not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I
think, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it

"Must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,
And build themselves again impregnably
In a diviner clime,
To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime
Which frowns above the idle foam of time."

"Frowns," says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something
timeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could
threaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous
error! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those
who instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to
reach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal
possibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of
other things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite
unrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal
essences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian
calm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome
to any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether
any one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether
he has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and
on circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.
Otherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be
no picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and
will always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,
indestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of
those who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who
drew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of
Shelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted
friend wrote upon his tomb: _cor cordium_, the heart of hearts.

VI

THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

_Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of
California, August_ 25, 1911.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The privilege of addressing you to-day
is very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is
great, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is
California that one is visiting for the first time, but also because
there is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems
particularly favourable for saying.