The completeness of their satisfaction in
what has been called "the aesthetic moment" is the death of their
philosophical instincts. The immediate perception of flowers and birds
and breezes is so all-sufficing to them that such phenomena do not send
their minds racing back on a quest of first principles. Thus argue
philosophers.
Such a conclusion the poet denies. The philosopher, to whom a
sense-impression is a mere needle-prick, useful only as it starts his
thoughts off on a tangent from it to the separate world of ideas, is not
unnaturally misled by the poet's total absorption in the world of sense.
But the poet is thus absorbed, not, as the philosopher implies, because
he denies, or ignores, the existence of ideas, but because he cannot
conceive of disembodied ideas. Walter Pater's reason for rejecting
philosophy as a handicap to the poet was that philosophy robs the world
of its sensuousness, as he believed. He explained the conception of
philosophy to which he objected, as follows:
To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant
to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first
sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome
hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to _genus_ and
_species_ and _differentia_, into formal classes,
under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels
fluttering on the stalks instead of blossoms--a botanic or
physic garden, as they used to say, instead of our
flower-garden and orchard.
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