e has paid the price of
that indulgence in personal humour by incurring the immortal hatred of
sentimentalists who are too much scandalised by his tone ever to
understand his principles.

[Sidenote: Rationalistic suicide.]

If the common mistake in empiricism is not to see the omnipresence of
reason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit its
variability and dependence, not to understand its natural life.
Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive
kind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from
the paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his
descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. "The
whole is one," Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same
sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical
terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an
indistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world.
Parmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that he
arrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz., the
fact that it is. Being exists, and nothing else does; whereby every
relation and variation in experience is reduced to a negligible
illusion, and reason loses its function at the moment of asserting its
absolute authority. Notable lesson, taught us like so many others by the
first experiments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and insight, a mind
led quickly by noble self-confidence to the ultimate goals of thought.

Such a pitch of heroism and abstraction has not been reached by any
rationalist since. No one else has been willing to ignore entirely all
the data and constructions of experience, save the highest concept
reached by assimilations in that experience; no one else has been
willing to demolish all the scaffolding and all the stones of his
edifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol which he had planted
on the summit. Yet all rationalists have longed to demolish or to
degrade some part of the substructure, like those Gothic architects who
wished to hang the vaults of their churches upon the slenderest possible
supports, abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the dead walls
of the building. So experience and its crowning conceptions were to rest
wholly on a skeleton of general natures, physical forces being
assimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained by identification of
similars taking the place of those