“But who shall parcel out
His intellect by geometric rules,
Split like a province into round and square?…
In weakness we create distinctions, then
Deem that our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made”
[Wordsworth (1805) The Prelude II, lines 208-9, 222-4
in Wordsworth (1971) The Prelude: A parallel text, Harmandsworth, Penguin]
This comes at p75 of Forms of Feeling, at the end of the Chapter on Symbols and just before Hobson develops the theme of “living symbols”.
It is a powerful text that warns us of the arbitrary distinctions we sometimes make when trying to define something that is quite fluid.
