but man reduced to his beggarly elements—­a being animated solely by the sensuous springs of pleasure and pain, which should properly, as Carlyle thought, go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral.  All things were reduced to what they seemed, robbed of their suggestiveness, changed into definite, sharp-edged, mutually exclusive particulars.  The world was an aggregate of isolated facts, or, at the best, a mechanism into which particulars were fitted by force; and society was a gathering of mere individuals, repelling each other by their needs and greed, with a ring of natural necessity to bind them together.  It was a fit time for political economy to supplant ethics.  There was nowhere an ideal which could lift man above his natural self, and teach him, by losing it, to find a higher life.  And, as a necessary consequence, religion gave way to naturalism and poetry to prose.

After this age of prose came our own day.  The new light first flushed the modern world in the writings of the philosopher-poets of Germany:  Kant and Lessing, Fichte and Schiller, Goethe and Hegel.  They brought about the Copernican change.  For them this world of the five senses, of space and time and natural cause, instead of being the fixed centre around which all things revolved, was explicable only in its relation to a system which was spiritual; and man found his meaning in his connection with society, the life of which stretched endlessly far back into the past and forward into the future.  Psychology gave way to metaphysics.  The universal element in the thought of man was revealed.  Instead of mechanism there was life.  A new spirit of poetry and philosophy brought God back into the world, revealed his incarnation in the mind of man, and changed nature into a pellucid garment within which throbbed the love divine.  The antagonism of hard alternatives was at an end; the universe was spirit-woven and every smallest object was “filled full of magical music, as they freight a star with light.”  There were no longer two worlds, but one; for “the other” world penetrated this, and was revealed in it:  thought and sense, spirit and nature, were reconciled.  These thinkers made room for man, as against the Puritans, and for God, as against their successors.  Instead of the hopeless struggle of ascetic morality, which divides man against himself, they awakened him to that sense of his reconciliation with his ideal which religion gives:  “Psyche drinks its stream and forgets her sorrows.”

Now, this is just the soil where art blooms.  For what is beauty but the harmony of thought and sense, a universal meaning caught and tamed in the particular?  To the poet each little flower that blooms has endless worth, and is regarded as perfect and complete; for he sees that the spirit of the whole dwells in it.  It whispers to him the mystery of the infinite; it is a pulse in which beats the universal heart.  The true poet finds God everywhere; for