to know them
by their appearance. A singular proof of the frivolous way in which
philosophers often proceed, when they think they are particularly
profound, is seen in this puzzle, on which they solemnly ask us to fix
our thoughts: How is it possible to know reality, if all we can attain
in experience is but appearance? The meaning of knowledge, which is an
intellectual and living thing, is here forgotten, and the notion of
sensation, or bodily possession, is substituted for it; so what we are
really asked to consider is how, had we no understanding, we should be
able to understand what we endure. It is by conceiving what we endure to
be the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge that
something exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us a
determinate role. There could be no knowledge of reality if what
conveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a medium
of knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived. To
have such appearances is what makes realities knowable. Knowledge
transcends sensation by relating it to other sensation, and thereby
rising to a supersensuous plane, the plane of principles and causes by
which sensibles are identified in character and distributed in
existence. These principles and causes are what we call the intelligible
or the real world; and the sensations, when they have been so
interpreted and underpinned, are what we call experience.

[Sidenote: Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate
emotions.]

If a poet could clarify the myths he begins with, so as to reach
ultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still be
dealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. The
prosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted on
the human brain by human reason. If he found that landscape
uninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life;
if he found it dull and unpoetical, he would be manifesting his small
capacity and childish whims. Tragic, fatal, intractable, he might well
feel that the truth was; but these qualities have never been absent from
that half-mythical world through which poets, for want of a rational
education, have hitherto wandered. A rational poet's vision would have
the same moral functions which myth was asked to fulfil, and fulfilled
so treacherously; it would employ the same ideal faculties which myth
expressed in a confused and hast