PHILOSOPHERS'STONE.PART 78

a scandinavian,marked a transition from Baroque period to the age of enlightenment,with a play Jeppe On The Mountain,mimicking each other,borrowed their theme from old arabian tales A Thousand And One Nights.Like their contemporaries,all compared life to a dream and it reverberated as far away as India and China where the old chinese sage Chuang-tzu Once dreamt himself as a butterfly and probably flies away and never returns,also captures the idiotic brevity of life.Peter Dass (1647 - 1707 ) a baroque poet in Norway,captures the same mood and ascribed eternity to God.When he writes in the hymn about rural life in northern Norway,he captures this mood as typical of baroque poet.The same with platonic distinction of material worldand the eternal world of ideas.Atthe bottom of these diametrically opposed modes of thoughts according to some philosopherlies the spiritual factor and this philosophical viewpoint they called it Idealism.The opposite being materialism was also a striking force in the western history.