Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and practical. In its proper sphere,--and it has an indispensable function to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good work in a clearly defined sphere,--the understanding has an independent value of its own[2] Nor is this true merely of practical life, where a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable in the higher theoretic life,--in art, religion, and philosophy. If intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there is something wrong about them. It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a _ne plus ultra,_ and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that is the things it deals with and believes utterly real, are only partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths. Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great deal which they cannot express,--whereas the heart is often more liberal than its interpreting mind will allow--the reverse is true of the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is, in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to proceed--what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended, and each have its legitimate influence.