Howards End can be termed a metaphysical novel for the good reason that it is concerned with metaphysical problems. These are implicit in the clash of motive and purpose that directs the novel's action; they present themselves in terms of conflicting principles whose reconciliation serves to define the action's meaning. The principles at variance here are in themselves metaphysical opposites—the real and the ideal, the tangible and the intangible, the body and the soul, the many and the one—and they all have reference to a single overwhelming question: wherein lies the reality of experience? Does it consist in the inner life of personal relations, as Helen Schlegel declares? Or is it to be sought in the outer world of practical affairs, as her sister Margaret comes to maintain? How, in any case, is it to be known: through the agency of the flesh or of the spirit? And once known, how is knowledge of it to be preserved in a world where permanence and stability are conditioned by time and change? The answer, a single one, is implied in the words “only connect” that stand on the novel's title page. What must be connected, to state the matter in so many words, is the inner life of intellect and spirit, and the outer life of the physical and the sensory. These, the conflicting halves of experience, must be reconciled, for—and this is the burden of all Forster's work—because they are halves they are mutually dependent, and one without the other cannot adequately endure. The intellect and the spirit are dependent for their very embodiment on the physical and the sensory, faculties which they in turn altogether transfigure when the halves are fused. The contradictory elements that are inherent in the duality of body and soul are reconciled when the duality itself is resolved. The result is the comprehensive and harmonious vision of experience wherein the earthly partakes of the eternal, the particular testifies to the universal, and multiplicity becomes but another attribute of the one. The partial view gives way before a vision of the whole, and the paradoxical quality of experience takes on another dimension as one comes to discern the reality behind the appearance, the substance beneath the accidents.
„Stoisz prosty albo cię prostują”. Psychosomatyczne podstawy racjonalistycznych praktyk stoickich