e an unquestioned idea, every stride a categorical
assertion. Does he deny this? Then his very denial, in its promptness
and heat, audibly contradicts him and makes him ridiculous. Honest
criticism consists in being consciously dogmatic, and conscientiously
so, like Descartes when he said, "I am." It is to sift and harmonise all
assertions so as to make them a faithful expression of actual experience
and inevitable thought.

[Sidenote: Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.]

Now will, no less than that reason which avails to render will
consistent and far-reaching, animates natural bodies and expresses their
functions. It has a radical bias, a foregone, determinate direction,
else it could not be a will nor a principle of preference. The knowledge
of what other people desire does not abolish a man's own aims. Sympathy
and justice are simply an expansion of the soul's interests, arising
when we consider other men's lives so intently that something in us
imitates and re-enacts their experience, so that we move partly in
unison with their movement, recognise the reality and initial legitimacy
of their interests, and consequently regard their aims in our action, in
so far as our own status and purposes have become identical with theirs.
We are not less ourselves, nor less autonomous, for this assimilation,
since we assimilate only what is in itself intelligible and congruous
with our mind and obey only that authority which can impose itself on
our reason.

The case is parallel to that of knowledge. To know all men's experience
and to comprehend their beliefs would constitute the most cogent and
settled of philosophies. Thought would then be reasonably adjusted to
all the facts of history, and judgment would grow more authoritative and
precise by virtue of that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all the
goods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued,
would leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; he
would still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would still
affect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubt
gain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglot
world; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feel
other creatures' joys would grow by exercise and new overtones would be
added to his gamut. But the foundations of his nature would stand; and
his possible happiness, though some new and precious