gs external to
language, which no perfection in the medium could modify. It might seem
as if the brilliant substitutions, the magic suggestions essential to
poetry, would necessarily vanish in the full light of day. The light of
day is itself beautiful; but would not the loss be terrible if no other
light were ever suffered to shine?

[Sidenote: A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.]

The Life of Reason involves sacrifice. What forces yearn for the ideal,
being many and incompatible, have to yield and partly deny themselves in
order to attain any ideal at all. There is something sad in all possible
attainment so long as the rational virtue (which wills such attainment)
is not pervasive; and even then there is limitation to put up with, and
the memory of many a defeat. Rational poetry is possible and would be
infinitely more beautiful than the other; but the charm of unreason, if
unreason seem charming, it certainly could not preserve. In what human
fancy demands, as at present constituted, there are irrational
elements. The given world seems insufficient; impossible things have to
be imagined, both to extend its limits and to fill in and vivify its
texture. Homer has a mythology without which experience would have
seemed to him undecipherable; Dante has his allegories and his mock
science; Shakespeare has his romanticism; Goethe his symbolic characters
and artificial machinery. All this lumber seems to have been somehow
necessary to their genius; they could not reach expression in more
honest terms. If such indirect expression could be discarded, it would
not be missed; but while the mind, for want of a better vocabulary, is
reduced to using these symbols, it pours into them a part of its own
life and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real blow, while the
incapacity that called for them endures; and the soul seems to be
crippled by losing its crutches.

[Sidenote: All apperception modifies its object.]

There are certain adaptations and abbreviations of reality which thought
can never outgrow. Thought is representative; it enriches each soul and
each moment with premonitions of surrounding existences. If discourse is
to be significant it must transfer to its territory and reduce to its
scale whatever objects it deals with: in other words, thought has a
point of view and cannot see the world except in perspective. This point
of view is not, for reason, locally or naturally determined; sense al