Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so
present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.

I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I
suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to
the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths.
No one--least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself--can, I
suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at
his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely
connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not
themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact
that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions
about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states.
And yet the truths are not true because the poet _feels_ them, as he
would say--no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no
separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have
passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been
very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good
logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by
subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the
poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection:
or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have
analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the
arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead
might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend
or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should
most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as
Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a
little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal
illustration.

I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the
case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold,
depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our
experiences, among which the most important place is held by our
immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a
truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was
first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have
endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many li