whether there exist a Beauty to pursue. Masefield ends his sonnet sequence on a suspended note:

Let that which is to come be as it may,
Darkness, extinction, justice, life intense,
The flies are happy in a summer day,
They will be happy many summers hence.

Time with his antique breeds that built the Sphinx,
Time with her men to come whose wings will tower,
Poured and will pour, not as the wise man thinks,
But with blind force, to each his little hour.

And when the hour has struck, comes death or change,
Which, whether good or ill, we cannot tell,

But the blind planet will wander through her range
Bearing men like us who will serve as well.
The sun will rise, the winds that ever move
Will blow our dust that once were men in love.

Yet as we wander through the poet's House of Life into his gardens, out into his bye-ways, off on his open ocean roads, insistently, swift in the blood and throbbing on the bone, beating through his figments and his dreams, is the song of his beliefand underlying all the poet's speculation is his profound and lovely faith-that nobilities are the lasting fruitage of men's lives. He wrote-while the Great War spattered the Hope of the World-"Perhaps, when the war is over and the mess of the war is cleaned up and the world is at some sort of peace, there may be leisure and feeling for verse-making. One may go back to that life in the mind, in which the eyes of the mind see butterflies and petals of blossoms blowing from the unseen world of beauty into this world. In that life, if it comes again, one may not be too old to look towards that world of beauty, and to see it and tell of it. And though, before this war, when I was writing, I saw little enough of that land, life is kind and wise and generous, and perhaps, in that new time, I may see more and be able to tell more, and know in fuller measure what the poets of my race have known about that world and the people existing forever over England, the images of what England and the English may become, or spiritually Chaucer and Shakespeare, some lines of Gray, of Keats,

are.

of Wordsworth, and of William Morris, the depth, force, beauty, and tenderness of the English mind, are inspiration enough, and star enough to urge and guide in any night of the soul, however wayless from our blindness or black from our passions and our follies."

The war is momently over, Masefield has published one of his finest narratives of the English countryside, Reynard the Fox, and has had time, evidently, to look toward the world of beauty, to draw from it a butterfly, a blossom, and a bird, for all three make holiday in his latest tale, King Cole. The tale lacks the marrow and sinew and the strong blood-beat of melody we expect from Masefield's narration, and it presents an incoherence of chronology, puzzling and repellent, but here again, with mellow grace and sharpened fable, comes the theme-Where beauty fought under the veil the glory never ends.

King Cole, the ancient, godly ghost, wanders earth, a friend to man. He inspirits a wayside circus, piping luck and honor to the gypsy crew. They go their road, refreshed. The old king pipes farewell and fades. If we have but the mood to make the moment ours, we may discern the poet in the place of rare King Cole, robins nestling to his old grey coat, the burden of his song a beauty, grave and wise.

He watched the night, then taking up his flute,
He breathed a piping of this world of ours,
The half-seen prize, the difficult pursuit,
The passionate lusts that shut us in their towers,
The love that makes us and the love that mars,
The beauty and the truth that are our stars.
And man, the marvellous thing, that in the dark
Works with his little strength to make a light..
He dimmed like mist till one could scarcely note
The robins nestling to his old grey coat..
But where the juggler trudged beside his love
Each felt a touching from beyond our ken,

From that bright kingdom where the souls who strove
Live on forever, helping living men.

And as they kissed each other, even then

Their brows seemed blessed, as though a hand unseen
Has crowned their loves with never-withering green.

ITALIAN SONNET

TO A FIR TREE CLINGING TO A MOUNTAIN CRAG

FRED SHERWIN

Cathedral book, time-sealed and unread scroll,
Chained to the craggy pillars of the sky;
Oh tell us, stately Fir Tree, how and why,
To mortal man, your bark-imprisoned soul
Lies volumed deep within this tree's dark bole;
While we by science and by various art
Try to divine your many-chaptered heart,
God's golden parchment we can ne'er unroll.
Yet when the storm wind's chill and piercing cold
Freezes the breath of lip-made piety,

You utter notes unorganed and unsung,
A melody of whispers that unfold
To all the world a secret harmony,
in a universal tongue.

God's message

A PERSONALIST'S VIEW OF REALITY

An Outline of a Philosophy of Personalism

JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM

Pacific School of Religion

When one considers the vastness and depth of Truth it is a hazardous task to attempt to outline a philosophy. I venture upon it only for the sake of an approach to unity and clarity of thought-entering upon the quest through the familiar gateway of the question: What is real-sub specie per

sonalitatis?

What is real?-the stone that one strikes with his foot as he climbs the mountain, or the inspiration that comes to him on the summit?-for these are its two contrasted types. Both experiences are manifestly forms of consciousness induced by sensation-the one painful, the other pleasurable. Common sense asserts that the cause of the first experience is the stone and of the second the landscape. As for the inner experiences called out by the landscape, common sense pronounces them subjective, imaginative, fanciful, or at least less real than the stone, or the landscape with its various objects.

Yet a little reflection shows how crude and inconclusive common sense is in the premises. Philosophy in the form of idealism enters with a more carefully reflected if not a better answer. What would the stone be, it asks, but a nameless and unknown somewhat except for the concept formed by the mind? Merely as a source of sensations it would not be a stone. And what would be the visual sensations aroused by looking from the mountain untranslated by a mind into terms of thought, emotion, and imagination? What, then, is real? The stone? Doubtless, else there would be no sensation aroused by it; but the vital and sensitive organism affected

by the stone is more real than the stone; and the mind that interprets the sensation and forms the concept "stone" is more real than the physical organism. The landscape seen from the mountain is real, and all its constituent parts, but the mind that sees them as a whole is the greater reality. Most real of all is the self, the person, who feels the sensation, experiences the emotion, and exercises the synthetic mental activity without which there would be no landscape.

II

There are, it would seem, degrees of reality. Reality does not fundamentally consist of external substances which produce sensations that shade off into mental images, the latter being but dim and secondary reflections of the primary substances. On the contrary reality gives evidence of being a matter of gradation and degree and culminates in persons, who experience, perceive, conceptualize, relate and unify, and thus prove themselves in a sense constructors of lesser forms of reality. In other words, realities are not all on the same level. That which has consciousness possesses, in the nature of the case, a greater degree of reality than that which is unconscious. One need not deny reality of a certain kind to the stone in order to recognize that it is less real than the conscious organism that comes in contact with it and far less real than the mind, the self, which perceives and conceptualizes it. Reality, that is, is not so much a matter of sensation-causing or sensation-receiving, as of conscious power to feel, to think, to understand. Everything else is less real than the self by whom it gets its place and meaning in the realm of reality. Upon the same principle, that which is self-conscious possesses a greater reality than that which is merely conscious. For the self-conscious being is aware not only of its states but of itself as having them. It is real, that is, in the