The first bad effect that philosophy has upon practical description is the tendency to change it from description and collection of particular descriptions into something that has the air of generality and comprehensiveness. Because, if practical description be closely connected with the historical conditions of definite individuals and societies and with their wants, the more specific and near to the concrete it is, the better it will be, and the more useless by as much as it goes wandering toward the general. We owe to the evil influence of philosophy those verbose treatises upon psychological classes, such as virtue, duties, things good, affections, passions, and human types, to read which nourishes less than fresh water, which at least refreshes. Let him who wishes to be convinced compare the books of rules and observations that we owe to men of experience and to men of the world, such as the _Ricordi_ of Guicciardini, the _Maximes_ of Larochefoucauld, and the _Oraculo Manual_ of Balthazar Gracian, with the _Traité des passions_ of Descartes, with that section of the _Ethica_ of Spinoza that relates to this matter, with the _Anthropologia_ and the _Doctrine of Virtue_ of Kant (we prefer to record great names). He will then see on whose side is the advantage, an advantage of originality, of importance, and even of style, which is in this case a revelation. Those books by philosophers contain for the most part definitions of vocabulary and of words which there is no need to define, because everybody knows them to such an extent that the definitions, rather than make them more clear, make them obscure. Who, for example, can resist the philosophical triviality of the _Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life_ of Arthur Schopenhauer? Take the trouble to open a book to learn that good things are to be divided into personal, wealth and imagination, or reputation, and that the first (such as good health and a gay temperament) are pre-eminent over the others. Do we not learn more and with greater rapidity and efficacy from such proverbs as "God helps the merry man"? It is superfluous to observe that those books, in so far as they generalize, can never attain to philosophy. They remain at bottom more or less historical. [Sidenote: _Historical elements persisting in generalizations._]