﻿WORDSWORTH'S MIND 



By Richard Rice, Jr. 



Assistant Professor of English in Indiana University 



INTRODUCTION 



The groAviiig answer to the ancieiit (juestion of what meanings 

 nature has for man is given chiefly in three different modes of 

 thought and by men of distinct temperaments. These three modes 

 of tiiought are by no means mutually exclusive, yet each of the 

 three thinkers, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, speaks 

 of nature from a thoroughly temperamental point of view and often 

 as if his special knowledge expressed some irremediable ignorance 

 or lack of vision in the others. 



To certain scientists, the philosopher appears to be a man who 

 has abstracted from finite things system alone and has tried to give 

 that realit}^ ])y applying it to mental phenomena, treating them as if 

 they were mechanical causes and effects, and so making laws of 

 thought outside the laws of nature. Or, to the poet, the philoso- 

 pher is one who has failed to give concrete form to his ideas, to see 

 images of his thoughts, and whose observation of nature takes on 

 some completely mental meaning which the objects of nature do 

 not truly giA-e rise to. nor which they could possibly embodj^. What 

 this expresses is the temperamental difference between these think- 

 ers. 



It is typical of the scientist that he is apt to perceive the fre- 

 quent futility and unreality of philosophic processes, of the philoso- 

 pher that he sees but the mechanical and obvious methods of 

 thought in natural science, and of the poet that he feels, on the one 

 hand, the flat practicality of science, and, on the other, the ab- 

 straction of philosophy. Temperamentally, the scientist is inter- 

 ested in the external or mechanical relation of facts and objects 

 to one another, and his knoAvledge of life is described and colored 

 by the laAvs of these relationships. Similarly, the philosopher is in- 

 terested in the intellectual relation of facts and ideas in his own 

 mind, Avhere he has a world of his oavu, self-created, in which he 

 thinks and creates new objects of thought. The poet, as poet, is 

 interested in facts, objects, ideas, for the sake of realizing them 



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