oral laws. There are limits to
communication even among beings of the same race, and the faculties and
ideals of one intelligence are not transferable without change to any
other. If this historic diversity in minds were complete, so that each
lived in its own moral world, a science of each of these moral worlds
would still be possible provided some inner fixity or constancy existed
in its meanings. In every human thought together with an immortal intent
there is a mortal and irrecoverable perception: something in it perishes
instantly, the part that can be materially preserved being proportionate
to the stability or fertility of the organ that produced it. If the
function is imitable, the object it terminates in will reappear, and two
or more moments, having the same ideal, will utter comparable messages
and may perhaps be unanimous. Unanimity in thought involves identity of
functions and similarity in organs. These conditions mark off the sphere
of rational communication and society; where they fail altogether there
is no mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral solidarity.

[Sidenote: Authority internal.]

The inner authority of reason, however, is no more destroyed because it
has limits in physical expression or because irrational things exist,
than the grammar of a given language is invalidated because other
languages do not share it, or because some people break its rules and
others are dumb altogether. Innumerable madmen make no difference to the
laws of thought, which borrow their authority from the inward intent and
cogency of each rational mind. Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse
for being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reason
satisfaction is made the measure of good.

The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be
prepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the
bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather
resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the
accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.
In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That universal soul sometimes
spoken of, which is to harmonise and correct individual demands, if it
were a will and an intelligence in act, would itself be an individual
like the others; while if it possessed no will and no intelligence, such
as individuals may have, it would be a physical force or law, a dynamic
system without moral