It brings a man to the point where he does not dispute but believes.  He has been wandering about cold and irresolute, tasting all philosophies, or none, and drinking deep despair.  He does not understand the want in his soul while he has been looking for some panacea for its cure till the great light streams on him, and instead of receiving something he finds himself.  That is it.  There is a power of vision latent in us, clouded by error; the true philosophy dissipates the cloud and leaves the vision clear, wonderful and inspiring.  He who acquired that vision is impervious to argument—­it is not that he despises argument; on the contrary, he always uses it to its full strength.  But he has had awakened within him something which the mere logician can never deduce, and that mysterious something is the explanation of his transformed life.  He was a doubter, a falterer, a failure; he has become a believer, a fighter, a conqueror.  You miss his significance completely when you take him for a theorist.  The theorist propounds a view to which he must convert the world; the philosopher has a rule of life to immediately put into practice.  His spirit flashes with a swiftness that can be encircled by no theory.  It is his glory to have over and above a new penetrating argument in the mind—­a new and wonderful vitality in the blood.  The unbeliever, near by, still muddled by his cold theories, will argue and debate till his intellect is in a tangle.  He fails to see that a man of intellectual agility might frame a theory and argue it out ably, and then suddenly turn over and with equal dexterity argue the other side.  Do we not have set debates with speakers appointed on each side?  That is dialectic—­a trick of the mind.  But philosophy is the wine of the spirit.  The capacity then to argue the point is not the justification of a philosophy.  That justification must be found in the virtue of the philosophy that gives its believer vision and grasp of life as a whole, that warms and quickens his heart and makes him in spirit buoyant, beautiful, wise and daring.

III

Let us come now to that burning question of consistency.  “Very well, you won’t acknowledge the English Crown.  Why then use English coins and stamps?  You don’t recognise the Parliament at Westminster.  Why then recognise the County Councils created by Bill at Westminster?  Why avail of all the Local Government machinery?”—­and so forth.  The argument is a familiar one, and the answer is simple.  Though no guns are thundering now, Ireland is virtually in a state of war.  We are fighting to recover independence.  The enemy has had to relax somewhat in the exigencies of the struggle and to concede all these positions of local government and enterprise now in question.  We take these posts as places conceded in the fight and avail of them to strengthen, develop and uplift the country and prepare her to carry the last post.  Surely this is adequate.  On a field of battle