d little
power of deduction; he tended to view a question at bright and radiant
points; he could not systematise or arrange it. He did not expect to
be able to penetrate the mystery, or to advance step by step nearer to
the dim and ultimate causes of things; but he thought he would like to
look into the philosophers' workshop, as a man might visit a factory.
He expected to see a great many processes going on the nature of which
he did not hope to discern, and the object of which would be made still
more obscure by the desperately intelligent explanations of some
obliging workman, who would glibly use technical words to which he
would himself be able to attach no sort of meaning.

But after a few excursions into modern philosophy, in which he seemed,
as Tennyson said, to be wading as in a sea of glue, he went back to the
earliest philosophers and read Aristotle and Plato. He soon conceived
a great horror of Aristotle, of his subtle and ingenious analysis,
which often seemed to him to be an attempt to define the undefinable,
and never to touch the point of the matter at all; he thought that
Aristotle was often occupied in the scientific treatment of essentially
poetical ideas, and in the attempt to classify rather than to explain.
Yet there were moments, it seemed to him, when Aristotle, writing with
a kind of grim contempt for the vagueness of Plato, was carried off his
feet by the Platonic enthusiasm; and so Hugh turned to Plato, which he
had scrambled through as an undergraduate long years before. How
incomparably beautiful it was! It revealed to Hugh what he had before
only dimly suspected, that the poet, the moralist, the priest, the
philosopher, and even the man of science, were all in reality engaged
in the same task--penetrating the vast and bewildering riddle of the
world. In Plato he found the philosophical method suffused by a
burning poetical imagination; and he thought that Plato solved far more
metaphysical riddles by a species of swift intuition than ever could be
done by the closest analysis. He realised that Plato's theory was of a
great, central, motionless entity, which acted not by expulsive energy
but by a sort of magnetic attraction; and that all the dreams, the
hopes, the activities of human minds were not the ripples of some
central outward-speeding force, but the irresistible inner motion, as
to the loadstone or the vortex, which made itself felt through the
whole universe, material and imma