EVERY specialisation, it is said, has its own peculiar narrow-mindedness, whereby it repudiates or repels other specialisations. Let us consider these in their four fundamental varieties represented by the outstanding figures of poet, philosopher, statesman, and saint. To one or another of these types, in their full breadth and complexity, all forms of human action are ultimately reducible.

We see, in fact, that the poet is continually abhorring the business man and politician, ridiculing the abstractions of the philosopher, pitying the self-abnegation of the saint. If he exalts any or all of these in his poetry from time to time, he does so because they are in his poetry and because he admires the imagery they suggest to his artistic mind. He has no love for them in themselves. He does not imitate them in real life, nor seek the things they stand for. And in this lies the eccentricity, the queerness, of the poet.

The practical man, the man of business or of public affairs, thinks of the poet as a ninny, of the philosopher as a time-waster, of the saint as a simpleton and an incompetent (the “unarmed prophet”). And this is the vulgarity of the “bourgeois.” And even the saint, kind soul that he is, is dubious of the sense-tickling imagery of poetry, scornful of the futile “reason” of the philosophies, sorrowful at the worldliness of those who scramble for things of the flesh on this speck of earth lost in eternity. And this, to use epithets of Giordano Bruno, is the holy asininity, the reverend stupidity, of the mystic.

But has not the philosopher his weak point too? Certainly: for he thinks other men are dupes, while he is wise, that others are blind to things that he can see. Foolish and blind the poet as he goes singing his nonsense in verse; foolish and blind the man of affairs who sets his heart on contingent things; foolish and blind the saint, forever chasing the wild goose of spiritual perfection. The philosopher is a philosopher. He sees the error they each are making, the game they each are playing, taking themselves seriously all the while. So from the everlasting tumult he withdraws into the eternal silences. From the ocean of illusion, storm-swept by winds of fatuity, he draws up his bark on the dry strands of Truth, “looks out upon earth and sky and sea, and smiles.” We must not be too severe toward these mutual intolerances. When they are not poses or affectations, when they are spontaneous, naïve, childish, so to speak, they are the up-flaring, the overboiling, of these various special activities in their creative effort. They are exaggerations, and hence guarantees, of virtues which are profitably attending to their respective and peculiar achievements. And we are not very severe, in fact. We do not blame the poet for his philosophical blasphemies, provided he gives us poetry that is living and beautiful. We overlook the bad taste of the man of affairs, if he keeps his country prosperous. And the saint can deprecate worldliness and reason all he wishes, if he refreshes our faith in goodness by the example of a pure life.

But this reciprocal intolerance is reciprocal ignorance, nevertheless; and it is sustained on reciprocal prejudices. Indulgence is all it deserves from us, not approbation or praise—another way of saying that the intolerance in question is not an absolute necessity but may be overcome. And overcome it is (or at least moderated) in cases less extreme than those just described. In words, if not in full sincerity, the business man may pay homage to art, philosophy, and humility. The poet may have the good sense to recognise that there are other things to do in this life aside from art. The saint may come to understand that the world is not to be renounced, but to be improved and perfected. The philosopher may perceive that the dry land on which he has found refuge shifts as the sea shifts, if indeed more slowly, that it is washed by the sea and perhaps made by the sea.

And what are such acknowledgments on the part of poet, business man, and saint? They are flashes of philosophy bursting before the minds of these men who are not only specialists but also whole men; and these gleams of philosophy reveal to them the unity of which they are part and function, refuting and breaking down the prejudices born of the passionate intensity of their special endeavour. And in the philosopher? They are a broader, ampler, more complete philosophy with which he finds the weak point in the prejudices of others as well as in the prejudices of his own special form of mind. He too sees that his work is part and function of the unity of the Spirit, that it could exist only as a phase of the Spirit, an eternal phase in a succession of phases, ever being born of those before it, ever dissolving into those that follow—one thinks of the swimmer lifting his head to survey the expanse of the water about him, but then pillowing it on the waves again to stroke his way forward with renewed vigour. This is the supreme glory of philosophy, the greatest of the triumphs it wins: that destroying all transcendencies, it also destroys the transcendence of philosophy itself. It prevents idol-breaking from becoming an idol—belief, that is, in a mythical form of Spirit higher than all other forms which lifts man to an empyrean whence he could never get back to earth again.