Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/238

Rh verely impersonal relationships and language of official life are intended to express the sense that no individual has as such the right to recognition at the moment when he exercises an official function. He lives at the time wholly in his office. The state is just then everything. Even so all higher criticism professes to disregard the personal pleasure of the artist, and the personal whim of the critic. The production and the criticism of Art are no amusements of two individuals. They are work done in the service of the one mistress, the divine art itself. But still, notwithstanding the recognition of this ideal devotion to one’s country or to one’s art, our typical politician and our typical ambitious artist show us that these activities still but imperfectly overcome individualism, or lead men to the higher plane of moral life. Better success in organizing life one finds, when one passes to the activity of truth-seeking, especially in fields where human thought is best master of itself, and best conscious of its powers. When one considers the work of a company of scientific specialists, — how each one lives for his science, and how, when the specialty is advanced and well organized, no one in official expressions of his purely scientific purposes dares either to give himself airs of importance as an individual, or to show any benevolence or favoritism or fear in considering and testing the work of anybody else; when one sees how impersonal is this idea of the scientific life, how no self of them all is supposed to have a thought about his science because it pleases him, but solely because it is true, — when one consid-