Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/23

Rh (i.e., their own), have found no morality, no honour, no religion therein, have seldom, in putting the same together again, placed any of these elements in their own breasts as practical men. And after a time it is the tendency of these omissions, and of this influence of theory upon practice, to operate on a wider scale, and pervade the heart of the whole people among whom such things occur, particularly among its well-educated ranks — witness France towards the end of the last century, with its host of economists, calculators, and atheists, who emptied the universe of morality, and set up expediency in its stead.

"Arouse man," says Schelling, "to the consciousness of what he is, and he will soon learn to be what he ought." It may be added, teach him to think himself something which he is not, and no power in heaven or in earth will long keep him from framing himself practically in conformity with his theoretical pattern, or from becoming that which he ought not to be. Speculative opinion always acts vitally upon practical character, particularly when it acts upon masses of men and long generations. Theory is the source out of which practice flows. The Hindoo beholds himself, as he conceives, whirling, with all other things, within the eddies of a gigantic fatalism. So far he is a speculator merely. But trace out his philosophy into his actual life, and see how supine he is in conduct and in soul. All his activities are dead. His very personality is really gone, because he looks upon it as gone. He has really