The critique of English insularity that opens "Tradition and the Individual Talent" hinges on Eliot's wry preference for the critical habits of the French-a playful jab at English national pride that sets up the following observation: "we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism" (Complete Prose 2: 105). Curiously, a similar call for apperception is heard from the very English author of the Fifteen Sermons: when the mind reflects upon itself in the act of reasoning, it begins to be dissatisfied with the absence of order and method in the exercise, and attempts to analyze the various processes which take place during it, to refer one to another, and to discover the main principles on which they are conducted, as it might contemplate and investigate its faculty of memory or imagination. ...this solemn-sounding, quasi-hylomorphic mystery is the Eliotic equivalent of what Wallace Stevens calls a "supreme fiction." 7 For parallel phrasing and general relevance, one may compare Newman: "in a state of society such as ours, in which authority, prescription, tradition, habit, moral instinct, and the divine influences go for nothing, in which patience of thought, and depth and consistency of view, are scorned as subtle and scholastic, in which free discussion and fallible judgment are prized as the birthright of each individual..."