the immediate product of the wondering and meditating mind; and such
thoughts as that celebrated one, 'There is nothing either good or bad
but thinking makes it so,' surely needed no special training to produce
them. Or does Portia's remark, 'Nothing is good without respect,'
_i.e._, out of relation, prove that she had studied metaphysics?

Still Hamlet had speculative genius without being a philosopher, just as
he had imaginative genius without being a poet. Doubtless in happier
days he was a close and constant observer of men and manners, noting his
results in those tables which he afterwards snatched from his breast to
make in wild irony his last note of all, that one may smile and smile
and be a villain. Again and again we remark that passion for
generalisation which so occupied him, for instance, in reflections
suggested by the King's drunkenness that he quite forgot what it was he
was waiting to meet upon the battlements. Doubtless, too, he was always
considering things, as Horatio thought, too curiously. There was a
necessity in his soul driving him to penetrate below the surface and to
question what others took for granted. That fixed habitual look which
the world wears for most men did not exist for him. He was for ever
unmaking his world and rebuilding it in thought, dissolving what to
others were solid facts, and discovering what to others were old truths.
There were no old truths for Hamlet. It is for Horatio a thing of course
that there's a divinity that shapes our ends, but for Hamlet it is a
discovery hardly won. And throughout this kingdom of the mind, where he
felt that man, who in action is only like an angel, is in apprehension
like a god, he moved (we must imagine) more than content, so that even
in his dark days he declares he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet
count himself a king of infinite space, were it not that he had bad
dreams.