Introduction

While Yeats declared in the second edition of A Vision(1937) thathe was told by the instructors not to read philosophy until his book was completed, he nevertheless admitted that his failures in understanding the geometry and “distinctions upon which the coherence of the whole depended” were due to “ignorance of philosophy” (AVB19). Philosophy was of immense importance to him in organizing the movement of Faculties, Principles and Thirteenth Cone in the second edition, in accordance with existing ontological and epistemological ideas. The following study seeks to explain how his reading of philosophers as diverse as Plotinus and Oswald Spengler helped him to develop the Principles into a theory of perception and experience, to comprehend the mutual and dependent relation between incarnate and discarnate life, and to style the Great Year of the ancients as a theory of civilization akin to the views of ethnographers and anthropologists current to his age. Above all, however, it will be shown how Yeats's occultist background made him reinterpret the work of previous and contemporary scholars to become part of his own individual theory, a theory which melds classical conceptions of history with the contemporary.

I. Sequence and Eternity—The Role of Kant, Gentile,

Plotinus, Berkeley, McTaggart and Dunne

KANT AND GENTILE

Yeats's first use of modern philosophy in the 1937 edition of A Vision occurs with the appropriation of Giovanni Gentile's view that time is spatialization into the description of the symbolism of the gyres. Originally, as in the first edition, Yeats begins his exposition of the symbolism by discussing the relationship of time to space as a corollary of subjectivity to objectivity: