us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two
by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us.
But being human creatures, IT IS good for us; nay, we are only human
in so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in
proportion to our passion.

You know I said of that great and pure society of the Dead, that it
would allow "no vain or vulgar person to enter there." What do you
think I meant by a "vulgar" person? What do you yourselves mean by
"vulgarity"? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but,
briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation.
Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped
bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a
dreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every
sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure,
without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the
dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that
men become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion
as they are incapable of sympathy,--of quick understanding,--of all
that, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may
be called the "tact" or "touch-faculty," of body and soul: that
tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above
all creatures;--fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason;--
the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine
what is true:- it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone
can recognise what God has made good.

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know
from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just.
Now, to feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us can