And it did more.  Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside vision and above it, rage.  Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.  And Nietzsche’s glorification of this elemental creative force also responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German.  His Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and the beginning of Schopenhauer’s fame, about 1850, coincides with a general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of Wundt and Muensterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing is is determined by what it can; that value is in fact the measure, and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power which created the German empire and launched her on the career of industrial greatness.  Nietzsche’s Superman is, above all, a being of colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer moved the world.  The moment at which the prestige of will began definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has pointed out, by the appearance of James’s Will to Believe, just when agnosticism seemed triumphant.

Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the philosophic reason to those ‘irrational’ elements of mind which reach their highest intensity in the vision and ‘rage’ of the poet.  James’s vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was not the least symptomatic passage of his great book.  And both concurred, however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as creation, creation in which we take part—­a conception which again, in the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the type of faith announced in that last—­the Jamesian—­’Variety’ of religious experience, which represents us as indispensable fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.

2. The New Freedom

No reader of the poetry of our time can mistake the kinship of its prevailing temper with that which lies at the root of these philosophies.  Without trying to fit its infinite variety to any finite formula, we may yet venture to find in it, as Mr. McDowall has found in our Georgian poetry in particular, a characteristic union of grip and detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and