restore or retain the often dormant faith in the perfectly good God, and thus in the future of man, may even be taken as in line with Reid, under the altered intellectual conditions at the end of the nineteenth century. It virtually appeals at last to moral faith.[1]
Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies Wordsworth’s 'healing power.' His 'Intimations of Immortality' express divine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and his surroundings—inspirations that, dormant, 'fade into the light of common day,' yet, recovered by reflection, 'in a season of calm weather, though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.' And 'In Memoriam' is Tennyson’s protest against the doubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life- determining principles, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood, and on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less intelligent consciousness through the ages—God revealed in the ideal man latent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical reason, final for beings whose 'knowledge' must be intermediate between omniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit philosophy—
- ↑ So in the 'Preliminary Notice,' in the new edition of Dr. Stirling’s Secret of Hegel—last paragraph.
