. Here is human life,
no doubt, and a brilliant pageantry it is; but human life as varied and
as problematic as it is in the living. Shakespeare's fundamental
intellectual resource is the historical and psychological knowledge of
such principles as govern the construction of human natures. The goods
for which men undertake, and live or die, are any goods, justified only
by the actual human striving for them. The virtues are the old winning
virtues of the secular life, and the heroisms of the common conscience.
Beyond its empirical generality, his knowledge is universal only in the
sense that space and time are universal. His consciousness _contains_
its representative creations, and expresses them unspoiled by any
transforming thought. His poetic consciousness is like the very stage to
which he likens all the world: men and women meet there, and things
happen there. The stage itself creates no unity save the occasion and
the place. Shakespeare's consciousness is universal because it is a fair
field with no favors. But even so it is particular, because, though each
may enter and depart in peace, when all enter together there is anarchy
and a babel of voices. All Shakespeare is like all the world seen
through the eyes of each of its inhabitants. Human experience in
Shakespeare is human experience as everyone feels it, as comprehensive
as the aggregate of innumerable lives. But human experience in
philosophy is the experience of all as thought by a synthetic mind.
Hence the wealth of life depicted by Shakespeare serves only to point
out the philosopher's problem, and to challenge his powers. Here he will
find material, and not results; much to philosophize about, but no
philosophy.

[Sidenote: Philosophy in Poetry. The World-View. Omar Khayyam.]

Sect. 11. The discussion up to this point has attributed to poetry very
definite intellectual factors that nevertheless do not constitute
philosophy. Walt Whitman speaks his feeling with truth, but in general
manifests no comprehensive insight. Shakespeare has not only sincerity
of expression but an understanding mind. He has a knowledge not only of
particular experiences, but of human nature; and a consciousness full
and varied like society itself. But there is a kind of knowledge
possessed by neither, the knowledge sought by coordinating all aspects
of human experience, both particular and general. Not even Shakespeare
is wise as one who, having seen the whole, can fundamentall