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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. Excerpt from book: Section 3CHAPTER II. THE CREATION OF A POETIC WORLD, AND ITS FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH REFLECTION. textit{* If we approach the earlier Greek philosophers, or even Plato, the prophet of beauty, expecting to find in them a simple reflex and appreciation of the plastic and poetic fancy of their countrymen, we shall be seriously disappointed. The thought of Hellas passed through all the phases which were natural to profound and ardent intelligence at first freely turned upon the world; and the partial truths which it successively attained were uttered with a definiteness and audacity which conveys a first impression of something like perversity. When a modern reader finds that the fair humanities of old religion aroused among the wisest of early philosophers either unsparing condemnation or allegorical misconception, he is forced to summon up all his historical sympathy if he would not conclude that Heracleitus and Xenophanes and Plato, and the allegorising interpreters of whom Plato tells us, were incapable of rational criticism. But in reality this moral and metaphysical analysis, directed against the substance of a poetic fancy which was thus beginning to be distinguished from prosaic history, was the natural sequel of artistic creation, and the natural forerunner of more appreciative theory. creation of the 2. The creation of Hellenic poetry and forma- woria of Beauty. t;ve art may l-, e regarded as an intermediate stage between popular practical religion and critical or philosophical reflection. The legendary content of this art was not the work of the poet or the formative artist, but of the national mind in its long development out of savagery. Its imaginative form, on the other hand, was due indeed to the national mind, but to this mind chiefly as it acted through the individuality of poetic genius, inve...

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