may hate his lay figure or he may like it; but, if he is in search of
truth, he had better throw the thing out of the window and try to
think about a human being instead. I do not wish to deny the
importance of generalisations. It is not possible to think or even to
act without them. The generalisation that is founded on a knowledge of
and a delight in the variety of things is the end of all science and
poetry. Keats said that he sought the principle of beauty in all
things, and poems are in a sense simply beautiful generalisations.
They subject the unclassified and chaotic facts of life to the order
of beauty. The mystic, meditating on the One and the Many, is also in
pursuit of a generalisation--the perfect generalisation of the
universe. And what is science but the attempt to arrange in a series
of generalisations the facts of what we are vain enough to call the
known world? To know the resemblances of things is even more important
than to know the differences of things. Indeed, if we are not
interested in the former, our pleasure in the latter is a mere
scrap-book pleasure. If we are not interested in the latter, on the
other hand, our sense of the former is apt to degenerate into
guesswork and assertion and empty phrases. Shakespeare is greater than
all the other poets because he, more than anybody else, knew how very
like human beings are to each other and because he, more than anybody
else, knew how very unlike human beings are to each other. He was
master of the particular as well as of the universal. How much poorer
the world would have been if he had not been so in regard not only to
human beings but to the very flowers--if he had not been able to tell
the difference between fennel and fumitory, between the violet and the
gillyflower!