parishioner, citizen, patriot, all complicated by specific religious and
social relations, and earning your living by some business that has its
own hosts of special problems, and you are answering letters from
everybody about everything, and deciding as to the genuineness of begging
appeals, and wrestling with some form or forms of disease, pain, and
sorrow.

"Truly, we are imperfect instruments for determining truth," I said to
the Poet. "The sane person acts from impulse, and only pretends to give a
reason. Reason is only called in to justify the verdict of prejudice.
Sometimes the impulse is sentiment--which is prejudice touched with
emotion. We cannot judge anything on pure, abstract grounds, because the
balance is biassed. A human being is born a bundle of prejudices, a group
of instincts and intuitions and emotions that precede judgment.
Patriotism is prejudice touched with pride, and politics is prejudice
touched with spite. Philosophy is prejudice put into propositions, and
art is prejudice put into paint or sound, and religion is a pious
opinion. Every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Romanticist,
or a Realist, or an Impressionist, and usually erects his own limitations
into a creed. Every country, town, district, family, individual, has a
special set of prejudices along the lines of which it moves, and which it
mistakes for exclusive truths or reasoned conclusions. Touch human
society anywhere, it is rotten, it crumbles into a myriad notes of
interrogation; the acid of analysis dissolves every ideal. Humanity only
keeps alive and sound by going on in faith and hope,--_solvitur
ambulando_,--if it sat down to ask questions, it would freeze like the
traveller in the Polar regions. The world is saved by bad logic."

"And by good feeling," added my friend the Poet.