Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/38

14 must illustrate a little, although at best I can thus far only suggest.

Some people have a fashion of recording their reflective moments just as they happen to come. If such persons chance to be poets, the form of the record is often the thoughtful lyric. And the thoughtful lyric poem usually possesses the very quality which made Aristotle call poetry a “more philosophical” portrayal of human life than history. It is indeed marvelous how metaphysical a great poem of passion almost always is. The passion of the moment makes its own universe, flashes back like a jewel the light of the far-off sun of truth, but colors this reflected light with its own mysterious glow. “You are, you shall be mine,” cries the strong emotion to the earth and to the whole choir of heaven, and the briefest poem may contain a sort of philosophic scheme of the entire creation. The scheme is sometimes as false as the passion portrayed is transient; but it is also often as true as the passion is deep, and whoever has once seen how variously and yet how significantly the moods expressed in great poems interpret both our life and the reality of which our life forms part, will not be likely to find that philosophical systems are vain merely because the philosophers, like the poets, differ. In fact the reason why there is as yet no one final philosophy may be very closely allied to the reason why there is no final and complete poem. Life is throughout a complicated thing; the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure house of experience; and hence no individual experience, whether it be the momentary insight of genius recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation of years of professional plodding through the problems of philosophy, will ever fully tell all the secrets which life has to reveal.

It is for just this reason, so I now suggest, that when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive,