814 PSYCHOLOGY. 



things brought for the first time before consciousness is not the theo- 

 retic ' What is that ?' but the practical ' Who goes there ? ' or rather, as 

 Horwicz has admirably put it, ' What is to be done ? ' — ' Was fang'' ich 

 an ? ' in all our discussions about the intelligence of lower animals the 

 only tessC we use is that of their aotiny as if for a purpose. Cognition, 

 in short, is incomplete until discharged in act. And although it is true 

 that the iater mental development, which attains its maximum through 

 the hypbrtrophied cerebrum of man, gives birth to a vast amount of 

 theoretic activity over and above that which is immediately ministerial 

 to practice, yet the earlier claim is only postponed, not effaced, and the 

 active nature asserts its rights to the end. 



" If there be any truth at all in this view, it follows that however 

 vaguely a philosopher may define the ultimate universal datum, he can- 

 not be said to leave it unknown to us so long as he in the slightest 

 degree pretends that our emotional or active attitude towards it should 

 be of one sort rather than another. He who says, ' Life is real, life is 

 earnest,' however much he may speak of the fundamental mysterious- 

 ness of things, gives a distinct definition to that mysteriousness by 

 ascribing to it the right to claim from us the particular mood called 

 seriousness, which means the willingness to live with energy, though 

 energy bring pain. The same is true of him who says that all is vanity. 

 Indefinable as the predicate vanity may be in se, it is clearly enough 

 something which permits anaesthesia, mere escape from suffering, to be 

 our rule of life. There is no more ludicrous incongruity than for 

 agnostics to proclaim with one breath that the substance of things is 

 unknowable, and with the next that the thought of it should inspire us 

 with admiration of its glory, reverence, and a willingness to add our co- 

 operative push in the direction towards which its manifestations seem 

 to be drifting. The unknowable may be unfathomed, but if it make 

 such distinct demands upon our activity, we surely are not ignorant of 

 its essential quality. 



" If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great 

 periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, 

 we shall find, I think, simply this : that each and all of them have said 

 to the human being, ' The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to 

 pov)ers which you possess.' In what did the emancipating message of 

 primitive Christianity consist, but in the announcement that God rec- 

 ognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely 

 overlooked ? Take repentance : the man who can do nothmg rightly can 

 at least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of re- 

 pentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair. 

 Christianity took it and made it the one power within us which appealed 

 straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the Middle Ages 

 had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses of the flesh, 

 and defined the Reality to be such that only slavish natures could com- 

 mune with it, in what did the Sursum corda ! of the Renaissance lie 

 but in the proclamation that the archetype of verity in things laid claim 



