ile us with our impotence.

But mediating attempts may be made by more mystical minds. The peace
of rationality may be sought through ecstasy when logic fails. To
religious persons of every shade of doctrine moments come when the
world, as it is, seems so divinely orderly, and the acceptance of it by
the heart so rapturously complete, that intellectual questions vanish;
nay, the intellect itself is hushed to sleep,--as Wordsworth says,
"thought is not; in enjoyment it expires." Ontological emotion so
fills the soul that ontological speculation can no longer overlap it
and put her girdle of interrogation-marks round existence. Even the
least religious of men must have felt with Walt Whitman, when loafing
on the grass on some transparent summer morning, that "swiftly arose
and spread round him the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument
of the earth." At such moments of energetic living we feel as if there
were something diseased and contemptible, yea vile, in theoretic
grubbing and brooding. In the eye of healthy sense the philosopher is
at best a learned fool.

Since the heart can thus wall out the ultimate irrationality which the
head ascertains, the erection of its procedure into a systematized
method would be a philosophic achievement of first-rate importance.
But as used by mystics hitherto it has lacked universality, being
available for few persons and at few times, and {75} even in these
being apt to be followed by fits of reaction and dryness; and if men
should agree that the mystical method is a subterfuge without logical
pertinency, a plaster but no cure, and that the idea of non-entity can
never be exorcised, empiricism will be the ultimate philosophy.
Existence then will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of
ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally
unsatisfied. Then wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential
attribute of the nature of things, and the exhibition and emphasizing
of it will continue to be an ingredient in the philosophic industry of
the race. Every generation will produce its Job, its Hamlet, its
Faust, or its Sartor Resartus.

With this we seem to have considered the possibilities of purely
theoretic rationality. But we saw at the outset that rationality meant
only unimpeded mental function. Impediments that arise in the
theoretic sphere might perhaps be avoided if the stream of mental
action should leave that sphere betimes a