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Nor will any such student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical dreamer. Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on the lyrical side?
The permanence of personality is a very subtle metaphysical problem, and certainly the English law solves the question in an extremely rough-and-ready manner. There is, however, something dramatic in the fact that this heavy punishment was inflicted on him for what, if we remember his fatal influence on the prose of modern journalism, was certainly not the worst of all his sins.
Would it prove that Man must needs pass, in the process of his mental and social development, through three distinct and successive stages, the preparatory Theological state, the transitory Metaphysical state, and the final Positive state?
If the simple request for something to eat presented such apparently insurmountable obstacles to pronunciation, what must the language be in its dealings with the more abstruse questions of theological and metaphysical science? Imagination stood aghast at the thought.
This unsparingly conscientious pursuit of the highest truth, this metaphysical instinct, found in conjunction with a varied and tender appreciation of all forms of human or other life, is what makes him so decidedly the representative of a wholly new order of novelists. Belief, however, is, not what he has usually been credited with, so much as incredulity.
For we have neither theological nor philosophical nor scientific evidences enough to draw from these Biblical utterances any metaphysical conclusions in reference to the relations of God to the temporal development of the world.
It marks a never-to-be-forgotten date in history; it opens up a phase of metaphysical thought; it lays down a principle of development the limits of which are indeterminable; and it is after cool consideration, with full consciousness of the exact value of words, that we are able to pronounce the revolution which it effects equal in importance to that effected by Kant, or even by Socrates.
His attack upon the ancien régime was, in the main, a theoretical attack; doubtless its immediate effectiveness was thereby diminished, but its ultimate force was increased. And the ancien régime itself was not slow to realise the danger: to touch the ark of metaphysical orthodoxy was in its eyes the unforgiveable sin. Voltaire knew well enough that he must be careful.
Hence this more refined form of teleology which we are considering, and which we saw to be the last of the possible arguments in favour of Theism, is met on its own ground by a very crushing opposition: by its metaphysical character it has escaped the opposition of physical science, only to encounter a new opposition in the region of pure psychology to which it fled. As a conclusion to our whole inquiry, therefore, it devolved on us to determine the relative magnitudes of these opposing forces. And in doing this we first observed that, if the supporters of metaphysical teleology objected
But though we look at these lectures, as they ought to be looked at, chiefly with a view to the special purpose for which they were destined, we are far from insinuating that they have no other merits, or that they are useless for readers who have already a metaphysical creed of their own.
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