The testament of beauty : a poem in four books / by Robert Bridges.

  • Bridges, Robert, 1844-1930.
Date:
[1930]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The testament of beauty : a poem in four books / by Robert Bridges. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    withhold official knowledge from the corporat mind; ther is no deliberation or whisper’d thought, not ev’n unspoken intention among them, but it will leak out to thatt swarming intelligence where life began, and where ideas wander at liberty to find their procreativ fellowship; thatt fluid sea in which all problems, spiritual or logical aesthetic mathematic or practic, resolve 820 melting as icebergs launch’d on the warm ocean-stream: and wheresoe’er this corporat alchemy is at best, ’tis call’d by all men genius, and its aptitudes like virtuous disposition may be inherited. Thus must all kind of stimulus hav come some way across the misty march-land, whereon men would fix their disputable boundary between Matter and Mind, —as every sensation must suffer translation ere it can mediate in the live machinery of any final cause or purpose: whence ’twould seem 830 that science went astray thinking to appropriate some nervous reactions wholly to her material sphere, and rather should hav thought to extend the mental field. Now this spontaneous life oweth nought to Reason (the conscient faculty which Socrates invoked); and so her claim to be the “very consciousness