or the devotees of phantasmal discovery--from the first believer in his own unmanifested inspiration, down to the last inventor of an ideal machine that will achieve perpetual motion. The kinship of human passion, the sameness of mortal scenery, inevitably fill fact with burlesque and parody. Error and folly have had their hecatombs of martyrs. Reduce the grandest type of man hitherto known to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts, and he appears in dangerous company: say that, like Copernicus and Galileo, he was immovably convinced in the face of hissing incredulity; but so is the contriver of perpetual motion. We cannot fairly try the spirits by this sort of test. If we want to avoid giving the dose of hemlock or the sentence of banishment in the wrong case, nothing will do but a capacity to understand the subject-matter on which the immovable man is convinced, and fellowship with human travail, both near and afar, to hinder us from scanning any deep experience lightly. Shall we say, "Let the ages try the spirits, and see what they are worth?" Why, we are the beginning of the ages, which can only be just by virtue of just judgments in separate human breasts--separate yet combined. Even steam-engines could not have got made without that condition, but must have stayed in the mind of James Watt.

He knew that human passion invites burlesque and parody. Many martyrs have been sacrificed to error and folly. The grandest man can appear ridiculous if reduced to an abstract statement of his qualities and efforts: to do him justice, we need to understand the subject-matter on which he is convinced, and to feel fellowship with his effort.
