ail him nothing
with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand Aeschyluses to my
intellectual integrity. Especially take the same ground in regard to
abstract truth, the science of the mind. The Bacon, the Spinoza, the
Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever propounds to you a philosophy of
the mind, is only a more or less awkward translator of things in
your consciousness which you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of
denominating. Say then, instead of too timidly poring into his
obscure sense, that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your
consciousness. He has not succeeded; now let another try. If Plato
cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then perhaps Kant.
Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find it is no recondite, but a
simple, natural, common state which the writer restores to you.

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the subject might
provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth and Love. I
shall not presume to interfere in the old politics of the skies;--"The
cherubim know most; the seraphim love most." The gods shall settle
their own quarrels. But I cannot recite, even thus rudely, laws of the
intellect, without remembering that lofty and sequestered class of men
who have been its prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure
reason, the Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought
from age to age. When at long intervals we turn over their abstruse
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, these
great spiritual lords who have walked in the world,--these of the
old religion,--dwelling in a worship which makes the sanctities of
Christianity look parvenues and popular; for "persuasion is in soul, but
necessity is in intellect." This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus,
Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and
the rest, have somewhat so vast in their logic, so primary in their
thinking, that it seems antecedent to all the ordinary distinctions of
rhetoric and literature, and to be at once poetry and music and dancing
and astronomy and mathematics. I am present at the sowing of the seed of
the world. With a geometry of sunbeams the soul lays the foundations of
nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is proved by its scope
and applicability, for it commands the entire schedule and inventory of
things for its illustration. But what marks its elevation and has even
a comic look to us, is the i