Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies…. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties, on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether “refined” is the one inevitable descriptive adjective that springs to your lips.

Refinement has its place in things, true enough. But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality. So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophy’s dust off their feet and following the call of the wild.

Wherefore, I say, let everyone be of good cheer about his soul who, after having renounced the insatiable hungers of the self, and the indefinite postponement of life, as working harm rather than good; has employed the claws of wisdom, not to increase the mind’s distinctive power to hate, nor to seek dominion over others, but to foster that higher tropism to the light still hidden below the rim of the world…. Thus adorned in the soul’s most perfect jewel, enjoying the beauty and loving the variousness of life, he is ready to enter at last into the silent almost secret bond of fellow-feeling that holds the world together.

The rapt saint is found the only logician.