, the white
star-flowers, and the blue-eyed speedwell, and the ground-ivy at
my feet--what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid
broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate
fibres within me as this home-scene? These familiar flowers, these
well-remembered bird-notes, this sky with its fitful brightness,
these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given
to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother
tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the
subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood
left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass
to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls,
if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years,
which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.
[Footnote: Chapter V.]

In the backward glance of _Theophrastus Such_ this anchorage of the life in
familiar associations is described as a source of our faith in the
spiritual, even when all the childhood thoughts about those associations
cannot be retained.

The illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted with evil
have not lost their value when we discern them to be illusions. They
feed the ideal better, and in loving them still, we strengthen, the
precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly existent, but
a spiritual product of our visible, tangible selves.

In the evolution philosophy she found the reconciliation between Locke and
Kant which she so earnestly desired to discover in girlhood. The old school
of experimentalists did not satisfy her with their philosophy; she saw
that the dictum that all knowledge is the result of sensation was not
satisfactory, that it was shallow and untrue. On the other hand, the
intellectual intuition of Schelling was not acceptable, nor even Kant's
categories of the mind. She wished to know why the mind instinctively
throws all experiences and thoughts under certain forms, and why it must
think under certain general methods. She found what to her was a perfectly
satisfactory answer to these questions in the theory of evolution as
developed by Darwin and Spencer. Through the aid of these men she found the
reconciliation between Locke and Kant, and discovered that both were wrong
and both right. So familiar