to be _understood_ by us still
more than to be reacted on? Is not the unparalleled development of
department Two of the mind in man his crowning glory and his very
essence; and may not the _knowing of the truth_ be his absolute
vocation? And if it is, ought he flatly to acquiesce in a spiritual
life of 'reflex type,' whose form is no higher than that of the life
that animates his spinal cord,--nay, indeed, that animates the writhing
segments of any mutilated worm?

It is easy to see how such arguments and queries may result in the
erection of an ideal of our mental destiny, far different from the
simple and practical religious one we have described. We may well
begin {138} to ask whether such things as practical reactions can be
the final upshot and purpose of all our cognitive energy. Mere outward
acts, changes in the position of parts of matter (for they are nothing
else), can they possibly be the culmination and consummation of our
relations with the nature of things? Can they possibly form a result
to which our godlike powers of insight shall be judged merely
subservient? Such an idea, if we scan it closely, soon begins to seem
rather absurd. Whence this piece of matter comes and whither that one
goes, what difference ought that to make to the nature of things,
except so far as with the comings and the goings our wonderful inward
conscious harvest may be reaped?

And so, very naturally and gradually, one may be led from the theistic
and practical point of view to what I shall call the _gnostical_ one.
We may think that department Three of the mind, with its doings of
right and its doings of wrong, must be there only to serve department
Two; and we may suspect that the sphere of our activity exists for no
other purpose than to illumine our cognitive consciousness by the
experience of its results. Are not all sense and all emotion at bottom
but turbid and perplexed modes of what in its clarified shape is
intelligent cognition? Is not all experience just the eating of the
fruit of the tree of _knowledge_ of good and evil, and nothing more?

These questions fan the fire of an unassuageable gnostic thirst, which
is as far removed from theism in one direction as agnosticism was
removed from it in the other; and which aspires to nothing less than an
absolute unity of knowledge with its object, and refuses to be
satisfied short of a fusion and solution and saturation of both
impression and action with reason, a