b. Religious liberty: no priests. c. Intellectual liberty: no censors. d. Political liberty: no tyrants.. T INTRODUCTION HE aim of this study is to determine the human and lasting element in Milton's thought. Milton has been studied too much in connection with his century, or at least with the wrong side of his century. We have been taught to see in him the stiff Puritan figure; and that has taken much of our interest away from him. Only too often do we feel half inclined to forgive Milton both his character and his ideas for love of the irresistible beauty of his art. Only too often do we open and read his poems with half-smothered prejudice against him; and thus we lose much that is important and interesting in them. There is, however, in Milton's work a permanent interest, outside the religious and political squabbles of his time, outside even dogma and religion proper - a philosophical interest susceptible of universal appeal, and fully as important for our own time as for Milton's. Milton's thought is most attractive when studied in connection with its intimate sources in his character and emotional experience. His abstract ideas are mostly generalizations of conceptions acquired in his personal experience, in the conflict between his temperament and the circumstances, private and political, of his life. His ideas are an interpretation of life which has not been built in the abstract by speculation, but which has been the result of the passing through life of a highly sensitive man a man of high intelligence also-to whom life brought revelations about himself, his ambitions, and his cause. An abstract study of his ideas, therefore, would be insufficient. In his great poems, Milton gives us a picture of life as he understood it after having lived. It is necessary to throw on the poems the light which comes from a study of his abstract ideas; many details rise then into significance, many peculiarities of the works are explained. But, inversely, many gaps in the thought are filled in by the poetry. I mean to try to show Milton as one, to reveal the unity of his private and political and literary life, the unity of the man himself. For it is not right even to say that the private man or the political man in him influenced the poet or the thinker. Quite as often it was the poet who influenced the politician in him, or the private man, by giving him a magnificent but impossible ideal to carry out into deeds. And the failures of the practical man again set his problems to the thinker. In a word, Milton was one in all his activities: his complex sensitiveness is found in his poems as in his life; his clear imperious will is seen in his philosophy as in his actions; his penetrating and systematic intellect dominates his political life as well as his theology or his poems. In a first part, I shall study Milton's character in his youth and show how that character brought him into conflict with the realities of private or public life; what problems the conflict presented to his intelligence; what conceptions of life it engraved deeply into his very being. A second part will analyze the abstract ideas that arose out of his experience, first as a solution to the problems set by his life to a man of his temperament, but also as the outcome of as wide an intellectual culture as a man ever had. In a third part, I shall study the essential rôle played |