have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader
that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do,
or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle
any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me
sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no
Past at my back.

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things partake
could never become sensible to us but by contrast to some principle
of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the eternal generation of
circles proceeds, the eternal generator abides. That central life is
somewhat superior to creation, superior to knowledge and thought,
and contains all its circles. For ever it labors to create a life and
thought as Large and excellent as itself, but in vain, for that which is
made instructs how to make a better.

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all things renew,
germinate and spring. Why should we import rags and relics into the new
hour? Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease;
all others run into this one. We call it by many names,--fever,
intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old
age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness,
not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst
we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young.
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward,
counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction flowing
from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all,
they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the
actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them, then,
become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold
truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are
perfumed again with hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a
human mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed
and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life,
transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or
covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it
may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be
settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Life is a series of surprises. W