Excerpt from Vision Vesture: A Study of William Blake in Modern Thought In dealing with modern thought I have preferred not to treat it in the lump. By tracing thoughts back to the thinkers the heavy lump dissolves into the fine essence of men's minds, and gathers colour and spirit from the individual thinker. And, there fore, I have dealt with persons - Goethe, Schopen hauer, Nietzsche, Shaw, Yeats. The one difficulty has been that of selection, so many names have started to mind. Here, too, I have followed my instinct, alighting on just those men and women who appeared to me to supply the necessary link in the chain of modern thought. Some may think that place might have been given to Browning, Tennyson, Morris, Maeterlinck. I must say that I do not think that they would have served my purpose. The only possible regret I might have is that I did not give a chapter to Samuel Butler; but even of this I will not repent, for I judged deliber ately at the time that Butler lived again in Shaw, and in treating Shaw with some fulness Butler's value was not really overlooked. 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.