Excerpt from On Life and Letters Elea has demonstrated that the flying arrow is motionless. One might also prove the contrary, although, to confess the truth, it would be more difficult. For the reasoning faculty is amazed by the obvious, and we may say that everything is capable of proof excepting the things that we feel are true. A consecutive argument upon a complex subject will never prove anything but the intellec tual capacity of him who conducts it. M. Maurice Barres was well advised when he said, in an exquisite little volume* That which distinguishes an argu ment from a play upon words is that the latter cannot be translated. Mankind must have some suspicion of this great truth, for they never rule themselves by reason. Instinct and feeling are their guides. They obey their passions - love, hatred, and above all, salutary fear. They prefer religions to philosophies, and never reason except to justify their evil tendencies or bad actions, which is ludicrous but pardonable. The most instinctive operations are generally those in which they best succeed, and nature has based on these alone the preservation of life and the perpetuation of the species. The philosophical systems have succeeded by reason of their authors' genius, but one is never able to recog nize in any of them the qualities of truth which cause them to prevail. In the matter of morality all opinions have been sustained, and if many of these appear to agree, this is only because the moralists have for the most part been careful not to quarrel with popular feeling and the common instincts. Pure reason, if they had listened to nothing else, would have led them by different paths to the most monstrous conclusions, as we see in the case of certain Tout licence muf contra l'amour, 1892, cr. 8vo. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.