Don't scold a fellow so! Exert your royal gifts in exalting only
the lowly and humbling only the proud. Precisely what I like, to
get extricated from metaphysics, is encouragement from a few
persons like yourself, such encouragement as would lie in your
intelligent apprehension and acknowledgment of the great _result_
of metaphysics, which is a godly and spotless life on earth. If I
could find anyone apt to that doctrine I should not work so hard
metaphysically to convince the world of its truth. And as for being
a metaphysical Jack Horner, the thing is contradictory, as no
metaphysician whose studies are sincere ever felt tempted to
self-complacency or disposed to reckon himself a good boy. Such
exaltations are not for him, but only for the artists and poets,
who dazzle the eyes of mankind and _don't_ recoil from the darkness
they themselves produce--as Dryden says, or Collins.
Mrs. Tappan, spending the month of June in London, continued to impute
for the time, I infer (I seem to remember a later complete detachment),
a livelier importance to the supernatural authors of her "writing" than
her correspondent was disposed to admit; but almost anything was a
quickener of the correspondent's own rich, that is always so animated,
earnestness. He had to feel an interlocutor's general sympathy, or
recognise a moral relation, even if a disturbed one, for the deep tide
of his conviction to rise outwardly higher; but when that happened the
tide overflowed indeed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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