Seeley's light was a dry one, I have said, but it was pure and steady, and illumined every branch of thought on which he turned it. There are those who prefer this species of illumination to the more iridescent glare and more fantastic shadows cast by the feu follet of imagination. Truth has its triumphs no less than Fancy, and of these were Seeley's. The votaries of Veracity need, above all things, restraint and repression; Imagination must be their servant, not their master. Throughout Seeley's work, so original in so many directions, one feels that he never brought out all that was in him. Of Gray—another Cambridge man, and Seeley's predecessor in his chair—it was said that he never spoke out. May we not say of Seeley that he never let himself go? Yet in this restraint and repression Seeley was English of the English. I have called his a Cambridge mind. Should I not supplement this by saying that the Cambridge mind, in all its strength, with all its limitations, is the characteristic English mind?
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press
