rience.]

That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and their affinity to
moral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habits
of intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, which
in sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion and
concern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level on
which it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, the region of
all the more vivid and massive human interests. The pleasures which lie
beneath it are ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are not
perceived. Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophy
accordingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment to
homespun ideas. The actual is too remote and unfriendly to the dreamer;
to understand it he has to learn a foreign tongue, which his native
prejudice imagines to be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is,
however, that nature's language is too rich for man; and the discomfort
he feels when he is compelled to use it merely marks his lack of
education. There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by
merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by
declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal
and necessary harmonies of the world.

[Sidenote: Platonism spontaneous.]

The thinker's bias is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man of
reflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality to
these alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way of
thinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt
with nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Plato
saw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definable
meanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be the
constituents of reality. And with that directness and audacity which was
possible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics had
already given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse,
like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities,
existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic
artificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicable
necessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multiplied
themselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised by
their resemblance to their originals, but were at once cancelled and
expunged by virtu