Poetry, art, religion are precious things. They cannot be maintained by lingering in the past and futilely wishing to restore what the movement of events in science, industry and politics has destroyed. They are an out-flowering of thought and desires that unconsciously converge into a disposition of imagination as a result of thousands and thousands of daily episodes and contact. They cannot be willed into existence or coerced into being. The wind of the spirit bloweth where it listeth and the kingdom of God in such things does not come with observation. But while it is impossible to retain and recover by deliberate volition old sources of religion and art that have been discredited, it is possible to expedite the development of the vital sources of a religion and art that are yet to be. Not indeed by action directly aimed at their production, but by substituting faith in the active tendencies of the day for dread and dislike of them, and by the courage of intelligence to follow whither social and scientific changes direct us. We are weak today in ideal matters because intelligence is divorced from aspiration. The bare force of circumstance compels us onwards in the daily detail of our beliefs and acts, but our deeper thoughts and desires turn backwards. When philosophy shall have co-operated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. To further this articulation and revelation of the meanings of the current course of events is the task and problem of philosophy in days of transition.
Animals, dramatisation in primitive life of man, 4
Aristotle, 13, 17, 19, 55; Bacon's charge against, 30-31, 36; distinction in ends, 171; experience, 79, 80; forms, 105; on change, 107; on philosophy as contemplation, 109, 110; on slavery, 191; theory of the state, 44; ultimate reality, 106
Authority, 48, 139, 195; final, 161; seat of, 160. _See also_ Final good
Bacon, Francis, 28, 81, 97; criticism of the learning of his day, 29-30; experience, 97-98; "knowledge is power," 29; summary of ideas, 29