TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1423 



experience too, as the lives of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle each 

 show, and later ones as well. Yet how human they were, have been, 

 and are, and how educative their life-experience, are again manifest 

 in all such lives, as even their abstract pages fail to conceal. Philo- 

 sophy is thus the child of life-experience, although the parent of 

 Wisdom. Hence the closer we look into the philosopher's life, the 

 more his secret opens. Thus most have been essentially optimistic, 

 or at least melioristic : Buddha of old, and Schopenhauer of recent 

 times, are perhaps the only two pessimists we can call great. But 

 little though they tell us of this, the facts remain, that the first 

 lost his mother in infancy, and was brought up by a fond and foolish 

 father: while Schopenhauer's is the yet rarer case — of lifelong and 

 thorough incompatibility of temper of mother and son. No wonder 

 then these were pessimists: life-experience, and its limitations too, 

 cannot but underlie all that man can think; each being only evolves 

 as it can. For a single and minor instance out of many possible ones, 

 Adam Smith, in writing his Wealth of Nations, has (of course un- 

 consciously, as even to his commentators) left us a very interesting 

 outline-guide-book to his childhood and later home-town and 

 neighbourhood of Kirkcaldy. Hence we have often concretely used 

 it, in conducting survey excursions there : and with general interest, 

 all thus understanding him, and his main ideas, more simply, more 

 deeply, too, than in their university department of Economics, with 

 lectures, library and all. To be convinced of this, the reader has 

 only to make this excursion and read essential passages on the spot 

 — of course reading in the concrete between the lines of abstract 

 paragraphs. 



Finally, if Art and Thought be thus intelligibly evolved, and 

 essentially from Sense and Experience, what origin has Religion? 

 Again, let us avoid conventional approaches. Imagine one of its 

 memorable moments, say Moses' vision of the burning bush, that 

 yet was not consumed. Not mere seeing a natural fire, which can 

 consume whole forests, and with no divine vision to its spectators: 

 but an inwardly emotioned and imaginative vision, that enhances 

 natural beauty, sunlit at dawn or set, as when Blake saw his home 

 tree "full of angels": and we are, of course, psychologists enough to 

 know he did; though we should not all have seen them if we had 

 been there. Given this vision of deepest emotional thrill, of mystic 

 experience and ecstasy, he reflects on it long and often, brings all 

 his intellect to bear upon it too. Emotion at deepest, intelligence at 

 highest, clarify anew his inheritance of patriarchal monotheism 

 (and Akhnaton's also) into that many-sided conception of Unity 

 and Power, at highest, and of individual relation of Love as well as 

 reverence ; thenceforward fully established as central doctrine of the 

 great religion for which he stands as main formulator, as thereafter 

 to its later legislation in detail. How his life-experience, as we are 



