as no
roots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection on
fact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which can
be verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable
and articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering their
lineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology has
analysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent.
For unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out
of recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which further
perceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced.

Such a mechanism once discovered confirms itself at every breath we
draw, and surrounds every object in history and nature with infinite
and true suggestions, making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potent
over the mind. The naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because his
constructions, though no less hypothetical and speculative than the
idealist's dreams, are such legitimate and fruitful fictions that they
are obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligible level where it
arises, means not sensible fact, but valid ideation, verified
hypothesis, and inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears and
deprecates any theory of his own origin and function, he is only obeying
the instinct of self-preservation; for he knows very well that his past
will not bear examination. He is heir to every superstition and by
profession an apologist; his deepest vocation is to rescue, by some
logical _tour de force_, what spontaneously he himself would have taken
for a consecrated error. Now history and criticism would involve, as he
instinctively perceives, the reduction of his doctrines to their
pragmatic value, to their ideal significance for real life. But he
detests any admission of relativity in his doctrines, all the more
because he cannot avow his reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here as
in so many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a bad conscience.
Bigotry and craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then come
to reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his interests
which turns his face away from history and criticism; until his system,
in its monstrous unreality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable,
and provokes a general revolt in which too often the truth of it is
buried with the error in a common oblivion.

[Sidenote: Reason and docility.]

If ideali