insupportable melancholy, were it not that current employments, especially those which are spoken of as duties, are so engrossing—that is, I would explain, were it not that his conscious life feels down with its roots into that "Part of the Soul" which, without sense of past or future or self, silently holds on to Life, in the implicit faith that it is worth living

that there is a Cosmos in which it is good to be. As it is, there is still room enough for melancholy in his hours of ease and leisure. If comfort comes to him in such hours, it is not from his thinking out some solution of his melancholy, but from his putting by thought, and sinking, alone, or led by some μυσταγωγὸς τοῦ βίου, for a while into the sleep of that fundamental "Part of the Soul." When he wakes into daily life again, it is with the elementary faith of this Part of his Soul newly confirmed in his heart; and he is ready, in the strength of it, to defy all that seems to give it the lie in the world of the senses and scientific understanding. Sometimes the very melancholy, which overclouds him at the thought of death, is transfigured, in the glow of this faith, into an exultant resignation-" I shall pass, but He abideth for ever." Sometimes, and more often, the faith does not merely transfigure, but dispels, the melancholy, and fills his heart with sweet hope, which fancy renders into dreams of personal immortality.

L

To sum up in effect what I have said about Transcendental Feeling it is feeling which indeed appears in our ordinary object-distinguishing, time-marking consciousness, but does not originate in it. It is to be traced to the influence on consciousness of the presence in us of that "Part of the X Soul" which holds on, in timeless sleep, to Life as worth living. Hence Transcendental Feeling is at once the solemn sense of Timeless Being-of "That which was, and is, and ever shall be" overshadowing us-and the conviction that Life is good. In the first-mentioned phase Transcendental Feeling appears as an abnormal experience of our conscious life, as a well-marked ecstatic state; in its other phase-as conviction that Life is good-Transcendental Feeling may be said to be a normal experience of our conscious life: it is not

1 See Paradiso, xxxiii. 82-96, quoted supra, p. 23, and Vita Nuova, Sonnet XXV., quoted supra, p. 38.

an experience occasionally cropping up alongside of other experiences, but a feeling which accompanies all the experiences of our conscious life. that "sweet hope," yλvкeîα exis, in the strength of which we take the trouble to seek after the particular achievements which make up the waking life of conduct and science. Such feeling, though normal, is rightly called Transcendental, because it is not one of the effects, but the condition, of our entering upon and persevering in that course of endeavour which makes experience.

5. THE PLATONIC MYTH ROUSES AND REGULATES TRANSCENDENTAL FEELING BY (1) IMAGINATIVE REPRESEN TATION OF IDEAS OF REASON, AND (2) IMAGINATIVE DEDUCTION OF CATEGORIES OF THE UNDERSTANDING

AND MORAL VIRTUES.

I have offered these remarks about Transcendental Feeling in order to preface a general statement which I now venture to make about the Platonic Myths-that they are Dreams expressive of Transcendental Feeling, told in such a manner and such a context that the telling of them regulates, for the service of conduct and science, the feeling expressed.

How then are conduct and science served by such regulation of Transcendental Feeling?

In the wide-awake life of conduct and science, Understanding, left to itself, claims to be the measure of truth; Sense, to be the criterion of good and bad. Transcendental Feeling, welling up from another " Part of the Soul," whispers to Understanding and Sense that they are leaving out something. What? Nothing less than the secret plan of the Universe. And what is that secret plan? The other "Part of the Soul" indeed comprehends it in silence as it is, but can explain it to the Understanding only in the symbolical language of the interpreter, Imagination-in Vision.1 In the Platonic Myth we assist at a Vision in which the

3

1 γλυκειά οἱ καρδίαν ἀτάλλοισα γηροτρόφος συναορεῖ ἐλπίς, ἃ μάλιστα θνατῶν πоλÚσтроdo yνúμav κußeрvâ.—Pindar, quoted Rep. 331 A.

2 As distinguished from "Empirical Feeling"; see infra, p. 389. 3 Plotinus, Enn. iii. 8. 4, and see infra, p. 45.

4 Tim. 71 D, E. The liver, the organ of Imagination, is a μavretov.

wide-awake life of our ordinary experiences and doings is seen as an act in a vast drama of the creation and consummation of all things. The habitudes and faculties of our moral and intellectual constitution, which determine a priori our experiences and doings in this wide-awake life, are themselves clearly seen to be determined by causes which, in turn, are clearly seen to be determined by the Plan of the Universe which the Vision reveals. And more than this, the Universe, planned as the Vision shows, is the work-albeit accomplished under difficulties of a wise and good God; for see how mindful He is of the welfare of man's soul throughout all its wanderings from creation to final purification, as the Vision unfolds them! We ought, then, to be of good hope, and to use strenuously, in this present life, habitudes and faculties which are so manifestly in accordance with a universal plan so manifestly beneficent.

