reasonable being; for the first demand of reason, as the truthful faculty in the world of action, is to realize its idea completely and thoroughly; and this no hasty and superficial handiwork can pretend to do. Again, if a man, as happens only too often, undertakes a long walk, and having miscalculated the distance, or carried with him confused ideas of north and south, finds himself under the veil of night wandering about in a boggy waste when he ought to have been snug in his bed, he has himself to blame: he acted unreasonably in undertaking an unknown expedition without exact information or wise calculation; and it is only reasonable {38} that he should be overtaken by the necessary consequences of all unreasoning procedure in a world where Reason is the only law and Truth the unerring judge. In the same way, from want of accurate knowledge, wise foresight, and comprehensive survey, Crimean campaigns are bungled, and Reform Bills of most serious consequence are huddled or juggled through a house of fretful or feverish senators, and Acts of Parliament are patched up with clauses that contradict one another, and make the preamble look like a bridegroom who finds he has promised eternal fidelity to a mistaken bride. All this is unreasonable work, and the men who did it were not exercising their reason at the time of the perpetration; for any practical purpose they might as well have been blind, furious, fatuous, or asleep. ’Tis plain, therefore, that all the efficiency of every kind of work done in the world depends on its reasonableness, that is, on its truthfulness; and in full view, so to speak, of the importance of this intellectual virtue Nature has furnished man with a moral excellence closely akin to it. The recognition of truth in the strictly intellectual world becomes, in the world of propulsive passions and inspiring emotions, the love of truth. This virtue shows itself in frankness, openness, and simplicity of character, and in an imperious disdain of all sorts of equivocation, dissembling, falsehood, and disguise, according to the well-known type of the heroic character in Homer: “That man within my soul I hate, even as the gates of hell, Who speaks fair words, but in his heart dark lies and treachery dwell.”