The poet soon passes his glowing torch into the hands of the philosopher.  After Aeschylus and Sophocles, come Plato and Aristotle.  The intuitive flash grows into a fixed light, which rules the day.  The great idea, when reflected upon, becomes a system.  When the light of such an idea is steadily held on human affairs, it breaks into endless forms of beauty and truth.  The content of the idea is gradually evolved; hypotheses spring out of it, which are accepted as principles, rule the mind of an age, and give it its work and its character.  In this way, Hobbes and Locke laid down, or at least defined, the boundaries within which moved the thought of the eighteenth century; and no one acquainted with the poetic and philosophic thought of Germany, from Lessing to Goethe and from Kant to Hegel, can fail to find therein the source and spring of the constitutive principles of our own intellectual, social, political, and religious life.  The virtues and the vices of the aristocracy of the world of mind penetrate downwards.  The works of the poets and philosophers, so far from being filled with impracticable dreams, are repositories of great suggestions which the world adopts for its guidance.  The poets and philosophers lay no railroads and invent no telephones; but they, nevertheless, bring about that attitude towards nature, man and God, and generate those moods of the general mind, from which issue, not only the scientific, but also the social, political and religious forces of the age.

It is mainly on this account that I cannot treat the supreme utterances of Browning lightly, or think it an idle task to try to connect them into a philosophy of life.  In his optimism of love, in his supreme confidence in man’s destiny and sense of the infinite height of the moral horizon of humanity, in his courageous faith in the good, and his profound conviction of the evanescence of evil, there lies a vital energy whose inspiring power we are yet destined to feel.  Until a spirit kindred to his own arises, able to push the battle further into the same region, much of the practical task of the age that is coming will consist in living out in detail the ideas to which he has given expression.

I contend, then, not merely for a larger charity, but for a truer view of the facts of history than is evinced by those who set aside the poets and philosophers as mere dreamers, and conceive that the sciences alone occupy the region of valid thought in all its extent.  There is a universal brotherhood of which all who think are members.  Not only do they all contribute to man’s victory over his environment and himself, but they contribute in a manner which is substantially the same.  There are many points of superficial distinction between the processes of philosophy and science, and between both and the method of poetry; but the inner movement, if one may so express it, is identical in all.  It is time to have done with the notion that philosophers occupy a transcendent region beyond experience, or spin spiritual cocoons by a priori methods, and with the view that scientific men are mere empirics, building their structures from below by an a posteriori way of thought, without the help of any ruling conceptions.  All alike endeavour to interpret experience, but none of them get their principles from it.