Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/538

528 in poetical creation. Looking at poetry, then, in its abstract and absolute character, looking at what we may call the spirit of poetry as it exists, not incarnated in this or that particular composition, but as a genial power which enlightens the intellect and the heart both of the poet himself and of those who listen to his strains; looking at poetry under this point of view, I ask, putting the question in the form of a bold, brief, and strong antithesis, Does man make poetry, or does poetry make man? Is the human mind the original source to which poetry may be traced as to its fountainhead? or is not rather poetry itself the fountainhead from whence flow the eternal waters which invigorate and purify, and in some measure constitute our souls? Does the human mind fabricate for itself the idea of the beautiful and the idea of the sublime? or do not rather these ideas fashion and fabricate the human mind? Does man derive his poetical inspiration from himself? or does he derive himself as a poet from the everlasting poetry of Him who has sown the sky with stars and the earth with flowers, who is Himself the substance of the true, the beautiful, and the good?

This question may appear mystical and obscure. Let me then explain myself by a reference to a still more general question, a question in regard to the fundamental nature of the human mind itself. All the accounts that can be rendered as to the nature of the human mind may be generalised into the two following theories: they may rather be said to generalise