246 The Future Poetry
it were a desirable remedy for our disease of over-intellectuality
and a mechanised existence. In fact we do not think less than
the men of the past generation but much more insistently, with
a more packed and teeming thought, with a more eager more
absorbed hunting of the mind along all the royal high-roads and
alluring byways of life. And it could not be otherwise. The very
school of poetry which insists on actual life as the subject matter
of the poet carries into it with or without conscious intention
the straining of the thought mind after something quite other
than the obvious sense of the things it tries to force into relief,
some significance deeper than what either the observing reason
or the normal life-sense gives to our first or our second view
of existence. The way out lies not in cessation of thinking and
the turn to a strenuous description of life, nor even in a more
vitally forceful thinking, but in another kind of thought mind.
The filled activity of the thinking mind is as much part of life as
that of the body and vital and emotional being, and its growth
and predominance are a necessary stage of human progress and
man’s self-evolution. To go back from it is impossible or, if
possible, would be undesirable, a lapse and not a betterment of
our spirit. But the full thought-life does not come by the activity
of the intellectual reason and its predominance. That is only a
step by which we get above the first immersion in the activity
and excitement and vigour of the life and the body and give
ourselves a first freedom to turn to a greater and higher reach of
the fullness of existence. And that higher reach we gain when we
get above the limited crude physical mind, above the vital power
and its forceful thought and self-vision, above the intellect and its
pondering and measuring reason, and tread the illumined realm
of an intuitive and spiritual thinking, an intuitive feeling, sense
and vision. This is not that vital intuition which is sometimes
confused with a much broader, loftier, vaster and more seeing
power, but the high original power itself, a supra-intellectual
and spiritual intuition. The all-informing spirit, when found in
all its fullness, heals the scission between thought and life, the
need of a just balance between them disappears, instead there
begins a new and luminous and joyful fusion and oneness. The