The unity in outlook, attended by differences of method and form, which may exist between poet and philosopher, is signally illustrated by the relation between Goethe and Spinoza. What Goethe saw and felt, Spinoza proved and defined. The universal and eternal substance was to Spinoza, as philosopher, a theorem, and to Goethe, as poet, a perception and an emotion. Goethe writes to Jacobi that when philosophy "lays itself out for division," he cannot get on with it, but when it "confirms our original feeling as though we were one with nature," it is welcome to him. In the same letter Goethe expresses his appreciation of Spinoza as the complement of his own nature: "His all-reconciling peace contrasted with my all-agitating endeavor; his intellectual method was the opposite counterpart of my poetic way of feeling and expressing myself; and even the inflexible regularity of his logical procedure, which might be considered ill-adapted to moral subjects, made me his most passionate scholar and his devoted adherent. Mind and heart, understanding and sense, were drawn together with an inevitable elective affinity, and this at the same time produced an intimate union between individuals of the most different types."[51:11] It appears, then, that some poets share with all philosophers that point of view from which the horizon line is the boundary of all the world. Poetry is not always or essentially philosophical, but may be so; and when the poetic imagination restores philosophy to immediacy, human experience reaches its most exalted state, excepting only religion itself, wherein God is both seen and also served. Nor is the part of philosophy in poetry and religion either ignoble or presumptuous, for, humanly speaking, "the owl-winged faculty of calculation" is the only safe and sure means of access to that place on high, "Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, trancèd thing, But a divine melodious truth; Philosophic numbers smooth; Tales and golden histories Of heaven and its mysteries." FOOTNOTES: [28:1] George Santayana, in his _Poetry and Religion_, p. 176. [30:2] Santayana: _op. cit._, p. 180. [42:3] _Appreciations_, p. 59. [43:4] Letter to Can Grande. See Lowell's _Essay on Dante_, p. 34. [44:5] _Purgatorio_, Canto XXVII. Translation by Norton. [45:6] _Paradiso_, Canto I. [46:7] Edward Caird, in his _Literature and Philosophy_, Vol. I, p. 24. [47:8] _Paradiso_, Canto III. [50:9] Observations prefixed to the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_. [51:10] _A Defence of Poetry._ [51:11] Quoted by Caird in his _Literature and Philosophy_, Vol. I, p. 60. CHAPTER III THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE [Sidenote: The Possibility of Defining Religion.]