idealistic
philosophy.

INDEX

CHAPTER I.

THE EGOCENTRIC CIRCLE

Most of us, mere men that we are, find ourselves caught in some
entanglement of our mortal coil even before we have fairly embarked upon
the enterprise of thinking our case through. The art of self-reflection
which appeals to us as so eminent and so human, is it after all much
more than a vaporous vanity? We name its subject "human nature"; we give
it a raiment of timeless generalities; but in the end the show of
thought discloses little beyond the obstreperous bit of a "me" which has
blown all the fume. The "psychologist's fallacy," or again the
"egocentric predicament" of the philosopher of the Absolute, these are
but tagged examples of a type of futile self-return (we name it
"discovery" to save our faces) which comes more or less to men of all
kinds when they take honest-eyed measure of the consequences of their
own valuations of themselves. We pose for the portrait; we admire the
Lion; but we have only to turn our heads to catch-glimpse Punch with
thumb to nose. And then, of course, we mock our own humiliation, which
is another kind of vanity; and, having done this penance, pursue again
our self-returning fate. The theme is, after all, one we cannot drop; it
is the mortal coil.

In the moment of our revulsion from the inevitable return upon itself of
the human reason, many of us have clung with the greater desperation to
the hope offered by poetry. By the way of intuition poets promise to
carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless
round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by
simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the
squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never,
never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our
dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the
quietude of transcendent beauty.

But what are we to say when, on opening almost any book of comparatively
recent verse, we find, not the self-forgetfulness attendant upon an
ineffable vision, but advertisement of the author's importance? His
argument we find running somewhat as follows: "I am superior to you
because I write poetry. What do I write poetry about? Why, about my
superiority, of course!" Must we not conclude that the poet, with the
rest of us, is speeding around the hippodrome of his own self-centered
consciousness?

Indeed