It is as producing this mood in us that the Platonic Myth, Aetiological and Eschatological, regulates Transcendental Feeling for the service of conduct and science. In Aetiological Myth the Categories of the Understanding and the Moral Virtues are deduced from a Plan of the Universe, of which they are represented as parts seen, together with the whole, in a former life, and "remembered" piecemeal in this; in Aetiological and Eschatological (but chiefly in Eschatological) Myth the "Ideas of Reason," Soul, Cosmos, as completed system of the Good, and God, are set forth for the justification of that "sweet hope which guides the wayward thought of mortal man"—the hope without which we should not take the trouble to enter upon, and persevere in, that struggle after ever fuller comprehension of conditions,1 ever wider "correspondence withenvironment," which the habits and faculties of our moral and intellectual structure-the Categories of the Understanding and the Moral Virtues-enable us to carry on in detail.

At this point, before I go on further to explain Plato's handling of Transcendental Feeling, I will make bold to explain my own metaphysical position. A very few words will suffice.

I hold that it is in Transcendental Feeling, manifested

1 Kant makes "Reason" (i.e. the whole man in opposition to this or that part, c.g. "understanding") the source of "Transcendental Ideas," described as conceptions of the unconditioned," "conceptions of the totality of the conditions of any thing that is given as conditioned."

normally as Faith in the Value of Life, and ecstatically as
sense of Timeless Being, and not in Thought proceeding by
way of speculative construction, that Consciousness comes
nearest to the object of Metaphysics, Ultimate Reality. It is
in Transcendental Feeling, not in Thought, that Consciousness
comes nearest to Ultimate Reality, because without that
Faith in the Value of Life, which is the normal manifestation
of Transcendental Feeling, Thought could not stir. It is
in Transcendental Feeling that Consciousness is aware of
"The Good"-of the Universe as a place in which it is good
to be. Transcendental Feeling is thus the beginning of
Metaphysics, for Metaphysics cannot make a start without
assuming "The Good, or the Universe as a place in which
it is good to be"; but it is also the end of Metaphysics, for
Speculative Thought does not really carry us further than
the Feeling, which inspired it from the first, has already
brought us: we end, as we began, with the Feeling that it
is good to be here. To the question, "Why is it good to be
here?" the answers elaborated by Thought are no more really
answers than those supplied by the Mythopoeic Fancy inter-
preting Transcendental Feeling. When the former have
value (and they are sometimes not only without value, but
mischievous) they are, like those supplied by the Mythopoeic
Fancy, valuable as impressive affirmations of the Faith in us,
not at all as explanations of its ground. Conceptual solutions
of the "problem of the Universe" carry us no further along
the pathway to reality than imaginative solutions do. The
reason why they are thought to carry us further is that they
mimic those conceptual solutions of departmental problems
which we are accustomed to accept, and do well to accept,
from the positive sciences. Imaginative solutions of the
'problem of the Universe" are thought to be as inferior to
conceptual solutions as imaginative solutions of departmental
problems are to conceptual.
to conceptual. The fallacy involved in this
analogy is that of supposing that there is a "problem of the
Universe" a difficulty presented which Thought may
"solve." The "problem of the Universe was first pro-
pounded, and straightway solved, at the moment when Life
began on the earth,-when a living being as such, from the
very first, lacking nothing which is essential to "selfhood" or

The

personality "first appeared as Mode of the Universe. "problem of the Universe" is not propounded to Consciousness, and Consciousness cannot solve it. Consciousness can feel that it has been propounded and solved elsewhere, but cannot genuinely think it. It is "propounded" to that on which Consciousness supervenes (and supervenes only because the problem has been already "solved")-it is propounded to < what I would call "selfhood," or "personality," and is ever silently being "understood" and "solved" by that principle, in the continued "vegetative life" of individual and race. And the most trustworthy, or least misleading, report of what the "problem" is, and what its "solution" is, reaches Consciousness through Feeling. Feeling stands nearer than Thought does to that basal self or personality which is, indeed, at once the living "problem of the Universe" and its living" solution." The whole matter is summed up for me in the words of Plotinus, with which I will conclude this statement which I have ventured to make of my metaphysical position : "If a man were to inquire of Nature- Wherefore dost thou bring forth creatures?' and she were willing to give ear and to answer, she would say-Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent.'" 1

In suggesting that the Platonic Myth awakens and regulates Transcendental Feeling (1) by imaginative representation of Ideas of Reason, and (2) by imaginative deduction of Categories of the Understanding and Moral Virtues, I do not wish to maintain that the Kantian distinction between Categories of the Understanding and Ideas of Reason was explicit in Plato's mind. There is plenty of evidence in his writings to show that it was not explicit; but it is a distinction of vital importance for philosophical thought, and it need not surprise us to find it sometimes implicitly recognised by a thinker of Plato's calibre. At any rate, it is a distinction which the student of Plato's Myths will do well to have explicit in his own mind. Let us remind ourselves, then, of what Kant means by Categories of the Understanding and Ideas of Reason respectively.

1 Plot. Enn. iii. 8. 4, καὶ εἴ τις δὲ αὐτὴν τὴν φύσιν) ἔροιτο τίνος ἕνεκα ποιεῖ, εἰ τοῦ ἐρωτῶντος ἐθέλοι ἐπαΐειν καὶ λέγειν, εἴποι ἄν· “ ἐχρῆν μὲν μὴ ἐρωτῶν, ἀλλὰ συνιέναι καὶ αὐτὸν σιωπῇ, ὥσπερ ἐγὼ σιωπῶ καὶ οὐκ εἴθισμαι λέγειν.”