A fine expression of a familiar fact. Under the influence of love, anger, or other strong passion, a man becomes an unreasoning animal, and actually hates to be told the truth. Wild passion glares through the bars of its self-constituted cage at philosophy standing calm, lofty, and serene. Only “when the fire is dying in the grate” do we again become akin to cold, dispassionate, star-like Philosophy.
The triumph of machinery is when man wonders at his own works; thus, says Derwent Coleridge, all science begins in wonder and ends in wonder, but the first is the wonder of ignorance, the last that of adoration.
Caroline Fox’s Journals.
Evidently a comment on S. T. Coleridge’s Aphorism IV. on “Spiritual Religion” (Aids to Reflection).
No one of himself can rise out of the depths, but must clasp some outstretched hand.
Seneca (? 3 B.C.-65 A.D.) (Epistle 52).