindism, or the belittlement of any of the higher joys,
than for concentration on the lower. Its antagonists alternately indict
it for 'gloom' and for licence; for coldness and for 'Epicureanism'; for
seeking only happiness, and for turning happiness out of doors. The
contradictions of the indictment tell of its collective origin in mere
hostility of temper. Rationalism, of all codes and modes of
life-philosophy, must most seek to make the best of life.

Some professed rationalists, indeed, at times grind in the mills of the
Philistines by professing an apprehension lest their fellows, in
pursuing truth, should lose sight of beauty; and such misconceiving
mentors plead confusedly for some formal association of rationalism with
the arts of feeling, with poetry, with music, with drama, with
fiction--as if without cultivating these things _in the name of_
Rationalism we should be divested of them or discredited as not
possessing them. The fallacy is of a piece with that which identifies
Christianity with progress in civilisation. The rationalistic bias is in
actual experience found to be as compatible with any aesthetic bias as
with the scientific, specially so called; though in point of fact a
scientific culture is in itself more conducive to rationalism in respect
of historical and ultimate problems than is culture in the arts, which
are mostly enjoyed, appraised, and even practised without deliberate
resort to critical analysis.

Some rationalists, again, have been found to contend that the critical
analysis of things aesthetic is destructive of aesthetic joy--an error of
errors, involving blindness to the facts that even a science is in
itself ultimately perceptible as an artistic construction, and that all
the arts live and renew themselves by the sense of truth. The solution
of the verbal conflict lies in recognising that rationalism is after all
but a name for considerate consistency in the intellectual life, where
consistency is still so sadly little cultivated, and where established
habits and institutions tend so powerfully to its exclusion; whereas in
the arts there is no call for such specific championship. There the very
joy of novelty is soon potent to overcome the resistance of
habit--which, for the rest, roots in structural or acquired limitations
not greatly dependent upo