Their determination to penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life.

Analysis became dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination.

Doubtful questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone.

The Understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.
They, too, began to dissect the human heart.

Poets and writers of fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or felt in this or that fashion.