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Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus.
The organization of Balthazar Gerard would furnish a subject of profound study, both for the physiologist and the metaphysician. Neither wholly a fanatic, nor entirely a ruffian, he combined the most dangerous elements of both characters. In his puny body and mean exterior were enclosed considerable mental powers and accomplishments, a daring ambition, and a courage almost superhuman.
It is true that M. Lamennais can boast of nothing but his style. As a philosopher, he has added not a single idea to those which existed before him. Look at his style, exuberant, sonorous, picturesque, vehement, full of exaggeration and invective, and hold it for certain that no man possessed of such a style was ever a true metaphysician.
Such are the amenities of expression into which an eloquent metaphysician, trying his best to speak popularly, is led. Yet the book is readable to that orderly application of the mind which such studies exact, and is the firmest and strictest guide now speaking our English tongue.
A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of the matter in the Biographia Literaria is clear.
Simple as may be the mind of this dark son of nature, uncommon as may be the qualities with which he has clothed his reptile, he still may be evidenced by all who choose to exercise their organs of sight; not so with the theologian; he absolutely questions the existence of every other god but that which he himself has formed; which is questioned in its turn by his brother metaphysician.
But he made merry over the ivory, apes, and peacocks of existence. He seems less French than he is in his self-mockery, yet he is a true son of his time and of his country. This young Hamlet, who doubted the constancy of his mother the moon, was a very buffoon; I am the new buffoon of dusty eternities, might have been his declaration; a buffoon making subtle somersaults in the metaphysical blue. He was a metaphysician complicated by a poet. Von Hartmann it was who extorted his homage. "All is relative," was his war-cry on schools and codes and generalisations. His urbanity never deserted him, though it was an exasperated urbanity. His was an art of the nerves. Arthur Symons has spoken of his "icy ecstasy" and Maurice Maeterlinck described his laughter as "laughter of the soul." Like Chopin or Watteau, he danced on roses and thorns. All three were consumptives and the aur
To say that I do not know, would be to say that I am ignorant of something; and God forbid, that a transcendental metaphysician, who has pure anticipated cognitions of every thing, and carries the whole science of geometry in his head without ever having looked into Euclid, should fall into so empirical an error as to declare himself ignorant of any thing: to say that I do know, would be to pretend to positive and circumstantial knowledge touching present matter of fact, which, when you consider the nature of evidence, and the various lights in which the same thing may be seen
If we can know only mental phenomena, the representatives of things, at first hand, how can we tell that they are representatives? and what becomes of the assumption that we perceive that mind is related to an external world? It may be said, this problem the psychologist may leave to the metaphysician.
He thought that the very foundations of Christianity were being undermined. No one was more disturbed by these theological controversies than the Emperor himself. He was a soldier, and not a metaphysician; and, as Emperor, he was Pontifex Maximus, head of the Church. He hated these contentions between good and learned men.
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