a consequence, his dramas are a storehouse of genuine human nature. Ambition, mercy, hate, madness, guilelessness, conventionality, mirth, bravery, deceit, purity--these, and all human states and attributes save piety, are upon his pages as real, and as mysterious withal, as they are in the great historical society. For an ordinary reader, these states and attributes are more real in Hamlet or Lear than in his own direct experience, because in Hamlet and Lear he can see them with the eye and intelligence of genius. But Shakespeare is the world all over again, and there is loss as well as gain in such realism. Here is human life, no doubt, and a brilliant pageantry it is; but human life as varied and as problematic as it is in the living. Shakespeare's fundamental intellectual resource is the historical and psychological knowledge of such principles as govern the construction of human natures. The goods for which men undertake, and live or die, are any goods, justified only by the actual human striving for them. The virtues are the old winning virtues of the secular life, and the heroisms of the common conscience. Beyond its empirical generality, his knowledge is universal only in the sense that space and time are universal. His consciousness _contains_ its representative creations, and expresses them unspoiled by any transforming thought. His poetic consciousness is like the very stage to which he likens all the world: men and women meet there, and things happen there. The stage itself creates no unity save the occasion and the place. Shakespeare's consciousness is universal because it is a fair field with no favors. But even so it is particular, because, though each may enter and depart in peace, when all enter together there is anarchy and a babel of voices. All Shakespeare is like all the world seen through the eyes of each of its inhabitants. Human experience in Shakespeare is human experience as everyone feels it, as comprehensive as the aggregate of innumerable lives. But human experience in philosophy is the experience of all as thought by a synthetic mind. Hence the wealth of life depicted by Shakespeare serves only to point out the philosopher's problem, and to challenge his powers. Here he will find material, and not results; much to philosophize about, but no philosophy. [Sidenote: Philosophy in Poetry. The World-View. Omar Khayyam.]