grown into a hoop;" and of Caliban that, "As with age his body uglier grows, so his mind cankers." It is not strange that Shakspere perceived the new psychology, for Milton sang

Oft Converse with heavenly habitants

Begins to cast a beam on the outward shape,

The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,

Till all be made immortal.

The poet Spenser most beautifully expresses this truth in saying:

So every spirit, as it is more pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in. . . .

For of the soul the body form doth take,

For soul is form, and doth the body make.

This is the teaching also of St. Paul, that the body must be transformed by the renewing of the mind.

Here we perceive the source of the heavenly beauty and grace of Miranda. "The pure in heart shall see God." Her thought and vision wrought out for her a bodily expression that made her seem celestial to the beholder, and held him in doubt whether she were goddess or mortal.

In esoteric thought the perfected being must be an equal blending of the masculine and feminine, which Balzac has so gloriously interpreted in his "Seraphita." This quality we see in Prospero, the gentle, refined element of motherhood, blended with sublime dignity and strength. His child was to him "a cherubim infusing him with fortitude from heaven," and he gave to her the richest dower of inheritance knowledge, with purity of heart and purpose. With the gentle patience of love he instructed her in the laws of nature and her being, with divine purity of thought. For all nature is pure as God himself. Thus Miranda became the peerless young Eve of blended wisdom and innocence.

After a display of his power, he states, in his address to Ferdinand, the most abtruse problems of the ideal philosophy.

These... were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

This sublime inspiration was almost the last outburst of the mighty genius of Shakspere, and is a fitting crown of glory.

Prospero was fully conscious of his superiority, and with simple but grandest dignity he claims that practically it was his own power that worked all the wonders. Most sublimely he expresses this when he calls before him his invisible helpers:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; . . . by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth
By my so potent art.

Passing from his power over nature to the manifestation of his higher self with men, we see the spiritual plane he had reached. In coming again in contact with the world of humanity his first action is the recognition of the good and the forgiving the evil :

O good Gonzalo,

My true preserver, and a loyal sir

To him thou follow'st, I will pay thy graces
Home both in word and deed.

His divine forgiveness of those who had so cruelly wronged him shows the height of his spiritual attainment:

Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,

Yet with my nobler reason 'gainst my fury

Do I take part; the rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend

Not a frown further.

In the very remarkable events of his life he recognizes a higher power in all his guidance. "Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue should become kings of Naples ?"

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Roughhew them how we will.

In no drama has the poet risen to such supreme types of character. Prospero was the highest expression of Shakspere's latest thought, but only the shadowing forth of a supremer ideal. We can portray what is beneath us far more vividly and truly than what is above us. Shakspere had lived Hamlet, and that is why he so vitally touches every human soul. In Prospero it was the vision by the great poetic soul of a promised land he had only viewed from a mountain top. He had seen the wonderfully luscious grasps of Eschol, but had not yet tasted them. This is why we feel the vast yet subtle difference between "Hamlet" and "The Tempest."

If the immortal poet had lived the years allotted to man, with ever increasing openness of vision, his own soul would have attained that lofty height where, from the "pattern on the mount," he would have portrayed the splendor of divine manhood in godlike majesty, the soul irradiating the body like the shining face of Moses in its halo of awe-inspiring divinity. The people required a veil; they would require one still.

Although Shakspere left us before he had lived in the radiance of the truly spiritual realm, we may well crown his Prospero with his words of another:

He sits 'mongst men like a descended God:
He hath a kind of honor sets him off,

More than a mortal seeming.

THE CREATIVE MAN.

IN

BY STINSON JARVIS.

N the April number of this magazine its paper called "The Man in History."

Editor gave us a

Readers will not

have failed to note the grand width and depth it gave to ordinary views. The facts concerning the human being, from the earliest records to those of the present day, were marshalled in so masterly a way, and the mental grip on the whole mass was so far-reaching and unique, that people must have perceived that they were gaining the benefits of a lifetime study.

This article is therefore in no sense a reply to Dr. Ridpath's masterpiece. On the contrary, I wish to refer to all the historical events as he has introduced them, and can only regret that want of space forbids a reprint which would enable the original to be read with these comments. My endeavor is simply to bring forward for contemporaneous consideration certain suggestions which seem to me to be of a highly interesting character, and which were forced in upon my own thought by the results of experiments upon the human being. After the long series of articles published in THE ARENA about three years ago, many of my readers will not require further explanation of these experiments; but for others I will briefly refer, later on in this paper, to the phenomena which greatly affect one's views regarding man's powers and possibilities, together with the nature and extent of his agency in the world's events.

Dr. Ridpath has brought forward as interesting a question as was ever laid before a public, namely, how far, if at all, Man is the maker of history. And by the word "history" the learned author does not mean those records of events which any chance chronicler may choose to present, but the events themselves, their causes, action, and results. Here he presents both sides of the question, with the arguments which may be alternately used in support of each. He cites two master thinkers, Carlyle and Buckle, whose differences of opinion relative to man's agency in history were distinctly defined: Carlyle seeking the

hero in each great event, and recognizing only one force, that of God, behind the principal actor of the temporary drama, and never satisfied until the individual origins of history could be discovered. On the other hand, Buckle, to whom man, including the part he played, appeared "as the mere result of historical forces," and in the view of scientific rationalism contemplating only the lines of an infinite and unalterable causation encompassing the world and bringing to pass whatever is done by the agency of men en masse."

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I confess I was not by any means clear at first as to what Buckle meant by this "infinite and unalterable causation." If he meant the shapings of heredity coming down through many generations to produce a man able to lead in a certain event, then I followed him. I also sufficiently understood him if he referred to national desires and necessities assisting to produce competent manipulators of important events. But I did not gather until later that this language might possibly be intended to include what in common parlance is called the will of God."

In the alternation of contention which Dr. Ridpath lays before us with so much skill, we are all more or less familiar with the Carlyle side of the argument, so let us consider a part of what is said on the Buckle side. In sentences collected from different portions, the "believer in the predominance of universal causation" is represented as speaking in this way:

Men produce nothing. They control nothing. On the contrary, they are themselves like bubbles thrown up with the heavings of an infinite sea. They do not direct the course of history. Nations go to battle as the clouds enter a storm. Do clouds really fight, or are they not rather driven into concussion? Are not unseen forces behind both the nations and the clouds? What was Rome but a catapult, and Cæsar but the stone? He was flung from it beyond the Alps to fall upon the barbarians of Gaul and Britain. What was Alfred but the bared right arm of England? What was Dante but a wail of the middle ages?—and what was Luther but a tocsin? What was Napoleon but a thunderbolt rattling among the thrones of Europe? He did not fling himself, but was flung!

The whole tendency of inquiry respecting the place of man in history has been to reduce the agency of the individual. Every advance in our scientific knowledge has confirmed what was aforetime only a suspicion, that the influence of man, as man, on the world's course of events is insignificant. Over all there is a controlling Force and Tendency, without which events and facts and institutions are nothing. . . . History may be defined as the aggregate of human forces acting under law, moving invisibly-but with visible phenomena. . . . The individuals who contribute to the vast vol