physics still
repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more
radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in
spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken
for granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling,
like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed
constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his
unstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have
reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an
interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by
common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans
to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective
self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and
embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has
known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or
dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are
men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a
dream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on,
and the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptions
it is able to lead us.

[Sidenote: Verbal ethics.]

Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of
what goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much
to help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to
modern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of
its attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or
some theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals
reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the
secondary question What ought I to do? without having answered the
primary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religion
rather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to
be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid
with reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they
leave in the one labelled "morality" the more sublime they think their
morality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far
that nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region
which should contain all human goods.

[Sidenote: Spinoza and the Life of Reason.]

Such trivial sanctimony