e freely, but a very intense feeling of distress when the
respiratory motions are prevented,--so any unobstructed tendency to
action discharges itself without the production of much cogitative
accompaniment, and any perfectly fluent course of thought awakens but
little feeling; but when the movement is inhibited, or when the thought
meets with difficulties, we experience distress. It is only when the
distress is upon us that we can be said to strive, to crave, or to
aspire. When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or
of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say
with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such
times, "I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of
the present moment, of its absoluteness,--this absence of all need to
explain it, account for it, or justify it,--is what I call the
Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from
any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of
seems to us _pro tanto_ rational.

Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency,
produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being
vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But
this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up
the theoretic way.

{65}

The facts of the world in their sensible diversity are always before
us, but our theoretic need is that they should be conceived in a way
that reduces their manifoldness to simplicity. Our pleasure at finding
that a chaos of facts is the expression of a single underlying fact is
like the relief of the musician at resolving a confused mass of sound
into melodic or harmonic order. The simplified result is handled with
far less mental effort than the original data; and a philosophic
conception of nature is thus in no metaphorical sense a labor-saving
contrivance. The passion for parsimony, for economy of means in
thought, is the philosophic passion _par excellence_; and any character
or aspect of the world's phenomena which gathers up their diversity
into monotony will gratify that passion, and in the philosopher's mind
stand for that essence of things compared with which all their other
determinations may by him be overlooked.

More universality or extensiveness is, then, one mark which the
philosopher's conceptions must possess. Unless they apply to an
enormous number of c