Must we not suppose that feeling and emotion is destined to be an evanescent form in the evolution of mind? Is not the emotional type gradually disappearing, and will not the men of the future be pure indifferentists? Or are we rather to judge that emotion will always continue to strengthen and deepen? In an intellectual and introspective age like our own the naïve mental life, which is primitive and merely natural, vanishes, and we find that men everywhere, like Kenyon, in Howell’s novel, The Undiscovered Country are constantly destroying their feelings by pulling them up by the roots to see what they are and why they are. Such are only occasionally surprised into a genuine emotion, but they greet it with joy, and forthwith pull it to pieces in a morbid self-analysis. An indifferentism, born of intellectual curiosity, of scepticism or of pessimism, is, in fact, a pathological state, a certain mono-emotionalism, for humanity cannot escape emotionalism if it would. This blasé way of looking at things and feeling about them, is a decadent symptom in an artificial age. The struggle of life in a natural state always demands a varied, prompt, and frank emotionalism. If mind lose its love of things and men, it may yet be moved to highest attainment by sentiments like the love of science and truth. An intense intellectual life must be driven to its strugglings and achievements by some strong motive power, some powerful emotion, though this may be purely impersonal, like the conviction of duty, or the love of truth. Feeling as the fundamental element in mind, as the very core of mentality, as the force which actuates both will and cognition, can never be destroyed, and for the future progress of mind, as for the past, we are assured that feeling and emotion will not cease to become ever stronger, deeper, and nobler.

ERRATA.

In the following index, for pages 100-332, subtract four; pages 332-390, subtract five.

INDEX

Note.—The letter m affixed to a page number signifies the middle third of the page; the letter b signifies the bottom third of the page; no letter being affixed, the top third of the page is referred to.