ntelligence, emotion, is so close to
us, and so attractive, that the most visionary of spirits must needs
represent the world unseen in colours, and under a form really borrowed
from it. Let me be sure then--might he not plausibly say?--that I miss
no detail of this life of realised consciousness in the present! Here
at least is a vision, a theory, [149] theoria,+ which reposes on no
basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future after
all somewhat problematic; as it would be unaffected by any discovery of
an Empedocles (improving on the old story of Prometheus) as to what had
really been the origin, and course of development, of man's actually
attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or
spirit in him. Such a doctrine, at more leisurable moments, would of
course have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment, generally, of
what is near at hand, on the adornment of life, till, in a not
impracticable rule of conduct, one's existence, from day to day, came
to be like a well-executed piece of music; that "perpetual motion" in
things (so Marius figured the matter to himself, under the old Greek
imageries) according itself to a kind of cadence or harmony.

It was intelligible that this "aesthetic" philosophy might find itself
(theoretically, at least, and by way of a curious question in
casuistry, legitimate from its own point of view) weighing the claims
of that eager, concentrated, impassioned realisation of experience,
against those of the received morality. Conceiving its own function in
a somewhat desperate temper, and becoming, as every high-strung form of
sentiment, as the religious sentiment itself, may become, somewhat
antinomian, when, in its effort towards the order of experiences it
prefers, it is confronted with the traditional and popular [150]
morality, at points where that morality may look very like a
convention, or a mere stage-property of the world, it would be found,
from time to time, breaking beyond the limits of the actual moral
order; perhaps not without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a
venture.

With the possibility of some such hazard as this, in thought or even in
practice--that it might be, though refining, or tonic even, in the case
of those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says of the kindly and
temperate wisdom of Montaigne, "pernicious for those who have any
natural tendency to impiety or vice," the line of reflection traced out
abo