believe, after all, that it is humanity in a
scientist, and not a kind of professional inhumanity in him, which makes
him a scientist in the great sense--a seer of matter. The great
scientist is a man who communes with matter, not around his human
spirit, but through it.

The small scientist, violating nature inside himself to understand it
outside himself, misses the point.

At all events if a man who has locked himself out of his own soul goes
around the world and cannot find God's in it, he does not prove
anything. The man who finds a God proves quite as much. And he has his
God besides.

II

Topical Point of View

If it is true that reading resolves itself sooner or later into two
elements in the reader's mind, tables of facts and feelings about the
facts, that is, rows of raw fact, and spiritualised or related facts,
several things follow. The most important of them is one's definition of
education. The man who can get the greatest amount of feeling out of the
smallest number and the greatest variety of facts is the greatest and
most educated man--comes nearest to living an infinite life. The purpose
of education in books would seem to be to make every man as near to this
great or semi-infinite man as he can be made.

If men were capable of becoming infinite by sitting in a library long
enough, the education-problem would soon take care of itself. There is
no front or side door to the infinite. It is all doors. And if the mere
taking time enough would do it, one could read one's way into the
infinite as easily as if it were anything else. One can hardly miss it.
One could begin anywhere. There would be nothing to do but to proceed at
once to read all the facts and have all the feelings about the facts and
enjoy them forever. The main difficulty one comes to, in being infinite,
is that there is not time, but inasmuch as great men or semi-infinite
men have all had to contend with this same difficulty quite as much as
the rest of us, it would seem that in getting as many of the infinite
facts, and having as many infinite feelings about the facts, as they do,
great men must employ some principle of economy or selection, that
common, that is, artificial men, are apt to overlook.

There seem to be two main principles of economy open to great men and to
all of us, in the acquiring of knowledge. One of these, as has been
suggested, may be called the scientist's principle of economy, and the
other the poet's or a