tions in Euclid's Geometry, but as soon as
he had read the enunciation the solution or answer was plain at once.
The power may be cultivated, but I think it is to a great degree a
natural gift, as is the eye for color, as is the ear for music.

--I think I could read equations readily enough,--I said,--if I could
only keep my attention fixed on them; and I think I could keep my
attention on them if I were imprisoned in a thinking-cell, such as the
Creative Intelligence shapes for its studio when at its divinest work.

The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to
explain what I meant.

--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.

--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its
planets revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving
conscious life to the beings that move on them?

--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of
all this vast mechanism. Without life that could feel and enjoy,
the splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away. You know
Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an
egg. You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about
spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the
Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus. Now, look
at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it is large
enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle easily. That would
be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell. Build me an oval with
smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the centre of it with Newton's
"Principia" or Kant's "Kritik," and I think I shall develop "an eye for
an equation," as you call it, and a capacity for an abstraction.

But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what
there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a
mathematician or a metaphysician?

--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances. I don't want to see
anything to draw off my attention. I don't want a cornice, or an angle,
or anything but a containing curve. I want diffused light and no single
luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from its one
object of contemplation. The metaphysics of attention have hardly been
sounded to their depths. The mere fixing the look on any single object
for a long time may produce very strange ef