788 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



experiences which forms the material for this construc- 

 tion or interpretation of finite reality forms only a portion 

 of the comprehensive field of consciousness, provoking 

 the desire to arrive at a larger construction or inter- 

 pretation which would give to the emotional and 

 volitional background in which the finite world is, as 

 it were, embedded, an impress of reality equal or superior 

 to that of the external world. 



For poetical, artistic, and religious minds this larger 

 circumference, this background or firmament of the soul, 

 forms the greater reality, in which the narrower but 

 more definite reality of external things and persons has 

 its setting ; and it demands a higher and wider interpre- 

 tation. Such minds have always existed ; they have not 

 only for themselves, but also for others, through the 

 creations of art and the symbolic use of language in 

 poetry, succeeded in communicating the result of their 

 discoveries in the unexplored regions of our mental firma- 

 ment. The main advance in philosophical thought in the 

 course of the nineteenth century and beyond has lain in 

 the direction of psychologically understanding that this 

 region of artistic creation and religious thought has an 

 independent existence, that it can draw upon a fund of 

 mental experience quite as real and inexhaustible as 

 that which is being successfully explored by scientific 

 thought. 



A History of Thought will accordingly not be com- 

 plete without tracing with equal diligence and with 

 equal sympathy, in the spontaneous literature and the 

 artistic creations of the period, the inventions of the 

 poetical and the manifestations of the religious thought 



