But it would be futile to continue this "fancy-work," of definition by an individual temperament. The general traditional meaning of these words is clear and unmistakable; though there may be infinite minute shades of difference between one person's interpretation of such a meaning and another's. What it all really amounts to is this. No philosophic or scientific interpretation of life, which does not include the verdict of life's own most concentrated moments, can possibly be adequate.
Human nature can perfectly well philosophize about its normal stream of impressions in "cold blood," so to speak, and according to a method that discounts all emotional vision. But the resultant conclusions of such philosophizing, with their easy-going assumption that what we call "beauty" and "goodness" have no connection with what we call "truth," are conclusions so unsatisfying to more than half of our being that they carry their refutation on the face of them.
To be an "interpretation of life" a philosophical theory cannot afford to disregard the whole turbulent desperate dramatic content of emotional experience. It cannot disregard the fact, for instance, that certain moments of our lives bring to us certain reconciliations and revelations that change the whole perspective of our days. To "interpret life" from the material offered by the uninspired unconcentrated unrhythmical "average" moods of the soul is like trying to interpret the play of "Hamlet" from a version out of which every one of Hamlet's own speeches have been carefully removed. Or, to take a different metaphor, such pseudo-psychological philosophy is like an attempt to analyse the nature of fire by a summary of the various sorts of fuel which have been flung into the flame.
The act of faith by which these ultimate ideas are reduced to the vision of living personalities is a legitimate matter for critical scepticism. But that there are such ultimate ideas and that life cannot be interpreted without considering them is not a matter for any sort of scepticism. It is a basic assumption, without which there could be no adequate philosophy at all. It is the only intelligible assumption which covers the undeniable human experience which gathers itself together in these traditional words.
CHAPTER VII.
THE NATURE OF ART
The only adequate clue to the historic mystery of that thing which the human race has come to call "beauty," and that other thing—the re-creation of this through individual human minds—which we have come to call "art"—is found, if the complex vision is to be trusted at all, in the contact of the emotion of love with the "objective mystery," and its consequent dispersion, as the other aspects of the soul are brought to bear upon it, into the three primordial ideas of goodness, beauty, and truth.
The reason why this one particular aspect of the soul which we call emotion is found to be the synthesis of what is discovered by all the other aspects of the soul functioning together is that the nature of emotion differs radically from reason, conscience, will, imagination, taste, and the rest, in that it is not only a clarifying, directing and discriminating activity but is also—as none of these others are—an actual mood, or temper, or state of the soul, possessing certain definite vibrations of energy and a certain sort of psychic fluidity or outflowing which seems perpetually to spring up from an unfathomable depth.
This synthetic role played by emotion in unifying the other activities of the complex vision and preparing the psychic material for the final activity of the apex-thought may perhaps be understood better if we think of emotion as being an actual outflowing of the soul itself, springing up from unfathomable depths. Thinking of it in this way we may conceive the actual size or volume of the "soul monad" to be increased by this centrifugal expansion.