tells them to go away, but they
keep coming back. Apropos of nothing, in the way of everything, they
keep hanging about while he attends to the regular business of his
brain, and say: "Why don't you do something with Me?"

What I would like to be permitted to do in this chapter is to say a good
word for these involuntary, helpless, wistful facts that keep tagging a
man's mind around. I know that I am exposing myself in standing up for
them to the accusation that I have a mere irrelevant, sideways,
intellectually unbusinesslike sort of a mind. I can see my championship
even now being gently but firmly set one side. "It's all of a
piece--this pleasant, yielding way with ideas," people say. "It goes
with the slovenly, lazy, useless, polite state of mind always, and the
general ball-bearing view of life."

It seems to me that if a man has a few involuntary, instinctive facts
about him, facts that fasten themselves on to his thoughts whether he
wants them there or not, facts that keep on working for him of their own
accord, down under the floor of his mind, passing things up, running
invisible errands for him, making short-cuts for him--it seems to me
that if a man has a few facts like this in him, facts that serve him
like the great involuntary servants of Nature, whether they are noticed
or not, he ought to find it worth his while to do something in return,
conduct his life with reference to them. They ought to have the main
chance at him. It seems reasonable also that his reading should be
conducted with reference to them.

It is no mere literary prejudice, and it seems to be a truth for the
scientist as well as for the poet, that the great involuntary facts in a
man's life, the facts he does not select, the facts that select him, the
facts that say to him, "Come thou and live with us, make a human life
out of us that men may know us," are the facts of all others which ought
to have their way sooner or later in the great struggling mass-meeting
of his mind. I have read equally in vain the lives of the great
scientists and the lives of the great artists and makers, if they are
not all alike in this, that certain great facts have been yielded to,
have been made the presiding officers, the organisers of their minds. In
so far as they have been great, no facts have been suppressed and all
facts have been represented; but I doubt if there has ever been a life
of a powerful mind yet in which a few great facts and a great man