I repeat, If the loyal are right, then the real
world contains other beings than mechanisms and individual human and
animal minds. It contains spiritual unities which are as real as we are,
but which certainly do not belong to the realm of a mere nature
mechanism. Does not all this put the problems of our philosophy of life
in a new light?
But I have no doubt that you may at once reply: All this speech about
causes is after all merely more or less pleasing metaphor. As a fact,
human beings are just individual natural creatures. They throng and
struggle for existence, and love and hate and enjoy and sorrow and die.
These causes are, after all, mere dreams, or at best entities as we have
just described. The friends like to talk of being one; but there are
always two or more of them, and the unity is a pretty phrase. The
country is, in the concrete, the collection of the countrymen, with
names, formulas, songs, and so on, attached, by way of poetical license
or of convenient abbreviation or of pretty fable. The poet really meant
simply that he was fond of the landscape, and was not wholly averse to a
good many of his countrymen, and was in any case fond of a good song.
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