of
resemblances in things remote, which lent so rich a colour to the
science of the Renaissance, may yet be trained in all our minds; and
the philosophy which trusts in the slow suffusion of the worlds with
intellectual light will bless and encourage its reasonable growth.

Such a philosophy brings also a living sympathy with art. For the artist
ever sees a perfection of truth beyond his rendering, yet always calling
for expression; there is something eternally missed by his highest
effort, and he can never know complacency. The philosophy which
conceives the gradual growth of form through consciousness towards a
perfection infinitely removed, yet in its remoteness drawing up our life
as the moon sways the tides--this surely is the artist's wisdom.
Idealism is like love, {apora porimos}, holding us as it were in touch
with the intangible: it will have us conceive the Absolute without that
helpless absorption in thought which changed Amiel's life from a
fountain to a vapour: it would keep us near the surf and confluence of
things. Its function is not to give any mysterious transcendental
knowledge, but to serve culture "by suggesting questions which help to
detect the passion, and strangeness and dramatic contrasts of life."
And not only to bring suggestions, but repose, by granting to eyes
wearied with minute concerns the contrasts of vast times and spaces, the
majestic idea of the Whole; to change the focus and variously dispose
the perspectives of familiar things.

An old watchmaker, whose window overlooked a wide meadow, used ever and
again to lay down his instruments to gaze out upon the expanse of green,
pasturing upon it a wandering vague regard, and absorbing from it an
assuagement of his wearied senses which, he said, served him more
effectually after these bright interludes. The province of Metaphysics
should be to us as to this wise workman his field; not a place to dream
our days away in, but for occasional resort; in which we may forget the
infinitesimal in healing visions of broad space and colour. I counsel
every lonely man to satisfy what has been described as the common
metaphysical instinct, and according to his powers to become a
metaphysician. There is no discipline which so well consists with
solitude, none which so instantly enfranchises the mind from the
tyranny of mean self-interest or vain and envious polemics. Men do not
grow sour and quarrelsome about the Absolute: everything that is
polemic