trace its consequences more minutely than
the saying; but the only worth of either treatise or saying is that the
consequences are there. The long definition can do no more than draw
them; the short definition does no less. Indeed, it may be said that
if two apparently different definitions of the reality before us should
have identical consequences, those two definitions would really be
identical definitions, made delusively to appear different merely by
the different verbiage in which they are expressed.[6]

My time is unfortunately too short to stay and give to this truth the
development it deserves; but I will assume that you grant it without
further parley, and pass to the next step in my argument. And here,
too, I shall have to bespeak your close attention for a moment, while I
pass over the subject far more {125} rapidly than it deserves. Whether
true or false, any view of the universe which shall completely satisfy
the mind must obey conditions of the mind's own imposing, must at least
let the mind be the umpire to decide whether it be fit to be called a
rational universe or not. Not any nature of things which may seem to
be will also seem to be _ipso facto_ rational; and if it do not seem
rational, it will afflict the mind with a ceaseless uneasiness, till it
be formulated or interpreted in some other and more congenial way. The
study of what the mind's criteria of rationality are, the definition of
its exactions in this respect, form an intensely interesting subject
into which I cannot enter now with any detail.[7] But so much I think
you will grant me without argument,--that all three departments of the
mind alike have a vote in the matter, and that no conception will pass
muster which violates any of their essential modes of activity, or
which leaves them without a chance to work. By what title is it that
every would-be universal formula, every system of philosophy which
rears its head, receives the inevitable critical volley from one half
of mankind, and falls to the rear, to become at the very best the creed
of some partial sect? Either it has dropped out of its net some of our
impressions of sense,--what we call the facts of nature,--or it has
left the theoretic and defining department with a lot of
inconsistencies and unmediated transitions on its hands; or else,
finally, it has left some one or more of our fundamental active and
emotional powers with no object outside of themselves to react-o