Only by way of despair and a subsequent detachment can we attain this experience in its purity, and distinguish it from the mere conviction that the heavens care for us. Only when we have countenanced the defeat and even ridicule of the whole enterprise of life upon this planet can we discover that unique splendour and perfection of existence which is more admirable even than life's victory. And because this discovery, coming as it does in the very trough of our disillusion, cannot be assimilated by a pessimistic view, it should perplex us, and should indeed start a ferment of the whole mind.

We may understand our case more clearly by considering the movements of thought that have led up to it. Professor Whitehead has described the conflict between materialistic science and romantic literature, which came to a head in the nineteenth century and resulted in the defeat of romance. The whole romantic movement, he says, was a protest on behalf of the organic view of nature and on behalf of value, a revolt against the unjustified metaphysical dogmas of a science which ever tended to ignore its own abstractness. The poets concerned themselves with these more subtle or more "spiritual" factors in our experience which the science of that day, though it rightly neglected them for its own purposes, had no right to deny metaphysically. But the gesture of the poets was doomed to failure. Expressions of faith or mere longing carried less weight than the precise demonstrations and brilliantly plausible guesses of the scientists. The wind set in the direction of materialism; the whole mental climate had changed. Even the romantics themselves found their vision blurred by a flood of argument and non-rational suggestion. In the early stage Wordsworth had been able to dismiss science with a contemptuous phrase, and to salute "the brooding presence of the hills" without suspicion that it was illusory. But later Tennyson was compelled to recognise the forcefulness of materialistic metaphysics, though finally he sought consolation in an impotent reiteration of faith. Professor Whitehead might have added that Browning, with more complacency, but perhaps less intelligence, missed the issue altogether and merely proclaimed his confidence that human individuals were too interesting to be scrapped at death; while Carlyle, in spite of his grim concentration, found no better solution for the problem than to condemn doubt as cowardly and bid the doubter act so vigorously that he should have no time for thought.

Professor Whitehead's theme is important; but certain equally important comments should be made. And first we must ask, had the romantic poets actually seized a truth which the scientists had missed, or were they merely expressing the fulfilment of their own longing? The answer would seem to be that the poets had indeed in a sense a truth which the scientists missed, but that the scientists also had a truth which the poets had missed, and that these two truths did not in fact conflict at all. The conflict was merely between two unsupported metaphysics, materialistic metaphysics and romantic metaphysics. The scientists, ignoring all the more difficult aspects of experience, were so enthralled by their admirable system of abstractions that they assumed universal materialism and neglected value. The poets, on the other hand, apprehending by direct acquaintance certain superior values, assumed that these values implied a romantic metaphysics. Quite illogically it was inferred that because nature was experienced as a brooding presence, because man could distinguish between good and evil and could espouse the good, and because the universe calls forth our admiration, therefore at the heart of reality there must be sympathy for man and advocacy of his most cherished ends.

Professor Whitehead has used the romantic movement to expose the insufficiency of nineteenth-century science and to support his organic view of nature; but, had he wished, he might equally well have used the whole movement of scientific interest to expose the incompleteness of the romantic ideal. If nineteenth-century science erred by ignoring the inner voice which the poets knew, they in turn had need to learn from science that interest in objectivity, that spirit of detachment from even the noblest human purposes, that dispassionate cognition in which alone the highest values are to be clearly envisaged. But this discovery was not possible to those who had not been forced to distinguish between their admiration of the universe and their faith that whatever was admirable must also be favourably disposed towards man's cravings.

We may continue Professor Whitehead's survey of the mental climate so as to bring it up to our own day and illustrate our own problem. The conflict between science and romance has issued in four distinct movements of thought. There is in the first place the retreat of the pure romantic mind into an unassailable but isolated stronghold of fantasy. Many of our modern romantics seek only to repeat the achievements of the nineteenth century, continuing to distill mystery from the past, or from fairyland, or from the recesses of daily life. Others achieve the same result by playing upon the well-established religious sentiments. Others again take refuge in extreme subjective idealism, supposing themselves to have undermined the whole attack of materialism by declaring that, since all our experience is mental, mind must be foundational to the universe; and that therefore man's nature is guaranteed fulfilment. Or the movement of withdrawal from the conflict and from reality may take yet another form. The value- experience which is the core of romanticism may be mistaken for a unique mystical apprehension of the reality behind all phenomena; and in an age when phenomena are very perplexing and shocking this yearning for the hidden reality may be so powerful as to trick the mind with many curious illusions and sophistries. Thus attention may be turned from the precise but often tragic forms of Western thought to the confused vision of the East, whether by way of theosophy or by way of Spengler.

The second movement to be noted must also be derived from romanticism, but it is romance reformed, "modernised" and aggressive. And it has captured the hearts of many who were at first on the side of materialistic science, though distressed by its materialism. This is essentially a movement of loyalty or moral obligation towards something which may be very variously described, but is always thought of as striving against obstructions to achieve a great end, and an end moreover which is only to be conceived little by little in the course of mind's development.