Know Thyself 37 



contains evidence of a growing perception of the essen- 

 tial unity between the physical and the spiritual. The 

 poet seems to be the preeminently skilled guesser of the 

 human species. He is endowed above all others with 

 the faculty of apprehending from afar the hidden 

 truths of nature. Not in imagination only, but in the 

 quality of sense perception is he superior to other men. 

 He seems to know what is "in the air" of his time bet- 

 ter than anybody else. 



To Shakespeare man was the most absorbingly inter- 

 esting of all animals. He regarded his fellows not as 

 problems to be minutely investigated, but as creatures 

 to be watched for the purpose of guessing what they 

 would do under hypothetical conditions. 



Just what sort of a mixture of the natural and 

 supernatural the animal is which interested him so 

 supremely, seems always to have puzzled Shakespeare. 

 That he could make Macbeth, about as unmitigated a 

 clod of animality as can be imagined, scare the spirits 

 into telling him what he wanted to know by threatening 

 them with an eternal curse, illustrates the puzzled state 

 of his understanding. But on the whole it appears that 

 not only did Shakespeare find the natural the distinctly 

 larger ingredient in the mixture, but that as he grew in 

 experience and insight, he saw more and more of the 

 natural and saw its meaning more clearly. 



From Venus and Adonis, one of his earliest pro- 

 ductions, to The Tempest, one of his latest, I seem 

 to find a distinct advance in this matter. Possibly my 



