Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Experience and Evaluation

...a person destitute of taste for music will consider any attempt to explain, in methodical language, the toto-coelo difference in kind between the effect caused on the mind respectively by Beethoven’s and Rossini’s music, as over-subtlety, or over-imaginativeness, or the two united. Just so, any one who has not lived in the habit of hourly regulating his conduct by a regard to the rule of right, will be blind to the most essential distinctions of morality, and will consider the attempt to explain them sophistry, and the habit of acting on them dishonestly. And thus it will happen, that the wisest and most sagacious Saint would be considered by the world at large, if they have not deep faith in Catholic Christianity, to unite no small degree of littleness of spirit, nay, of positive moral obliquity, with his undeniable genius, greatness, and power of mind. Nor would it be difficult, were it worth while, to draw a similar picture, in the case where his sphere is that of abstract speculation, not of practical action.

W. G. Ward, The Ideal of a Christian Church, p. 272.