" The originality of
Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce between the intellect and
the soul in its highest sense, in his making reason and intuition work
together to the same end of spiritual perfection. The unsatisfactoriness
of science leads Faust to seek repose in worldly pleasure; it led Dante
to find it in faith, of whose efficacy the short-coming of all logical
substitutes for it was the most convincing argument. That we cannot know,
is to him a proof that there is some higher plane on which we can believe
and see. Dante had discovered the incalculable worth of a single idea as
compared with the largest heap of facts ever gathered. To a man more
interested in the soul of things than in the body of them, the little
finger of Plato is thicker than the loins of Aristotle.
We cannot but think that there is something like a fallacy in Mr.
Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the
direction of science, and not in that of morals. No doubt the laws of
morals existed from the beginning, but so also did those of science, and
it is by the application, not the mere recognition, of both that the race
is benefited. No one questions how much science has done for our physical
comfort and convenience, and with the mass of men these perhaps must of
necessity precede the quickening of their moral instincts; but such
material gains are illusory, unless they go hand in hand with a
corresponding ethical advance.
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