Utility alone is to decide on the value of a theory. Be it so. But who is to decide on utility? If all things are useful which serve to satisfy human wants, who is to decide on our wants? We take Mr. Macaulay’s own point of view. Philosophy should be practical; it should serve man, satisfy his wants, or help to satisfy them; and if it fails in this, let it be called useless and hollow. But if there are wants in human nature which demand to be satisfied, which make life a burden unless they are satisfied, is that not to be called practical which answers to these wants? And if some of them are of that peculiar nature that they can only be satisfied by knowledge, or by theoretical contemplation, is this knowledge, is this theoretical contemplation, not useful,—useful even in the eyes of the most decided Utilitarian? Might it not happen that what he calls theoretical philosophy seems useless and barren to the Utilitarian, because his ideas of men are too narrow? It is dangerous, and not quite becoming, to lay down the law, and say from the very first, ‘You must not have more than certain wants, and therefore you do not want more than a certain philosophy!’ If we may judge from Mr. Macaulay’s illustrations, his ideas of human nature are not very liberal. ‘If we were forced,’ he says, ‘to make our choice between the first shoemaker and Seneca, the author of the books on Anger, we should pronounce for the shoemaker. It may be worse to be angry than to be wet. But shoes have kept millions from being wet; and we doubt whether Seneca ever kept anybody from being angry.’ I should not select Seneca as the representative of theoretical philosophy, still less take those for my allies whom Mr. Macaulay prefers to Seneca, in order to defeat theoretical philosophers. Brennus threw his sword into the scale in order to make it more weighty. Mr. Macaulay prefers the awl. But whatever he may think about Seneca, there is another philosopher more profound than Seneca, but in Mr. Macaulay’s eyes likewise an unpractical thinker. And yet in him the power of theory was greater than the powers of nature and the most common wants of man. His meditations alone gave Socrates his serenity when he drank the fatal poison. Is there, among all evils, one greater than the dread of death? And the remedy against this, the worst of all physical evils, is it not practical in the best sense of the word? True, some people might here say, that it would have been more practical if Socrates had fled from his prison, as Criton suggested, and had died an old and decrepit man in Bœotia. But to Socrates it seemed more practical to remain in prison, and to die as the first witness and martyr of the liberty of conscience, and to rise from the sublime height of his theory to the seats of the immortals.