ibed as a thin head, may and
constantly does fall into a confirmed manner of judging character and
circumstance, so narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to
make common sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine
name of reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional
transports, in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the
difficulty of discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that
leads thereto, the merits of intellectual precision and definiteness,
and even the merits of moral precision and definiteness, are all
effectually veiled by purple or fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and
sentimentalism, which imagination has hung over the intelligence.

The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or
crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of
objects and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the
facts of human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification
of these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between
the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects
of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a
view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which
they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our
tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other
emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side
for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet.
The nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in
an ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a
Wordsworth. The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world,
the thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another
by sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.

The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
nearly and immediately relating to man and the social union. One school
has maintained the v