rises above them: the one maintaining that all knowledge is sensation; the
other basing the virtues on the idea of good. The reason of this
phenomenon has now to be examined.

By those who rest knowledge immediately upon sense, that explanation of
human action is deemed to be the truest which is nearest to sense. As
knowledge is reduced to sensation, so virtue is reduced to feeling,
happiness or good to pleasure. The different virtues--the various
characters which exist in the world--are the disguises of self-interest.
Human nature is dried up; there is no place left for imagination, or in any
higher sense for religion. Ideals of a whole, or of a state, or of a law
of duty, or of a divine perfection, are out of place in an Epicurean
philosophy. The very terms in which they are expressed are suspected of
having no meaning. Man is to bring himself back as far as he is able to
the condition of a rational beast. He is to limit himself to the pursuit
of pleasure, but of this he is to make a far-sighted calculation;--he is to
be rationalized, secularized, animalized: or he is to be an amiable
sceptic, better than his own philosophy, and not falling below the opinions
of the world.

Imagination has been called that 'busy faculty' which is always intruding
upon us in the search after truth. But imagination is also that higher
power by which we rise above ourselves and the commonplaces of thought and
life. The philosophical imagination is another name for reason finding an
expression of herself in the outward world. To deprive life of ideals is
to deprive it of all higher and comprehensive aims and of the power of
imparting and communicating them to others. For men are taught, not by
those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise above them, who
see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like a bird in a cage,
the mind confined to sense is always being brought back from the higher to