searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientious
reversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake. So
violent a disturbance of mental habits needs some great social upheaval
or some revolutionary ambition to bring it about. The transcendental
philosophy might never have been put forward at all, had its authors
valued it for what it can really accomplish. The effort would have
seemed too great and the result too nugatory. Their criticism of
knowledge was not freely undertaken, with the pure speculative motive of
understanding and purifying human science. They were driven on by the
malicious psychology of their predecessors, by the perplexities of a
sophistical scepticism, and by the imminent collapse of traditional
metaphysics. They were enticed at the same time by the hope of finding a
new basis for the religious myths associated with that metaphysics. In
consequence their transcendentalism was not a rehearsal of the Life of
Reason, a retrospect criticising and justifying the phases of human
progress. It was rather a post-rational system of theology, the
dangerous cure to a harmless disease, inducing a panic to introduce a
fable. The panic came from the assumption (a wholly gratuitous one) that
a spontaneous constructive intellect cannot be a trustworthy instrument,
that appearances cannot be the properties of reality, and that things
cannot be what science finds that they are. We were forbidden to believe
in anything we might discover or to trust in anything we could see. The
artificial vacuum thus produced in the mind ached to be filled with
something, and of course a flood of rhetorical commonplaces was at hand,
which might rush in to fill it.

[Sidenote: Its romantic sincerity.]

The most heroic transcendentalists were but men, and having imagined
that logic obliged them to abstain from every sort of hypostasis, they
could not long remain true to their logic. For a time, being of a
buoyant disposition, they might feel that nothing could be more
exhilarating than to swim in the void, altogether free from settled
conditions, altogether the ignorant creators of each moment's vision.
Such a career evidently affords all sorts of possibilities, except
perhaps the possibility of being a career. But when a man has strained
every nerve to maintain an absolute fluidity and a painful fidelity to
the immediate, he can hardly be blamed if he lapses at last into some
flattering myth, and if having satisfied him