s, and
what, in consequence, should be our conduct? These are the great
problems, the answers to which may take a religious, a poetical, a
philosophical, or an artistic form. The difference is that the poet has
intuitions, while the philosopher gives demonstrations; that the thought
which in one mind is converted into emotion, is in the other resolved
into logic; and that a symbolic representation of the idea is
substituted for a direct expression. The normal relation is exhibited in
the case of the anatomist and the sculptor. The artist intuitively
recognises the most perfect form; the man of science analyses the
structural relations by which it is produced. Though the two provinces
are concentric, they are not coincident. The reasoner is interested in
many details which have no immediate significance for the man of
feeling; and the poetic insight, on the other hand, is capable of
recognising subtle harmonies and discords of which our crude instruments
of weighing and measuring are incapable of revealing the secret. But the
connection is so close that the greatest works of either kind seem to
have a double nature. A philosophy may, like Spinoza's, be apparelled
in the most technical and abstruse panoply of logic, and yet the total
impression may stimulate a religious sentiment as effectively as any
poetic or theosophic mysticism. Or a great imaginative work, like
Shakespeare's, may present us with the most vivid concrete symbols, and
yet suggest, as forcibly as the formal demonstrations of a
metaphysician, the idealist conviction that the visible and tangible
world is a dream-woven tissue covering infinite and inscrutable
mysteries. In each case the highest intellectual faculty manifests
itself in the vigour with which certain profound conceptions of the
world and life have been grasped and assimilated. In each case that man
is greatest who soars habitually to the highest regions and gazes most
steadily upon the widest horizons of time and space. The logical
consistency which frames all dogmas into a consistent whole, is but
another aspect of the imaginative power which harmonises the strongest
and subtlest emotions excited.

The task, indeed, of deducing the philosophy from the poetry, of
inferring what a man thinks from what he feels, may at times perplex the
acutest critic. Nor, if it were satisfactorily accomplished, could we
infer that the best philosopher is also the best poet. Absolute
incapacity for poetical e