ctical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with
which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the _terra
firma_ of concrete life again.

Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how
theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long
neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native
France to-day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to be
better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of
the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession
of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes
our theoretic control, may suggest a most definite practical
conclusion,--this one, namely, that 'our wills are free.' I will say
nothing of Renouvier's line of reasoning; it is contained in many
volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.[10] But to
enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the
philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of
Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made,
and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:--

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"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that great deep before our world begins,
Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,--
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
From that true world within the world we see,
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,--
Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep,
With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun
Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy.
For in the world which is not ours, they said,
'Let us make man,' and that which should be man,
From that one light no man can look upon,
Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons
And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost
In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou,--who wailest being born
And banish'd into mystery,...
...our mortal veil
And shattered phantom of that Infinite One,
Who made thee unconceivably thyself
Out of his whole world-self and all in all,--
Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
And ivyberry, choose; and still depart
From death to death through life and life, and find
Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought
Not matter, nor the finite-infinite,
_But this main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world