These are the
literary or the creative folk. Their passion is not so much to know
life as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but to experience it; not even
to make understanding of it an end, but only a means to interpreting
it. They do not, as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they are
indifferent to those manipulations of the externals of life which
are dear to the lovers of executive power. They know less but they
understand more than their scholastic brethren. As a class they are
sometimes disreputable but nearly always unworldly; more distinguished
by an intuitive and childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticated
quality of mind. Ideas and facts are perceived by them not abstractly
nor practically, but in their typical or symbolic, hence their
pictorial and transmissible, aspects. They read dogma, whether
theological or other, in the terms of a living process, unconsciously
translating it, as they go along, out of its cold propositions into
its appropriate forms of feeling and needs and satisfactions.
The scientist, then, is a critic, a learner who wants to analyze and
dissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants to
command and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a lover
and a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it,
enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The intolerable poignancy
of existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate,
to interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce to
its center, to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate.
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