﻿woedsworth's mind 



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smsatioiially, so that they become the images of his feeling and of 

 his mind. 'If you only knew nature as closely and as practically 

 as I do,' says the scientist, when speaking to the others, 'you could 

 not idle away your time in pursuits that do not often appear to 

 lead to realities.' To the problem of nature, the scientist, whose 

 temperament requires a known cause and an observable effect to 

 enable him to understand reality, tries to give at once a useful and 

 a sincere, if a temporarily limited, answer — limited because sincere. 

 'If you saw all the relations of things in the mind, which is itself 

 the ultimate reality,' says the philosopher, 'you could not blind 

 yourselves so frequently with mere facts or with mere feelings.' 

 The philosopher, finding cause and effect to be but phases of crea- 

 tive thought, may give an answer that perhaps transcends, through 

 force of abstract reason, the reality of knowledge. ' If you only felt 

 and realized nature, both for its own sake and for the image that it 

 makes of the soul, ' says the poet, ' you would see reality alive every- 

 where with new significances.' And the poet, requiring an atmos- 

 phere of sensation before he can think at all about reality or about 

 abstraction, finds in the objects of sense those vivid images that 

 give shape to what is continuous and permanent in life's changing 

 ideas. 



It is the testimony of culture that the answer to the ancient 

 question is, for any one age, unsatisfactory without the contribution 

 of each of these men in the form he wishes to make it. For the 

 answer tends to become permanent as it is comprehensive and re- 

 flects the varieties and the changes of thought ; and it is ephemeral 

 as it is exclusive and belongs definitely to the past. On this fact do 

 we base the education of our youth, and by it do we see the stature 

 of our greatest men. Poetry, science, and philosophy exhibit differ- 

 ent views of life ; but they are not in themselves mutually exclu- 

 sive fields of discourse except as the smaller men of genius make 

 them so. The great thinkers have penetrated farthest into the 

 mystery of nature because of their comprehension of the total 

 aspect of reality that surrounds it. 



It is, however, a part of ' human economy that most thinkers 

 are rather definitely in one field of thought or another, and that 

 they are led there not by any intrinsically greater value of that 

 field but by a personal and temperamental choice. In this essay 

 it will be one of my aims to show the essential temperament of the 

 poet in explaining what nature may mean to man. It may be said 

 here that, as distinguished from the other two, from the scientist 

 and the philosopher, the poet thinks in images or concrete symbols, 



