This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is
diversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that
are not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other
names, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material
processes. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.
Its visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some
favourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these
visions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day
be revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the
possibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is
precisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,
that it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific
probability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the
landscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that
the ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual
truth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)
than any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre
and aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by
sinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,
because it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul
touches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may
people the infinite.
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