us and philosophical idealism have not unfrequently parted
company with practice. Still upon the whole it must be admitted that the
higher standard of duty has gone hand in hand with the higher conception
of knowledge. It is Protagoras who is seeking to adapt himself to
the opinions of the world; it is Plato who rises above them: the one
maintaining that all knowledge is sensation; the other basing the
virtues on the idea of good. The reason of this phenomenon has now to be
examined.

By those who rest knowledge immediately upon sense, that explanation of
human action is deemed to be the truest which is nearest to sense. As
knowledge is reduced to sensation, so virtue is reduced to feeling,
happiness or good to pleasure. The different virtues--the various
characters which exist in the world--are the disguises of self-interest.
Human nature is dried up; there is no place left for imagination, or in
any higher sense for religion. Ideals of a whole, or of a state, or of a
law of duty, or of a divine perfection, are out of place in an Epicurean
philosophy. The very terms in which they are expressed are suspected of
having no meaning. Man is to bring himself back as far as he is able to
the condition of a rational beast. He is to limit himself to the pursuit
of pleasure, but of this he is to make a far-sighted calculation;--he is
to be rationalized, secularized, animalized: or he is to be an amiable
sceptic, better than his own philosophy, and not falling below the
opinions of the world.

Imagination has been called that 'busy faculty' which is always
intruding upon us in the search after truth. But imagination is also
that higher power by which we rise above ourselves and the commonplaces
of thought and life. The philosophical imagination is another name for
reason finding an expression of herself in the outward world. To deprive
life of ideals is to deprive it of all higher and comprehensive aims and
of the power of imparting and communicating them to others. For men are
taught, not by those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise
above them, who see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like
a bird in a cage, the mind confined to sense is always being brought
back from the higher to the lower, from the wider to the narrower view
of human knowledge. It seeks to fly but cannot: instead of aspiring
towards perfection, 'it hovers about this lower world and the earthly
nature.' It loses the religious sens