and unnatural--is the dispute in question. When the heart takes upon itself to anticipate or reverse the ruling of the head, it violently usurps the function of the latter, and gives a verdict in its own favour in a court whose authority it has refused to recognize. The heart should go into the court of reason, not as a suitor against the head--that feud is, I repeat, fundamentally fallacious--still less as a judge, but as a witness who is deeply interested in a case which is ever on trial, and whose evidence deserves to be received and weighed. When the head refuses to accept the depositions of the heart, and then makes light of the heart's protest, it is, in its judicial capacity, deliberately ignoring evidence which bears directly on the matter in dispute. In thus ceasing to be impartial, it abdicates its judicial functions, and takes a side in the very case which it has undertaken to try. This is equivalent to closing its court; and when the court of reason is closed, a state of chaos ensues, in which there is not even the semblance of order, until might becomes right and cuts the knots which cannot otherwise be loosed.

In the West, then, we have the strange spectacle of the head, which ought to be judicial and impartial, playing in its own court the role of a partisan and an advocate; while the heart, which is and ought to be an interested witness, finding that the Presiding Judge refuses to accept its evidence, takes forcible possession of the judicial bench and gives judgment on the case in dispute, using arguments the insufficiency of which it had fully recognized in the very act of entering the court. For it is this, and nothing less than this, which happens

when reason gives judgment against "faith," having from the outset refused to listen to its evidence; and when "faith," in revenge, claims, on rational grounds, the right to reverse the rulings of reason.