imagination,' he asks, 'than Bossuet, Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, all
of them great philosophers? Who more judgment and wisdom than Racine,
Boileau, La Fontaine, Molière, all of them poets full of genius? _It is
not true, then, that the ruling qualities exclude the others; on the
contrary, they suppose them._ I should be much surprised if a great poet
were without vivid lights on philosophy, at any rate moral philosophy,
and it will very seldom happen for a true philosopher to be totally
devoid of imagination.'[31] With imagination in the highest sense
Vauvenargues was not largely endowed, but he had as much as is essential
to reveal to one that the hard and sober-judging faculty is not the
single, nor even the main element, in a wise and full intelligence. 'All
my philosophy,' he wrote to Mirabeau, when only four or five and twenty
years old, an age when the intellect is usually most exigent of
supremacy, 'all my philosophy has its source in my heart.'[32]

In the same spirit he had well said that there is more cleverness in the
world than greatness of soul, more people with talent than with lofty
character.[33] Hence some of the most peculiarly characteristic and
impressive of his aphorisms; that famous one, for instance, '_Great
thoughts come from the heart,_' and the rest which hang upon the same
idea. 'Virtuous instinct has no need of reason, but supplies it.'
'Reason misleads us more often than nature.' 'Reason does not know the
interests of the heart.' 'Perhaps we owe to the passions the greatest
advantages of the intellect.' Such sayings are only true on condition
that instinct and nature and passion have been already moulded under the
influence of reason; just as this other saying, which won the warm
admiration of Voltaire, '_Magnanimity owes no account of its motives to
prudence_,' is only true on condition that by magnanimity we understand
a mood not out of accord with the loftiest kind of prudence.[34] But in
the eighteenth century reason and prudence were words current in their