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An exception was made for Paula and me. "You've met Aaron Hancock here. He was one of the philosophers, and to this day he swaggers that he owed Dick a bigger bill that never was paid than any of his customers. And there they used to meet, all those wild young thinkers, and pound the table, and talk philosophy in all the tongues of Europe. Dick always had a penchant for philosophers.
The poet did not specify the fluid in which the toast was to be carried, and the cup might be that which "cheers but not inebriates." "The common cup," as the remonstrants had to be informed, "has in all ages been the sacred symbol of unity." The Promise of May was produced in November 1882, and the poet was once more so unfortunate as to vex the susceptibilities of advanced thinkers.
"Some fifty years ago, acting upon the impulse of a group of great writers and thinkers, our statesmen at last achieved that German unity which had been the unrealized ideal of so many centuries.
And indeed, if the fact be admitted, it cannot but be a shock to all those high-minded thinkers who have committed themselves unreservedly to the view that personal sanctity and elevation of character in the artist is an essential condition for the production of any great work of art, and especially of religious art. As regards the fact, we need not concern ourselves very long.
If a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole civilised world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers should have sunk under an abortion of fear and folly, should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among them; surely there were nothing better for a wise man than to make the best of his time, and to crowd what enjoyment he can find into it, sheltering himself in a very disdainful Pyrrhonism from all care for mankind or for their opinions.
It was the whole care of the Pontiff to adorn the city. The prosperity which the Papal court brought to Rome was the main support of the Popes as princes, at a time when many thinkers looked with Dante's jealousy upon the union of temporal and spiritual functions in the Papacy.
"The Greyson Letters" are evidently the work of an amiable, learned, accomplished, and able man, interested in a wide variety of themes which especially attract the attention of thinkers, but in his treatment of them indicating a lack of deep and wide experience, and of that close, searching thought which pierces to the core of a subject, and broods patiently over its living elements and relations, before it assumes to take them as materials for argumentation.
And in that simple, strenuous, necessary task statesmen and political thinkers have watched the slow extension of the power of Law, from the family to the tribe, from the tribe to the city, from the city to the nation, from the nation to the Commonwealth. When will Law take its next extension?
Thus the gospels as memoirs and suggestive statements of sociological and biological doctrine, highly relevant to modern civilization, though ending in the history of a psycopathic delusion, are quite credible, intelligible, and interesting to modern thinkers. In any other light they are neither credible, intelligible, nor interesting except to people upon whom the delusion imposes.
Turning to philosophy, it is enough to mention the immortal name of Immanuel Kant as the founder of modern German philosophic thought and the first of a line of eminent thinkers extending to wellnigh the middle of the nineteenth century. The names of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others will at once occur to the reader.
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