fragments of truth, or of mingled truth and error, which are needed to aid them in the attainment of their own ends, and these ends vary with the character or predominant inclinations to action of individual men. Their knowledge consequently is fragmentary, relative and interested rather than scientific. The disinterested love of science and philosophy is a counterpoise upon the tendency of less elevated minds, to pervert the very meaning of the word truth, and to assume that those opinions which are or which seem best adapted to gratify some other active principle of the mind, subordinate to, or at least quite distinct from, the desire for speculative activity, are to be received as a standard of belief.
As human nature and society are constituted, it is however well that instances of an exclusive development of the faculty for abstract or highly generalized science should be rare. A rigorous separation of the speculative from the practical, is apt, by causing a disruption of the complex nature of man, to infuse the spirit of scepticism into the operations of the understanding, and to occasion weakness and vacillation in the conduct of life. The Creator of the human mind has inserted into it numerous and various principles of action, which are besides usually fused together in practice. The search for speculative truth is in all common minds conducted in subordination to, and in all minds should be conducted in harmony with the law of mixed motives. The statesman is impelled by political as well as by logical necessity to know and practise the theory of civil or ecclesiastical
