lieve that 'our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.' The fact
symbolised by the poetic fancy--the glory and freshness of our childish
instincts--is equally noteworthy, whatever its cause. Some modern
reasoners would explain its significance by reference to a very
different kind of pre-existence. The instincts, they would say, are
valuable, because they register the accumulated and inherited experience
of past generations. Wordsworth's delight in wild scenery is regarded by
them as due to the 'combination of states that were organised in the
race during barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were
amongst the mountains, woods, and waters.' In childhood we are most
completely under the dominion of these inherited impulses. The
correlation between the organism and its medium is then most perfect,
and hence the peculiar theme of childish communion with nature.

Wordsworth would have repudiated the doctrine with disgust. He would
have been 'on the side of the angels.' No memories of the savage and the
monkey, but the reminiscences of the once-glorious soul could explain
his emotions. Yet there is this much in common between him and the men
of science whom he denounced with too little discrimination. The fact of
the value of these primitive instincts is admitted, and admitted for the
same purpose. Man, it is agreed, is furnished with sentiments which
cannot be explained as the result of his individual experience. They may
be intelligible, according to the evolutionist, when regarded as
embodying the past experience of the race; or, according to Wordsworth,
as implying a certain mysterious faculty imprinted upon the soul. The
scientific doctrine, whether sound or not, has modified the whole mode
of approaching ethical problems; and Wordsworth, though with a very
different purpose, gives a new emphasis to the facts, upon a
recognition of which, according to some theorists, must be based the
reconciliation of the great rival schools--the intuitionists and the
utilitarians. The parallel may at first sight seem fanciful; and it
would be too daring to claim for Wordsworth the discovery of the most
remarkable phenomenon which modern psychology must take into account.
There is, however, a real connection between the two doctrines, though
in one sense they are almost antithetical. Meanwhile we observe that the
same sensibility which gives poetical power is necessary to the
scientific observer. The magic of the ode, and of m