ay, and Aristotle himself when he was the
thinker and not the critic; not to speak of the great moderns, whether
preachers or philosophers--have none of {66} them been greatly
concerned for consistency of expression, for a mere logical
self-identity of doctrine. Life in every form, nay, existence in any
form, is a union of contradictories, a complex of antagonisms; and the
highest and deepest minds are those that are most adequate to have the
vision of these antagonisms in their contrariety, and also in their
unity; to see and hear as Empedocles did the eternal war and clamour,
but to discern also, as he did in it and through it and behind it and
about it, the eternal peace and the eternal silence.

Philosophy, in fact, is a form of poesy; it is, if one pleases so to
call it, 'fiction founded upon fact.' It is not for that reason the
less noble a form of human thought, rather is it the more noble, in the
same way as poetry is nobler than mere narrative, and art than
representation, and imagination than perception. Philosophy is indeed
one of the noblest forms of poetry, because the facts which are its
basis are the profoundest, the most eternally interesting, the most
universally significant. And not only has it nobility in respect of
the greatness of its subject matter, it has also possibilities of an
essential truth deeper and more far-reaching and more fruitful than any
demonstrative system of fact can have. A great poem or work of art of
any kind is an adumbration of truths which transcend any actual fact,
and as such it brings us nearer to the underlying fundamentals of {67}
reality which all actual occurrences only by accumulation _tend_ to
realise. Philosophy, then, in so far as it is great, is, like other
great art, prophetic in both interpretations of the word, both as
expounding the inner truth that is anterior to actuality, and also as
anticipating that final realisation of all things for which 'the whole
creation groaneth.' It is thus at the basis of religion, of art, of
morals; it is the accumulated sense of the highest in man with respect
to what is greatest and most mysterious in and about him.

The facts, indeed, with which philosophy attempts to deal are so vital
and so vast that even the greatest intellects may well stagger
occasionally under the burden of their own conceptions of them. To
rise to the height of such an argument demands a more than Miltonic
imagination; and criticisms directed