poetry, has its préciosité and its Symbolism. Just as there are orators who attain astonishing popularity by dint of putting together bombastic and resonant phrases in which heterogeneous words—mingled more or less at random and strained beyond their ordinary meaning—serve to lead up to impressive moral or patriotic or humanitarian tirades, so there are philosophers who win an extraordinary degree of influence in certain minds by mixing together great words of uncertain significance and mysterious color, arranging them in symmetrical schemes and in elegant combinations, and making reversible charades or impressive phrases broken here and there by a noisy outburst of metaphysics. When you read that a syllogism is "the essence of logic meeting with itself," that the "negative is also positive, positive in the very fact of its being negative," that "the unreal has its own reality, which is to be sure the reality of the unreal: the reality of 'not-being' in the dialectic triad, of that 'not-being' which is not real, but is the stimulus of the real," you experience an æsthetic pleasure which is different from that of poetry, but is none the less unmistakable, though it has as yet no name. A similar pleasure is to be derived from the unexpected and sometimes grotesque comparisons of the Hegelians, which recall the famous metaphors of the decadent lyrists of the seventeenth century. A similar pleasure comes
