for
the moment make a distinction between the theoretical and practical
life, or between ideas and their causative potency--must be attributed
the constructive power which has built the world of morality, with its
intangible but most real relations which bind man to man and age to age.
It is the author of the organic institutions which, standing between the
individual and the rudeness of nature, awaken in him the need, and give
him the desire and the faculty, of attaining higher things than physical
satisfaction. Man is meant to act as well as to think, to be virtuous as
well as to have knowledge. It is possible that reverence for the
intellect may have led men, at times, to attribute the evolution of the
race too exclusively to the theoretic consciousness, forgetting that,
along with reason, there co-operates a twin power in all that is wisest
and best in us, and that a heart which can love, is as essential a
pre-condition of all worthy attainment, as an intellect which can see.
Love and reason[A] are equally primal powers in man, and they reflect
might into each other: for love increases knowledge, and knowledge love.
It is their combined power that gives interest and meaning to the facts
of life, and transmutes them into a moral and intellectual order. They,
together, are lifting man out of the isolation and chaos of subjectivity
into membership in a spiritual kingdom, where collision and exclusion
are impossible, and all are at once kings and subjects.

[Footnote A: It would be more correct to say the reason that is loving
or the love that is rational; for, though there is distinction, there is
no dualism.]

And, just as reason is present as a transmuting power in the sensational
life of the infancy of the individual and race, so is love present
amidst the confused and chaotic activity of the life that knows no law
other than its own changing emotions. Both make for order, and both grow
with it. Both love and reason have travelled a long way in the history
of man. The patriot's passion for his country, the enthusiasm of pity
and helpfulness towards all suffering which marks the man of God, are as
far removed from the physical attraction of sex for sex, and the mere
liking of the eye and ear, as is the intellectual power of the sage from
the vulpine cunning of the savage. "For," as Emerson well said, "it is a
fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private
bosom, caught from a wandering spark ou