ng, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national
idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the
least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the
analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become
peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,
and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and
of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with
brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their
thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with
the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope
and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making
_Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in
_Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a
line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a
perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the
mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best
merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important
particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes;
whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very
heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton
framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply
imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said
Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form,
contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative
Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly
congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he
restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the
nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely
suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a
formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital
impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for
existence'.

The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical
thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one
of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of
Schelling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in
his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully wi