Shakespeare nevertheless has assumed in the past and sometimes assumes even in our eyes, the appearance of a philosopher and of a master, or a precursor of the loftiest truths, which have since come to light. It is a fact that modern idealistic and historical philosophy has not experienced equal attraction towards any other poet, recognising in him the soul of a brother. How can this be? The answer is contained in what we have been noting and establishing. Shakespeare's mental presuppositions, which rejected the Middle Ages and were on a level with the new times, seeking and failing to find unity and harmony and above all that vigorous feeling of his for the cosmic strifes, breaking out from them and rising to the sphere of poetry, seems to offer material already prepared and to some extent also shaped to the dialectician, for he sometimes almost suggests the right word to the moralist, the politician, the philosopher of art. He might also be called a "pre-philosopher," owing to this power of stimulation that he possesses, and this appellation would have the further advantage of making it well understood that there is no use attempting to make of him a philosopher. And precisely because it is impossible to extract a definite and particular doctrine from his pre-philosophy and poetry, can many of different kinds be extracted, according to diversity of minds and the progress of the times. Hence, if some have maintained that the logical complement of that poetical vision is speculative idealism, dialectic, anti-ascetic morality, romantic aesthetic, realistic politics, the historical conception of the real, and have maintained this with reason, basing their views upon doctrines which they believed to be true, and have justly thought that the logical complement of beauty is truth; others have possibly arrived at pessimistic conclusions from that vision and assertion of conflicts; and others have striven and are striving to effect the restauration of some of the presumptions that are negated or are absent, such as faith in another world and in divine and transcendental justice. This latter position has been maintained as well as it possibly could have been, with the aid of much research, by an Italian mind of the first order, Manzoni, who was both a severe Catholic and a fervent Shakespearean. He found in the profundity of Shakespeare the profoundest morality, and remarked that "the representation of profound sorrows and indeterminate terrors," as given by Shakespeare, "comes near to virtue," because "when man comes inquisitively forth from the beaten path of things known and from the accidents that he is accustomed to combat, and finds himself in the infinite region of possible evils, he feels his weakness, the cheerful ideas of defence and of vigour abandon him. Then he thinks that virtue only, a clear conscience, and the help of God alone can be of some succour to his mind in that condition." And thus