Yeats considered Spinoza a mystic and had appreciation of Spinoza’s thought that God does not belong to a specific religion but is a nature and a boundless Absolute and he thought that freedom is not only compatible with but requires determinism, which means that reason leads man to an adequate understanding of causes of the world through three phases of knowledge. “Scholars” and “the obedient” in Yeats’s works are explained by the first knowledge through imagination with which we can never access the essence of the world and our knowledge of them is always inadequate. “The hawk” who “learns to be proud” presents the second knowledge through reason, where we know things truly according to their essences. The third is knowledge through intuition, where we can deduce true knowledge of things from true knowledge of the essence of God. Since only God acts consistently according to his nature, God is absolutely free. A thing is, therefore, free if and only if it acts according to its own nature from God. In this idea, freedom is to consider it a form of predestination. In Yeats’s poem, “Cuchulain,” is a free man who determines himself and accepts his destiny at the same time. A Vision also implies this concept of freedom in it.

• 김다(부산대학교 영어영문학과 박사과정) | Dah Kim