noble and dark, so
long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived.
Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while
the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically
against enlightenment.

[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary.]

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that
speculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For
direct perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality,
the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a
shell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the
surface. Since the function of perception is properly to give
understanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it
were, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so
unintelligible and dense an apparition. AEsthetic enthusiasm cares
nothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious
movement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of
perception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object
through want of consideration. These aesthetic objects, which have no
intrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and
inexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes,
that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have
fed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds.
Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these
apparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long,
perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin
to pine for another, where just those images which here played so
deceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and
efficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies
about what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in
the wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in
dialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world
divined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the
objects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach
the permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience,
something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond
the dreamlike unities and cadences which