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 (to give one more illustration) wars and revolutions, the struggles of nations and of creeds, are one thing to a man who shares them, quite another to the man who reads of them in history. While history itself is to those who study it for sheer interest in the doings of mankind, an art, and one of the greatest;—to those who study it that they may 'learn its lessons', refute a political opponent, or pass a competitive examination, no more than a branch of useful knowledge.

Here, then, we have two great divisions of feeling,—the one self-sufficing, contemplative, not looking beyond its own boundaries, nor essentially prompting to any action; the other lying at the root of conduct, always having some external reference, supplying the immediate motive for all the actions of mankind. Of highest value in the contemplative division is the feeling of beauty; of highest value in the active division is the feeling of love. It is with these two only that I am here concerned, and it is on the comparison between them that my final contention is founded.

For what was it that occasioned, and I hope justified, this excursion into regions apparently far removed from the primary subject of this lecture? It was the desire to mitigate as far as possible the conclusions to which, in the vain search for some