As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limitation, in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have here that paralysing awe of reason, which haunts us in matters of religion. We never allow ourselves to be bullied into submission to its supremacy. We should laugh at it, if it attempted to dictate to us; or to account for all our motives. Not that we are at war with it: or are shirking it: or are afraid of it. We can have affections and friendships, which have every possible justification which reason can offer. Every conceivable expediency can unite to authorise and approve them. Every interest may be served by them. They may stand every test which a cool common-sense, or a calm impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of consequences can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment of reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies, by no pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for one moment, that our friendship was accounted for. If ever it could trace its origin to these motives, it would cease to be what we thought it. The discovery would destroy it. All possible considerations and calculations might have been present, and yet they would be utterly powerless to create in us the love. And the love, however gladly it may recognise the approving considerations, would repudiate, with amazement, and with laughter, any presumption on their part to say, 'this is why you love.' It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be absolutely rational: yet, they would cease to be heroic, they would never be done, if they did not call upon a force, which, indeed, may determine its direction by reason, but which uses quite other motives to induce itself to act. Utilitarianism, which attempts to account for such heroic momentum by purely rational considerations, finds itself reduced to shifts which all those can see through, who refuse to be juggled out of their own experiences. It is the same with all the higher forms of moral energy. All of them go beyond their evidences. They all lift the rational motives, which suggest and determine the direction of their activity, by an impulsive force, which has in it the power of initiative, of origination. Every high act of will is a new creation. As the gunpowder sleeps, until the spark alights upon it, so the directions of reason remain below the level of action, until the jet of a living will fuses its fire with their material. The act which results may, indeed, be capable of complete interpretation on reasonable grounds: it may be able to show reasons which account for every fragment of it: yet, still, the living force which drew together, and combined all those separate reasons into a single resultant act, has a creative and original character. The series of reasons, however complete, cannot account for the result, for they cannot possibly account for their own combination: and without this