jection of the essence of the
soul upon the objective plane; when such an essence is directed
towards life."

But it would be futile to continue this "fancy-work," of definition
by an individual temperament. The general traditional meaning of
these words is clear and unmistakable; though there may be
infinite minute shades of difference between one person's
interpretation of such a meaning and another's. What it all really
amounts to is this. No philosophic or scientific interpretation of
life, which does not include the verdict of life's own most
concentrated moments, can possibly be adequate.

Human nature can perfectly well philosophize about its normal
stream of impressions in "cold blood," so to speak, and according
to a method that discounts all emotional vision. But the resultant
conclusions of such philosophizing, with their easy-going
assumption that what we call "beauty" and "goodness" have no
connection with what we call "truth," are conclusions so
unsatisfying to more than half of our being that they carry their
refutation on the face of them.

To be an "interpretation of life" a philosophical theory cannot
afford to disregard the whole turbulent desperate dramatic content
of emotional experience. It cannot disregard the fact, for instance,
that certain moments of our lives bring to us certain reconciliations
and revelations that change the whole perspective of our days. To
"interpret life" from the material offered by the uninspired
unconcentrated unrhythmical "average" moods of the soul is like
trying to interpret the play of "Hamlet" from a version out of
which every one of Hamlet's own speeches have been carefully
removed. Or, to take a different metaphor, such pseudo-psychological
philosophy is like an attempt to analyse the nature of fire
by a summary of the various sorts of fuel which have been
flung into the flame.

The act of faith by which these ultimate ideas are reduced to the
vision of living personalities is a legitimate matter for critical
scepticism. But that there are such ultimate ideas and that life
cannot be interpreted without considering them is not a matter for
any sort of scepticism. It is a basic assumption, without which
there could be no adequate philosophy at all. It is the only
intelligible assumption which covers the undeniable human
experience which gathers itself together in these traditional words.

CHAPTER VII.

THE NATURE OF ART

The only adequate clue to the