reeds or hymns or affirmations into the
schools. This driving force which all the great workmen know and bow
before, is above and beyond man-uttered interpretations, above all
separateness, even above anything like a complete expression in matter
as yet. One day the workman realises that he has fashioned something
greater than himself--that he has said or sung or written or painted
something that he did not know he knew, and that his few years of
training in the world did not bring to him. He turns within to do it
again.... I would have the children begin at once to turn within. In awe
and humility, I beg you to believe that as a vast human family, we have
but wet our ankles in an infinite ocean of potentiality designed for our
use; that by giving ourselves to it we become at once significant and
inimitable; that its expression _through us_ cannot be exactly
reproduced by any other instrument; and that if we fail to become
instruments of it, the final harmony must lack our part, which no other
can play.

That which we see by means of an optic nerve is but the stone, but the
pit, of any object, a detached thing, which can be held in mind after
the eye turns away, only by a sensible retaining of memory, as an object
is held in the hand. There is a higher vision--and the word
_imagination_ expresses it almost as well as any other--by which the
thing can be seen, not as a detached object, but in its relation to the
whole.

There is a book on the table. You give it a day or a year. You find your
utmost limitations expanded if it is great enough and you can give
yourself freely enough. This book is no more a mere object upon a board.
Its white lines are as long as the spires of magnetism which stretch up
from the polar centre of the earth to the isolated northern stars.

You have read the book. Its separateness and detachment for you has
ended. That which you held in your hand was but the pit, the stone....
You can read the whole story of the tree in the pit; the whole story of
creation in any stone. The same magnetism that rises in spires from the
poles of the earth and is seen by the optic nerve under certain
conditions of atmosphere, rises from your brow, pours forth from the
finger-ends of man. The actual skull of a human mind is but the centre
of a flame of force, as seen by the truer vision, and the colour and the
beauty of it is determined by its instrumentation of the driving energy
which gives life to all men and