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It answers the big problems which are as familiar to the scientist and the theologian as to the metaphysician and epistemologist, and which are both intelligible and interesting to common sense. The following questions stand out: Can the possibility of knowledge be maintained against Hume and other sceptics?
The choice of the principle depends on several causes: The chief of these is the creator's individuality. Every metaphysician has a point of view, a personal way of contemplating and interpreting the totality of things, a belief that tends to recruit adherents.
The stanzas entitled 'The Power of Song' tell of a fugitive in strange lands lured back to warm himself in the embrace of nature from the chill of 'cold rules'. Another reminds the metaphysician, who boasts of the great height to which he has climbed, that his altitude can do nothing for him except give him a view of the valley below, 'Pegasus in Harness' is a humorous apologue intended to enforce the truth that the winged horse is of no use for drudgery and exhibits his proper mettle only when ridden by a poet.
But to show that he was a good common-lawyer, that he understood the theory of colors, that he was an accurate botanist, a master of the science of medicine, especially in its relation to mental disease, a profound metaphysician, and of great experience and insight in politics, all these, while they may very well form the staple of separate treatises, and prove, that, whatever the extent of his learning, the range and accuracy of his knowledge were beyond precedent or later parallel, are really outside the province of an editor.
Priestly, inventor of the pneumatic apparatus still used by chemists, and discoverer of oxygen and several other gases; David Hartley, the metaphysician whom Coleridge so much admired that he called his son after him; and Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso.
As for M. Janet, he is a metaphysician, and such gentlemen are so acute that I think they often misunderstand common folk. Your criticism on the double sense in which I have used Natural Selection is new to me and unanswerable; but my blunder has done no harm, for I do not believe that anyone excepting you has ever observed it.
"Miss Jennie is right," he thought; "I'm an artist, and not a reformer or a metaphysician, and I had better spend my time here than in trying to solve feminine enigmas;" and he worked like a beaver until the fading light compelled him to desist. "There," he said, "that is a fair beginning.
On this account, however, it would be all the more suitable place of confinement for a metaphysician, to keep him from bewildering mankind with his shadowy speculations; and, being shut off from external converse, the dark corridor would help him to make rich discoveries in those cavernous regions and mysterious by-paths of the intellect, which he had so long accustomed himself to explore.
This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year.
'The author's design being to consider the Freethinker in the various lights of Atheist, libertine, enthusiast, scorner, critic, metaphysician, fatalist, and sceptic, it must not therefore be imagined that every one of these characters agrees with every individual Freethinker; no more being implied than that each part agrees with some or other of the sect. The fallacy here arises from the assumption of a sect with a coherent system, which, as has been stated above, never had any existence.
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