of approaching it; for never can we get a glimpse of it in the
unimaginable insipidity of its virgin estate. To bid the man's
subjective interests be passive till truth express itself from out the
environment, is to bid the sculptor's chisel be passive till the statue
express itself from out the stone. Operate we must! and the only
choice left us is that between operating to poor or to rich results.
The only possible duty there can be in the matter is the duty of
getting the richest results that the material given will allow. The
richness lies, of course, in the energy of all three departments of the
mental cycle. Not a sensible 'fact' of department One must be left in
the cold, not a faculty of department Three be paralyzed; and
department Two must form an indestructible bridge. It is natural that
the habitual neglect of department One by theologians should arouse
indignation; but it is most _un_natural that the indignation should
take the form of a wholesale denunciation of department Three. It is
the story of Kant's dove over again, denouncing the {131} pressure of
the air. Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us, that, amid the
wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands
upright,--that his name is Scientific Truth, and that he has but one
commandment, but that one supreme, saying, _Thou shalt not be a
theist_, for that would be to satisfy thy subjective propensities, and
the satisfaction of those is intellectual damnation. These most
conscientious gentlemen think they have jumped off their own
feet,--emancipated their mental operations from the control of their
subjective propensities at large and _in toto_. But they are deluded.
They have simply chosen from among the entire set of propensities at
their command those that were certain to construct, out of the
materials given, the leanest, lowest, aridest result,--namely, the bare
molecular world,--and they have sacrificed all the rest.[9]

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of
his subjective propensities,--his pre-eminence over them simply and
solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of
his wants, physical, moral, aesthetic, and intellectual. Had his whole
life not been a quest for the superfluous, he would never have
established himself as inexpugnably as he has done in the necessary.
And from the consciousness of this he should draw the lesson that his
wants are to be tru