one
is limited in that material fashion, being seated in the body and
looking thence centrifugally upon things in so far as they come into
dynamic relations with that body. Intelligence, on the contrary, sallies
from that physical stronghold and consists precisely in shifting and
universalising the point of view, neutralising all local, temporal, or
personal conditions. Yet intelligence, notwithstanding, has its own
centre and point of origin, not explicitly in space or in a natural
body, but in some specific interest or moral aim. It translates animal
life into moral endeavour, and what figured in the first as a local
existence figures in the second as a specific good. Reason accordingly
has its essential bias, and looks at things as they affect the
particular form of life which reason expresses; and though all reality
should be ultimately swept by the eye of reason, the whole would still
be surveyed by a particular method, from a particular starting-point,
for a particular end; nor would it take much shrewdness to perceive that
this nucleus for discourse and estimation, this ideal life, corresponds
in the moral world to that animal body which gave sensuous experience
its seat and centre; so that rationality is nothing but the ideal
function or aspect of natural life. Reason is universal in its outlook
and in its sympathies: it is the faculty of changing places ideally and
representing alien points of view; but this very self-transcendence
manifests a certain special method in life, an equilibrium which a
far-sighted being is able to establish between itself and its
comprehended conditions. Reason remains to the end essentially human
and, in its momentary actuality, necessarily personal.

[Sidenote: Reason has its own bias and method.]

We have here an essential condition of discourse which renders it at
bottom poetical. Selection and applicability govern all thinking, and
govern it in the interests of the soul. Reason is itself a specific
medium; so that prose can never attain that perfect transparency and
mere utility which we were attributing to it. We should not wish to know
"things in themselves," even if we were able. What it concerns us to
know about them is merely the service or injury they are able to do us,
and in what fashion they can affect our lives. To know this would be, in
so far, truly to know them; but it would be to know them through our own
faculties and through their supposed effects; it would be