rs upon it. In the recent book from which I quoted
the words of Professor Paulsen, a book of successive chapters by
various living german philosophers,[4] we pass from one idiosyncratic
personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a
photograph album.

If we take the whole history of philosophy, the systems reduce
themselves to a few main types which, under all the technical verbiage
in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them, are just so
many visions, modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole
drift of life, forced on one by one's total character and experience,
and on the whole _preferred_--there is no other truthful word--as
one's best working attitude. Cynical characters take one general
attitude, sympathetic characters another. But no general attitude
is possible towards the world as a whole, until the intellect has
developed considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure
in synthetic formulas. The thought of very primitive men has hardly
any tincture of philosophy. Nature can have little unity for savages.
It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a checkered play of light and
shadow, a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical
powers. 'Close to nature' though they live, they are anything but
Wordsworthians. If a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them, it is
likely to be at midnight, when the camp smoke rises straight to the
wicked full moon in the zenith, and the forest is all whispering with
witchery and danger. The eeriness of the world, the mischief and the
manyness, the littleness of the forces, the magical surprises, the
unaccountability of every agent, these surely are the characters most
impressive at that stage of culture, these communicate the thrills
of curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings. Tempests and
conflagrations, pestilences and earthquakes, reveal supramundane
powers, and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy. Nature,
more demonic than divine, is above all things _multifarious_. So many
creatures that feed or threaten, that help or crush, so many beings
to hate or love, to understand or start at--which is on top and which
subordinate? Who can tell? They are co-ordinate, rather, and to adapt
ourselves to them singly, to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep
the others friendly, regardless of consistency or unity, is the chief
problem. The symbol of nature at this stage, as Paulsen well says,
is the sphinx, under