In this sort of moral psychology there is evidently some truth; but the "law of experience" which it points to is but a loose and ambiguous law, which disguises more facts than it expresses. Honest minds will rebel against the suggestion that when you outgrow a desire you have fulfilled it; and they will detect the furtive irony in bidding you live hard in order not to feel the vanity of living. To drown sorrow in work, and to forget private failures in public interests, is certainly possible, but it is only drugging yourself with hurry and routine, which may not be more advantageous to others than it really is to yourself. Impersonal or "ideal" aims are not necessarily less delusive or "higher" than personal ones; in fact there is far more likelihood that they are conventional humbug. This pathological hygiene of idealism, which always stops at some uncriticised impulse, thinks it secures health when perhaps it has only increased the dose of illusion. Nevertheless transcendentalism has this important element in common with Christianity and with the other Hebraic religions, that it regards human interests as the core of the universe and God as the [Pg 107] God of man, who disposes all things for man's benefit. In its eyes the sphere of providence and moral life is bounded by the history of a part of Europe and Asia for a few thousand years. So long as transcendentalism is taken to imply some such philosophy of history it can compound its differences with liberal Christianity, since they are at one in the cardinal point of their faith, which is the apotheosis of the human spirit. Yet this human egotism, which comforts so many minds, offends others, in their way no less religious. Of course, those who believe in the infinity of the universe, be they mystics or naturalists, smile at such pettiness and fatuity. But even among transcendentalists, some are repelled; for the dominion which they attribute to their ego is a dominion over appearances only; they do not pretend that the grammar of the human intellect can lay down the law for the world at large. At the same time, in their own house they wish to keep their freedom. That prescribed evolution and that reversible optimism of the absolute transcendentalists are repulsive to them; they resent that such a precise and distasteful career should be imposed on their transcendental individuality, and should swallow it up. It is these rebels that have carried romanticism and German philosophy into its last phase. They have broken at [Pg 108] last with Christianity and at the same time with the theological and cosmic transcendentalism that was its treacherous ally, and hoped to be its heir.