This is a characteristically poetic attitude; it is the antithesis of the scientific attitude. Formal logic excited Shakespeare's disdain even more conspicuously. In the mouths of his professional fools he places many reductions to absurdity of what he calls the "simple syllogism." He invests the term "chop-logic" with the significance of foolery _in excelsis_.[26] Again, metaphysics, in any formal sense, were clearly not of Shakespeare's world. On one occasion he wrote of the topic round which most metaphysical speculation revolves:-- We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded by a sleep. (_Tempest_, IV., i., 156-8.) [Footnote 26: The speeches of the clown in _Twelfth Night_ are particularly worthy of study for the satiric adroitness with which they expose the quibbling futility of syllogistic logic. _Cf._ Act I., Scene v., ll. 43-57. _Olivia._ Go to, you're a dry fool; I'll no more of you: besides you grow dishonest. _Clown._ Two faults, Madonna, that drink and good counsel will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is the fool not dry: bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Anything that's mended is but patched: virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that amends is but patched with virtue. If that _this simple syllogism_ will serve, so; if it will not, what remedy?] Such a theory of human life is first-rate poetry; it is an illuminating figure of poetic speech. But the simplicity with which the theme is presented, to the exclusion of many material issues, puts the statement out of the plane of metaphysical disquisition, which involves subtle conflict of argument and measured resolution of doubt, rather than imaginative certainty or unconditional assertion. Nor is Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the merits and demerits of suicide conceived in the spirit of the metaphysician. It is a dramatic description of a familiar phase of emotional depression; it explains nothing; it propounds no theory. It reflects a state of feeling; it breathes that torturing spirit of despondency which kills all hope of mitigating either the known ills of life or the imagined terrors of death. The faint, shadowy glimpses which Shakespeare had of scientific philosophy gave him small respect for it. Like the typical hard-headed Englishman, he doubted its practical efficacy. Shakespeare viewed all formal philosophy much as Dr Johnson's Rasselas, whose faith in it dwindled, when he perceived that the professional philosopher, who preached superiority to all human frailties and weaknesses, succumbed to them at the first provocation. There are more things in heaven and earth Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.[27] For there was never yet philosopher That could endure the toothache patiently.[28] [Footnote 27: _Hamlet_, I., v., 166-7.] [Footnote 28: _Much Ado About Nothing_, V., i., 35-6.]