Poetry in another way than philosophy expresses and interprets for man the inspired experience that transcends physical science and its logical understanding. And we find in the great poets of the Victorian era an appeal through the imagination to those elements in human nature, to which Reid made argumentative appeal as a philosopher. In this lies Wordsworth’s ‘healing power.’ His ‘Intimations of Immortality’ express divine inspirations, through which man learns to understand himself and his surroundings—inspirations that, dormant, ‘fade into the light of common day,’ yet, recovered by reflection, ‘in a season of calm weather, though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us hither.’ And ‘In Memoriam’ is Tennyson’s protest against the doubting spirit of the age, on behalf of the final and life-determining principles, which underlie creeds, belong to our earliest childhood, and on which the wisest and best have rested with a more or less intelligent consciousness through the ages—God revealed in the ideal man latent in all men. The human office of inspired common sense or ethical reason, final for beings whose ‘knowledge’ must be intermediate between omniscience and blind ignorance of mere sense and feeling, is its tacit philosophy— ‘Our wills are _ours_, we know not how, Our wills are ours, to make them Thine. We have but _faith_: we cannot _know_; For knowledge is of things we see; And yet we trust it comes from _Thee_, A beam in darkness: let it _grow_. Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell; That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster.’ Our scientific interpretation of the ever-changing universe at last rests on ethical theistic faith, and the Christian revelation of divine love is responded to by the divine inspiration of God in Man, in the form of the spiritual Common Sense. If this be not so, we cannot rely on the Common Sense, for it then belongs to a morally untrustworthy universe. Established on this faith, philosophy or theology, in Scotland and throughout the world, awaits the sceptical criticism and the spiritual healing power of the masters of thought in the twentieth century, for its further development, and application to human affairs. THE END FOOTNOTES [1] The above from data at Birkwood. [2] _Scottish Notes and Queries_, iii. 84-88; 128. [3] The number is, unfortunately, unrecorded. [4] Birkwood MSS. [5] In _Scotland and Scotsmen of the Eighteenth Century_, by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, there is an interesting account of this Mr. Bisset. [6] _Essays on the Intellectual Powers_, II. ch. 10. [7] While he lived here, he seems to have retained the incumbency of New Machar till May 1752. [8] Long ago removed. I have an engraving of it.