e one broad and ancient foundation that temple of Truth which
the folly and ignorance of man is ever tearing down. A material
counterpart of that temple will in that case afterward arise. Thus
will be born the architecture of the future; and the ornament of that
architecture will tell, in a new set of symbols, the story of the
rejuvenation of the world.

In this previsioning of architecture after the war, the author
must not be understood to mean that these things will be realized
_directly_ after. Architecture, from its very nature, is the most
sluggish of all the arts to respond to the natural magic of the
quick-moving mind--it is Caliban, not Ariel. Following the war the
nation will be for a time depleted of man-power, burdened with
debt, prostrate, exhausted. But in that time of reckoning will come
reflection, penitence.

"And I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool."

With some such epilogue the curtain will descend on the great drama
now approaching a close. It will be for the younger generations, the
reincarnate souls of those who fell in battle, to inaugurate the work
of giving expression, in deathless forms of art, to the vision of that
"fairer world" glimpsed now only as by lightning, in a dream.

[Illustration]

ESSAYS

ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS

I

THE WORLD ORDER

No fact is better established than that we live in an _orderly_
universe. The truth of this the world-war may for the moment, and to
the near and narrow view appear to contradict, but the sweep of human
history, and the stars in their courses, show an orderliness which
cannot be gainsaid.

Now of that order, _number_--that is, mathematics--is the more than
symbol, it is the very thing itself. Whence this weltering tide of
life arose, and whither it flows, we know not; but that it is governed
by mathematical law all of our knowledge in every field confirms. Were
it not so, knowledge itself would be impossible. It is because man is
a counting animal that he is master over all the beasts of the earth.

Number is the tune to which all things move, and as it were make
music; it is in the pulses of the blood no less than in the starred
curtain of the sky. It is a necessary concomitant alike of the sharp
bargain, the chemical experiment, and the fine frenzy of the poet.
Music is number made audible; architecture