tive principles in the poetry of Wordsworth and in much of the serious poetry since his time. Necessity, Determinism, Predestination are antithetical to Free-Will. These terms may seem to have merely a metaphysical interest, but in truth they have a very practical one. Whether the mind of man be as a cog in a wheel, or a link in a chain, or as a harp to be played upon by forces outside itself, or whether, on the other hand, it possesses some unique self-determining and creative power, by which in a measure it shapes its own destiny, is of vital importance. Since it is obvious to common sense that there are events and incidents and things—the passing of day and night, the coming and going of the seasons, the stars in their course, the processes of all the elemental forces of Nature, etc.-over which man, no matter what he thinks and does, has no appreciable control, it is easy enough to conceive the whole universe, including man, so bound up and closed in by law and sequence that there is no room in it for the exercise of man's free moral agency. Yet man has not been willing to surrender his freedom, for with it he must needs surrender his sense of personal identity and of personal responsibility. The antinomy of law and freedom is not wholly explicable. One of the most serious occupations of philosophers is to resolve it, as, for example, to show that if man wills to live by fixed law he attains to freedom, or to distinguish between must as obtaining in one realm and ought in another. Here we need not be disturbed by the subtleties of the arguments. We shall hold to the antithesis: if a poet be found to accept and express the deterministic outlook on life he may be set down as having a weak hold on will and personality, and if he be an ardent exponent of free-will he will be a weak deter minist. It shall be seen that these attitudes are extremely important. Indeed, literature of the nineteenth century is decidedly less deterministic than in the eighteenth. It appeals not only more strongly to the emotions but relatively more powerfully to the will, its characteristic distinction being that it renders imaginatively experiences compact of deep feeling and energetic will. It is that which separates it from the literature of the eighteenth century and links it in spirit to the literature of the latter part of the sixteenth and the early part of the seventeenth centuries. Though important exceptions must be made, it in general substitutes, for the determinism and necessitarianism regnant in the eighteenth century, the postulate of moral freedom; accordingly it appeals more profoundly to the human will. The principle of Transcendentalism is closely allied to the principle of Free-will. Strictly speaking transcendentalism is a theory, not of intuition, but of knowledge. It lays bare the method, or mode, by which the intellect grows. It reverses the conception that all knowledge is derived from the senses, and asserts that the sense impressions that stream into the mind from the outer world were meaningless, a mere blotch on the canvas, had not the mind an original, active, organizing principle within itself by which it turns them into knowledge. Says Kant: "I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori." This constituent force of the mind, which did not come by experience but which renders experience possible, makes the mind an active agent and not merely a passive recipient, implies that the mind is self-determining and the will free. This is the so-called immortal discovery of Kant-the kernel of what philosophers speak of when they say that Kant's thinking revolutionized modern thought. The current of philosophical thought in the eighteenth century in England as represented by Locke and Hume and others started with the assumption that all knowledge is derived from sensation, that the mind is 'compounded' out of the senses, that it is an empty form until an impingement has been made upon it by sense impressions. The mind thus being a passive instrument, a product of sensation, it was strictly necessitated, and not free, in its action. Here the skeptical philosophers were at one with the believing theologians, Calvin and Jonathan Edwards and their followers. For the doctrine of Necessity in philosophy is the same as the doctrine of Predestination in religion. The remorseless logic of the philosophers (granting their major premise), supported by the remorseless logic of the theologians, made it well-nigh impossible for a thinking man, born in the tradition of the creed of Necessity, to break through its iron chains. But the new trascendentalism offered a profound challenge to its central contention and in due course of time won a victory of vast significance to the thought of the nineteenth century. The transendental principle did not get into the world merely by the arguments of German philosophers and such men as Coleridge and Emerson. Some speak of it as though it were a thing invented by Kant, talked about by Coleridge in his metaphysical moments, and elaborated into a system by Emerson, and that it has no other connection with the thought of the nineteenth century. Nothing of course can be farther from the truth. It entered the world as a presence, a force, an atmosphere, pervasive and unescapable even by those who by tempera ment and express purpose were least inclined to countenance it. Like the theory of Evolution of a later generation, which influenced thousands of men who never read Darwin, the principle of Transcendentalism influenced thousands of persons who never read Kant. After Coleridge it had become common property among English speaking peoples. Transcendentalism poetry unobtrusively and by slow gradations, making his poetry prophetic for the thought of the century to follow; it was the shaping influence in all of Coleridge's later writings; it entered as an essential into the poetry and prose of Emerson, the prose of Carlyle, and the poetry of Tennyson; and it became an axiomatic truth in the poetry of Browning. Tennyson thinks of it chiefly as a miracle: But this main-miracle, that thou art thou, entered Wordsworth's mature With power on thine own act and on the world. The transcendental principle, however, did not enter poetry in its pure form. As a theory of knowledge it asserted that man is capable of a unitary experience only on the basis that the mind itself, independent of sensations, is possessed inherently of an active power by which it can synthesize and transmute sensations into wider experiences of self-consciousness. In the following passage from The Prelude Wordsworth expresses the doctrine in its pure form: The mind is lord and master-outward sense But generally the poets, who do not usually exercise as rigid an intellectual logic as philosophers, conceived this new principle of self-consciousness, with its power of initiative and development from within, not only as an abid ing and therefore immortal energy of the soul but as an intuition implanted in man by which he perceives Deity— which converts it into a spiritual and a poetic principle. Under its influence they exalted man's inner life of intuitions, passions, and volitions, not in any egotistical sense, but as divine powers sacredly entrusted to man, which are the insignia of his worth of soul. Living under a rigid regime of Necessity men find it inherently difficult to maintain a profound respect for human individuality, since man is a mere puppet to the predestinating or deterministic powers; this regime produces, according to their respective natures, gloomy religionists, or skeptical philosophers, or light-hearted cynics and satirists, or sentimental moralists, with which different kinds among the leaders of English thought in the eighteenth century the roll of names is replete. The transcendental principle restores man's faith in his deeper self, because it gives assurance that he himself has a positive share in the shaping of his own destiny and the destiny of the race. This high faith lies at the root of the literature of the nineteenth century, taking vigorous growth in the mature poetry of Wordsworth and culminating perhaps in the poetry of Browning. Of course so profound and freeing a principle as the transcendental brings with it the possibilities of grave abuse. Not taken in the right spirit it may unduly exaggerate the intuitions, or develop the merely egotistic, or make a man anti-social, or cause him to indulge in mere vagaries of soul development or soul affinities. But these risks must be taken for the essential worth of the principle, for it carries within itself the corrective of its own dangers, namely, the power of self-discipline and of selfsacrifice. In its fundamentals it is really nothing new |