And here too were required the strange aberration of fancy of a Taine, his singular incapacity for receiving clear impressions of the truth, in order to portray the feeling of Shakespeare towards man and life as being fundamentally irrational, based on blind deception, a sequence of hasty impulses and swarming images, without an autonomous centre, where truth and wisdom are accidental and unstable effects, or appearances without substance. These are simply exercises in style, repeated with variants from other writers; they do not even present a caricature of the art of Shakespeare, since even for this, some connection with fact is necessary. Shakespeare, who has so strong a feeling for the bounds set to the human will, in relation to the Whole, which stands above it, possesses the feeling for the power of human liberty in equal degree. As Hazlitt says, he, who in some respects is "the least moral of poets," is in others "the greatest of moralists." He who beholds the unremovable presence of evil and sorrow, has his eye open and intent in an equal degree upon the shining forth of the good, the smile of joy, and is healthy and virile as no pessimist ever was. He who nowhere in his works refers directly to a God, has ever present within him the obscure consciousness of a divinity, of an unknown divinity, and the spectacle of the world, taken by itself, seems to him to be without significance, men and their passions a dream, a dream that has for intrinsic and correlative end a reality which, though hidden, is more solid and perhaps more lofty.