ases they will not bring him relief. The knowledge
of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of
rational knowledge, is useless to him unless the causes converge to a
minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects.
The more multiple then are the instances, the more flowingly does his
mind rove from fact to fact. The phenomenal transitions are no real
transitions; each item is the same old friend with a slightly altered
dress.

Who does not feel the charm of thinking that the moon and the apple
are, as far as their relation to the {66} earth goes, identical; of
knowing respiration and combustion to be one; of understanding that the
balloon rises by the same law whereby the stone sinks; of feeling that
the warmth in one's palm when one rubs one's sleeve is identical with
the motion which the friction checks; of recognizing the difference
between beast and fish to be only a higher degree of that between human
father and son; of believing our strength when we climb the mountain or
fell the tree to be no other than the strength of the sun's rays which
made the corn grow out of which we got our morning meal?

But alongside of this passion for simplification there exists a sister
passion, which in some minds--though they perhaps form the minority--is
its rival. This is the passion for distinguishing; it is the impulse
to be _acquainted_ with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole.
Loyalty to clearness and integrity of perception, dislike of blurred
outlines, of vague identifications, are its characteristics. It loves
to recognize particulars in their full completeness, and the more of
these it can carry the happier it is. It prefers any amount of
incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness (so long as the literal
details of the separate facts are saved) to an abstract way of
conceiving things that, while it simplifies them, dissolves away at the
same time their concrete fulness. Clearness and simplicity thus set up
rival claims, and make a real dilemma for the thinker.

A man's philosophic attitude is determined by the balance in him of
these two cravings. No system of philosophy can hope to be universally
accepted among men which grossly violates either need, or {67} entirely
subordinates the one to the other. The fate of Spinosa, with his
barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness