Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/44

20 him, because lie wants nothing short of the truth itself. He will fail to get it, but then, as I have said, we all of us fail more or less in some career or other; and the metaphysician, with his one talent of critical estimate, must do what he can.

Yet I hasten to correct this seemingly too lifeless a picture of the philosopher’s cruel analysis of passion, by a reference to the thoughts upon which I have already dwelt. From the often disheartening difficulties and incompleteness of the human search for absolute truth, we who read philosophy continually find ourselves returning, hand to hand with the author himself, to the world of the concrete passions which he criticises. We find this world at each return more fair and yet more serious, because we know it better. The sacred tears that were shed in it are none the less sacred because we have been trying to find out from the critic what they meant. Their mystery, long pried into, becomes even the dearer for that. The criticised passions become like old letters, treasured up by a lover after his dear friend’s death, — often read and reread, until the reader has looked at every curve to know why it was traced in just this way. He has found out, or not, — still the search was consoling. So, too, we have analyzed our long past life; and now the more confidently may we henceforth live in the new life before us. We have criticised, so much the more cheerfully may we enjoy. I once saw something of a pair of literary lovers, friends of mine, who, being a trifle reflective, were prone to amuse themselves by affecting to treat each other’s productions with a certain editorial coldness and severity of critical estimate. They wrote poems to each other, suppressing or changing of course the names, and then each, wholly ignoring whom this poem might be intended to mean, used to pick the other’s work to pieces with an air of gentle and pathetic disdain. “Here the sentiment somehow failed to justify its object, being expressed un-