378 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



from a different and opposite pole to that from which 

 natural knowledge takes its beginning. 



It must, however, be admitted that in the course of 

 his philosophical writings Mill came more or less ex- 

 plicitly to admit the existence of a something, of a 

 mental factor, which could not be found and definitely 

 traced by the process of analysis which he practised. 

 And this admission dates from an early period in his 

 life when he already, in opposition to his father, recog- 

 nised the importance of Coleridge's influence, when he felt 

 the power of Carlyle's oracular sayings, and when he was 

 himself coming under the spell of Wordsworth's poetry. 

 Regarding this hidden factor in mental life he nowhere 

 expressed himself with sufficient clearness, though he 

 rejected all the various attempts by contemporary 

 English or foreign thinkers to define or locate it in 

 a comprehensive philosophical creed. But there is no 

 doubt that we find foreshadowed in Mill's writings the 

 conception of the Unknowable which plays such an im- 

 portant part in later English philosophy. At present 

 it is important for us to remark that we find in Mill 

 something analogous to that position which, on a much 

 larger scale, existed a generation earlier in German 

 philosophy. As I have mentioned before, the construc- 

 tive efforts of German speculation after Kant, the dog- 

 matic assertion of a higher insight, which in single 

 instances rose to a kind of inspiration, was derived from 

 the regions of poetical, or creative, thought as it mani- 

 fested itself in the great classical literature of the age. 

 Similarly the poetical creations of the new school of 

 poetry in England, notably of Wordsworth and Cole- 



