Excerpt from The Poet as Philosopher, a Study of Three Philosophical Poems, Nosce Teipsum the Essay on Man: In Memoriam It is probable, too, that to his contemporaries the philosophical discoveries of Davies had all the charm of novelty. It is to our print-satiated age that they seem trite. The men and women who read his work knew Plato and Aristotle, to be sure; but here were Plato and Aristotle popularized and made English. And these readers were not constructive thinkers, each in possession of a well-formulated system of metaphysics. Among the men of learning of his time, Davies was one of the few conscious philos Ophers. While he was no more really the philosopher than was Spenser, and while his work no more truly contains a knowledge of the deep things of the thought of the ages past than does the Faerie Queen, nevertheless Spenser's philosophical reflections are so intermingled with the thread of his allegory and with vivid images of sensuous beauty that the philosopher seems all poet. For the writer of Nosoe Teipsum, on the contrary, poetry was merely the medium of expression of an abstract philosophical theme - the ship which carried the adventurer through the deeps of thought, into a country to him as undiscovered as was the Eldorado Which lured Sir Walter Raleigh to his death. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.