ing before the commonplacest, sanest, and simplest
generalisations of human life. In The Great Free Show, in our common
human peep at it, who has not seen them, staggering to know what the
very children, playing with dolls and rocking-horses, can take for
granted? Minds which seem absolutely incapable of striking out, of
taking a good, manly stride on anything, mincing in religion, effeminate
in enthusiasm--please forgive me, Gentle Reader, I know I ought not to
carry on in this fashion, but have I not spent years in my soul
(sometimes it seems hundreds of years) in being humble--in being abject
before this kind of mind? It is only a day almost since I have found it
out, broken away from it, got hold of the sky to hoot at it with. I am
free now. I am not going to be humble longer, before it. I have spent
years dully wondering before this mind; wondering what was the matter
with me that I could not love it, that I could not go where it loved to
go, and come when it said "Come" to me. I have spent years in dust and
ashes before it, struggling with myself, trying to make myself small
enough to follow this kind of a mind around, and now the scales are
fallen from my eyes. When I follow An Inductive Scientific Mind now, or
try to follow it through its convolutions of matter-of-fact, its
involutions of logic, its wriggling through axioms, I smile a new smile
and my heart laughs within me. If I miss the point, I am not in a panic,
and if, at the end of the seventeenth platitude that did not need to be
proved, I find I do not know where I am, I thank God.

I know that I am partly unreasonable, and I know that in my chosen
station on the ridge-pole of the world it is useless to criticise those
who do not even believe, probably, that worlds have ridge-poles. It is a
bit hard to get their attention--and I hope the reader will overlook it
if one seems to speak rather loud--from ridge-poles. Oh, ye children of
The Literal! ye most serene Highnesses, ye archangels of Accuracy, the
Voices of life all challenge you--the world around! What are ye, after
all, but pilers-up of matter, truth-stutterers, truth-spellers, sunk in
protoplasm to the tops of your souls? What is it that you are going to
do with us? How many generations of youths do you want? When will souls
be allowed again? When will they be allowed in college?

Well, well, I say to my soul, what does it all come to? Why all this ado
about it one way or the other? Is it not a gr