acter of our universe, do but teach the most
demonstrable of truths. Did you take them seriously, as you
should, their ardent reports might well disgust you with the
dull and narrow character of your own consciousness.

What is it, then, which distinguishes the outlook of great poets
and artists from the arrogant subjectivism of common sense?
Innocence and humility distinguish it. These persons prejudge
nothing, criticise nothing. To some extent, their attitude to the
universe is that of children: and because this is so, they
participate to that extent in the Heaven of Reality. According to
their measure, they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a
life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on
thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that
ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the
essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a
few great mystics appear to have possessed--not indeed in its
entirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, "one with
the Reality of things." The greater the artist is, the wider and
deeper is the range of this pure sensation: the more sharply he is
aware of the torrent of life and loveliness, the rich profusion of
possible beauties and shapes. He always wants to press deeper
and deeper, to let the span of his perception spread wider and
wider; till he unites with the whole of that Reality which he feels
all about him, and of which his own life is a part. He is always
tending, in fact, to pass over from the artistic to the mystical
state. In artistic experience, then, in the artist's perennial effort
to actualise the ideal which Keats expressed, we may find a point of
departure for our exploration of the contemplative life.

What would it mean for a soul that truly captured it; this life in
which the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, the
messages the world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticated
universe into which our clever brains transmute them? Plainly, it
would mean the achievement of a new universe, a new order of
reality: escape from the terrible museum-like world of daily life,
where everything is classified and labelled, and all the graded
fluid facts which have no label are ignored. It would mean an
innocence of eye and innocence of ear impossible for us to
conceive; the impassioned contemplation of pure form, freed
from all the meanings with which the mind has dra