Thus to students of the past the life of the old kings and priests
teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for
wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after
which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model
constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a
barbarous philosophy. Crude and false as that philosophy may seem to
us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency.
Starting from a conception of the vital principle as a tiny being or
soul existing in, but distinct and separable from, the living being,
it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules
which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and
harmonious whole. The flaw--and it is a fatal one--of the system
lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises; in its conception of
the nature of life, not in any irrelevancy of the conclusions which
it draws from that conception. But to stigmatise these premises as
ridiculous because we can easily detect their falseness, would be
ungrateful as well as unphilosophical.
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