d he wished
to bestow instead a groundless adoration on the law that connected and
defeated every ideal. Such a genius, in spite of incisive wit and a
certain histrionic sympathy with all experience, could not be truly
free; it could not throw off its professional priestcraft, its habit of
ceremonious fraud on the surface, nor, at heart, its inhuman religion.

[Sidenote: Its empire is ideal and autonomous.]

The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human,
Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its
basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has
the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the
throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous
heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own
interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it;
so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world
he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his
mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties
had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve.
Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new
method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces
stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that
would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and
free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody
them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured
life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.

CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Empirical alloy in dialectic.]

When a polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur to
him, which he at once translates into the language he happens to be
using. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea,
suggestions for this development may come from the empirical field; yet
these suggestions soon shed their externality and their place is taken
by some genuine development of the original notion. In constructing, for
instance, the essence of a circle, I may have started from a hoop. I may
have observed that as the hoop meanders down the path the roundness of
it disappears to the eye, being gradually flattened into a straight
line, such as the hoop presents when it is rolling directly away f