actions and appetites of men as if it were a question of lines,
of planes, and of solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he
will consider our passions and their properties with the same eye
with which he looks on all other natural things, since the
consequences of our affections flow from their nature with the
same necessity as it results from the nature of a triangle that
its three angles should be equal to two right angles. Similarly
M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English
literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it
makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are
causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for
digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are
products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such
proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential
conditions of absolutely everything, we feel--quite apart from
our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of
the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to
perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost
life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should
succeed in explaining their origin would simultaneously explain
away their significance, and make them appear of no more
preciousness, either, than the useful groceries of which M. Taine
speaks.

Perhaps the commonest expression of this assumption that
spiritual value is undone if lowly origin be asserted is seen in
those comments which unsentimental people so often pass on their
more sentimental acquaintances. Alfred believes in immortality
so strongly because his temperament is so emotional. Fanny's