flects from Schelling
that flitting intellectual tradition. He supposes a subtle, sympathetic
co-ordination between the ideas of the human reason and the laws of the
natural world. Science, the real knowledge of that natural world, is
to be attained, not by observation, experiment, analysis, patient
generalisation, but by the evolution or recovery of those ideas
directly from within, by a sort of Platonic "recollection"; every group
of observed facts remaining an enigma until the appropriate idea is
struck upon them from the mind of a Newton, or a Cuvier, the genius in
whom sympathy with the universal reason becomes entire. In the next
place, he conceives that this reason or intelligence in nature becomes
reflective, or self-conscious. He fancies he can trace, through all
the simpler forms of life, fragments of an eloquent prophecy about the
[78] human mind. The whole of nature he regards as a development of
higher forms out of the lower, through shade after shade of systematic
change. The dim stir of chemical atoms towards the axis of crystal
form, the trance-like life of plants, the animal troubled by strange
irritabilities, are stages which anticipate consciousness. All through
the ever-increasing movement of life that was shaping itself; every
successive phase of life, in its unsatisfied susceptibilities, seeming
to be drawn out of its own limits by the more pronounced current of
life on its confines, the "shadow of approaching humanity" gradually
deepening, the latent intelligence winning a way to the surface. And
at this point the law of development does not lose itself in caprice:
rather it becomes more constraining and incisive. From the lowest to
the very highest acts of the conscious intelligence, there is another
series of refining shades. Gradually the mind concentrates itself,
frees itself from the limitations of the particular, the individual,
attains a strange power of modifying and centralising what it receives
from without, according to the pattern of an inward ideal. At last, in
imaginative genius, ideas become effective: the intelligence of nature,
all its discursive elements now connected and justified, is clearly
reflected; the interpretation of its latent purposes being embodied in
the great central products of creative art. The secret of creative
[79] genius would be an exquisitely purged sympathy with nature, with
the reasonable soul antecedent there. Those associative conceptions of
th