Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

“ [38] the bonds of constraining legalism and restores the soul to freedom.” He was at once taken to task by his stricter associates, and was assured that this was by no means “psychological science or evolution,” but that he had “given poetry and rhetoric in the place of cold facts and scientific deductions.” ¹ From their point of view, the critics were perfectly right. It is a very dangerous thing to admit that there is a world outside of science. Once recognize thus much, and then, after the art-impulse has burst through and claimed its place in that world, who knows but the devout impulse, at least, may also take its place by the side of the art-impulse, and the soul be restored to freedom in good earnest?

If the devout impulse thus takes its place with the poetic, in a world outside of science, the question must inevitably follow, whether the ethical emotion is to take its place there also. At present, as we know, the followers of Herbert Spencer claim to have utterly captured, measured, and solved it from the point of view of science; and they dismiss the whole conception of Intuitive Morals as completely