There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[42]

His philosophy, if the word is to be used, was, like Shakespeare’s own, the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such thoughts as that celebrated one, ’There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ surely needed no special training to produce them.  Or does Portia’s remark, ‘Nothing is good without respect,’ i.e., out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?

Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as he had imaginative genius without being a poet.  Doubtless in happier days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile and be a villain.  Again and again we remark that passion for generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections suggested by the King’s drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he was waiting to meet upon the battlements.  Doubtless, too, he was always considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously.  There was a necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to question what others took for granted.  That fixed habitual look which the world wears for most men did not exist for him.  He was for ever unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.  There were no old truths for Hamlet.  It is for Horatio a thing of course that there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a discovery hardly won.  And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad dreams.

If now we ask whether any special danger lurked here, how shall we answer?  We must answer, it seems to me, ’Some danger, no doubt, but, granted the ordinary chances of life, not much.’  For, in the first place, that idea which so many critics quietly take for granted—­the idea that the gift and the habit of meditative and speculative thought tend to produce irresolution in the affairs of life—­would be found by no means easy to verify.  Can you verify it, for example, in the lives of the philosophers, or again in the lives of men whom you have personally known to be addicted to such speculation?  I cannot.  Of course, individual peculiarities being set apart, absorption in any intellectual interest, together with withdrawal from affairs, may make a man slow and unskilful in affairs; and doubtless, individual peculiarities being again set apart, a mere student is likely to