in time, the soul's
wonderful old voice will tell us all things, so that we can
write and tell about them. Every thought we try so hard to
get, is there. It is like losing track of a thimble. If you
know it is somewhere and you need it badly enough, you will
find it.

The brain cannot get for us a mighty thought. The brain can
only translate soul-talk into words. It was not the _brain_
which told Fichte, a long, long time ago, that Germany was
going wrong and that _he_ should fix it by telling them the
right way to go; but it was the brain that told the people
not to listen to him, but to go on just as they had been.

It is always the brain that makes one add columns correctly,
and learn the number tables and how to spell words. But these
will come themselves, without a life spent studying them.
After a life of this kind, the soul is not a bit farther
ahead than it was when coming into the world in the body of a
baby.

The brain will also show one the way to make money, perhaps
lots of it, the most terrible thing that can happen to you,
unless, as Whitman says, "you shall scatter with lavish hand
all that you earn or achieve."

15

A MAN'S OWN

The first and general objection to the plan made much of here, that of
educating young minds in small classes with a design toward promoting
the individual expression, is that the millions of our rising race could
not be handled so; in fact, that it is a physical and economic
impossibility.

The second objection is that I have in a sense called my own to me; that
the great mass of children could not be ignited except by an orderly and
imperceptible process, either from within or without. In fact, it has
been said repeatedly that I deal with extraordinary soil. I wish to
place the situation here even more intimately, in order to cover these
and other objections, for I believe they are to be covered in this book.

... In the last days of the building here, when the fireplace of the
study was the only thing we had in the way of a kitchen-range, when the
places of books became repositories for dishes, and the desk a
dining-table--the little afternoon Chapel was of course out of the
question for some weeks.... I used to see The Abbot (longer-legged each
week) making wide circles against the horizon, his head turned this way,
like a bird's in flight. And The Vall