l character they
have become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then
possess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified into
logical terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smelted
again in imagination, into forms of spirit.]

CHAPTER VIII--ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS

[Sidenote: Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.]

Those who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuries
commonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certain
consecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, while
other speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to all
that is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone in
philosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that their
opinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, in
reflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers of
no less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonly
absolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, it
would be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the race
are bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but with
discovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominant
trust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so that
philosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidence
is offered but that they chime in with current aspirations or
traditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, even
in philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.

Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind in
all its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principle
of discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestations
already discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas
she framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that her
latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we
shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems
corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of
idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating
concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and
the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising
concretions in existence, describe causal relat