sis leaves off--that
continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving
of ourselves.

Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren vivificiren. The
service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit
is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment
some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the
sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or
intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us,--for
that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is
the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated,
dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by
the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point,
and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital
forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy,
is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is
to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world,
and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two
persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet,
we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to
knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a
moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and
curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's
friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in
those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing
of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep
before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of
its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see
and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we
see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new
opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile
orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or
ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather
up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the
microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us
the sacrifice of any part o