we pursue, we should not
be satisfied with literature.

[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described.]

When discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to the
interlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, not
without leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments.
Knowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are no
doubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these cases
a vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at is
agreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather than
psychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winter
are not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true has
a certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from that
assertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injury
received but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from our
own foolishness more than from other people's bad conduct. Yet my
observation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it was
made to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others a
similar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share.
There was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it into
frank poetry and exclaimed, "Blow, blow, thou winter's wind!" Knowledge
of human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a very
fine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeare
utters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the same
thing as to pursue science.

Now it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposed
to go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order to
support some observation or illustrate some argument--as continually,
for instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in these
very pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation to
think after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting some
fact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader to
resist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Such
a method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that it
relies for success on the total movement of the reader's life and mind,
without forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or pure
dialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource rath