Page:Interpretations of Poetry and Religion.djvu/11

native element of ideas. It casts a greater blight than would a civilized orthodoxy on any joyous freedom of thought. For the respect exacted by an establishment is limited and external, and not greater than its traditional forms probably deserve, as normal expressions of human feeling and apt symbols of moral truth. A reasonable deference once shown to authority, the mind remains, under such an establishment, inwardly and happily free; the conscience is not intimidated, the imagination is not tied up. But the preoccupations of a hungry and abstract fanaticism poison the liberty nominally allowed, bias all vision, and turn philosophy itself, which should be the purest of delights and consolations, into an obsession and a burden to the soul. In such a spectral form religious illusion does not cease to be illusion. Mythology cannot become science by being reduced in bulk, but it may cease, as a mythology, to be worth having.

On the other hand, the positivistic school of criticism would seem, if our theory is right, to have overlooked in its programme the highest functions of human nature. The environing world can justify itself to the mind only by the free life which it fosters there. All observation is observation of brute fact, all discipline is mere repression, until these facts digested and this discipline embodied in humane impulses become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination,