t checked
their proper development. Youth has a beautiful capacity for trust and
belief, and it accepts everything as equal in goodness and truth from
an author it reverences. The young do not know enough of themselves,
and they do not trust enough to their own instincts to discriminate.
They are dominated and unconsciously suppressed. Ruskin, in his
ethical views of art, and strange doctrines about some old masters,
has done nearly as much harm to susceptible minds as Carlyle. Ruskin
restricted and perverted their art ideals on certain lines as Carlyle
crushed ethical discrimination. Mind have been kept imprisoned for
years, and their development on the lines nature intended them to
take, has been arrested, by the want of belief in their own
initiative. What was inevitable for Ruskin's unique mind was yet wrong
for readers, who agreed to all his theories under the influence of his
fascinating personality, and through the power of his individuality.
In life, we sometimes find we have made a series of mistakes of this
sort, before at last we get glimmerings of what we were intended to
be, and we learn at last the need of having known ourselves, and the
vital necessity of cultivating the atmosphere and colour of that mind
of ours, which has been used merely as a tool to know everything else.

Spiritualists and Theosophists talk of a Dominant Self, and an Astral
body, and of gleams of heavensent insight. Gleams of insight and
dreams do come to us, and teach us truths, which "never can be
proved," and without some such intuitions the soul of man would indeed
be poor,

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has
them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they
can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the
truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given
issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve
the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we
would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a
pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a
moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on
the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of
each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection
of the Poet;