Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/101

Rh popular imagination Truth and Goodness represent themselves as a couple of knights-errant incessantly in the act of slaying certain dragons called errors and vices. It is supposed that whenever any one of these is, anyhow, destroyed, that is always so much gained towards the final triumph of Truth and Goodness over the whole noxious brood. But, alas! Truth and Morality, so far as man has to do with them, are conditions of brain, of a most exquisitely delicate organization. And just as it is possible to cure a comparatively harmless physical ailment by the use of remedies which lower vitality and tend to set up a more painful and more obstinate disease than they cure, so it is often possible to combat (and successfully combat) a bad condition of the mind by the use of means which leave it an easy prey to some worse condition. Those who would practice the art of curing physical disease are not allowed to content themselves with studying only the immediate action of remedies, so as to know what drug will neutralize what symptom; they are required to make themselves acquainted also with the structure of the human frame, and the nature of its reactions after certain modes of action, and even of hereditary reactions after stimulation. Those who take upon themselves to cure symptoms without knowledge of reactions are empirics or quacks. They are often wonderfully successful; but the result of trusting to them is a general depression of vital and recuperative power. He only is a true physician who so combats disease as to store up vitality; and he only is a true teacher who so combats evil as to store up brain-vitality. Therefore the Far-Seer, i. e. the student of the longer and slower mental reactions, often seems