st art of education.]

When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal
with is our interlocutor's power of imagining that experience; for the
real experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither
answer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not
touch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our
proofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose
and best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an
ideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these
matters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We
may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for
the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their
natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat
sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be
more profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking
together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material
facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual
ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus,
with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond
of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to
understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in
antiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and
while the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of
people's states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in
ourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind.]

In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often
pursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic
experience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be
reconstructed _ad hoc_; it is not the experience that necessitates the
description, but the description that recalls the experience, defining
it in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there
is something about our friend's troubles that secretly pleases us, many
circumstances in our own lives, or in other people's, may suddenly recur
to us to illustrate that _apercu_; and we may be tempted to say, There
is a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of
satire, a ray from a liter