rtist's. The main difference between the scientific
and the artistic method of selection seems to be that the scientist does
his selecting all at once and when he selects his career, and the artist
makes selecting the entire business of every moment of his life. The
scientist of the average sort begins by partitioning the universe off
into topics. Having selected his topic and walled himself in with it, he
develops it by walling the rest of the universe out. The poet (who is
almost always a specialist also, a special kind of poet), having
selected his specialty, develops it by letting all the universe in. He
spends his time in making his life a cross section of the universe. The
spirit of the whole of it, something of everything in it, is represented
in everything he does. Whatever his specialty may be in poetry,
painting, or literature, he produces an eternal result by massing the
infinite and eternal into the result. He succeeds by bringing the
universe to a point, by accumulating out of all things--himself. It is
the tendency of the scientist to produce results by dividing the
universe and by subdividing himself. Unless he is a very great scientist
he accepts it as the logic of his method that he should do this. His
individual results are small results and he makes himself professedly
small to get them.

All questions with regard to the reading habit narrow themselves down at
last: "Is the Book to be divided for the Man, or is the Man to be
divided for the Book? Shall a man so read as to lose his soul in a
subject, or shall he so read that the subject Loses itself in
him--becomes a part of him?" The main fact about our present education
is that it is the man who is getting lost. And not only is every man
getting lost to himself, but all men are eagerly engaged in getting lost
to each other. The dead level of intelligence, being a dead level in a
literal sense, is a spiritless level--a mere grading down and grading up
of appearances. In all that pertains to real knowledge of the things
that people appear to know, greater heights and depths of difference in
human lives are revealed to-day than in almost any age of the world.
What with our steam-engines (machines for our hands and feet) and our
sciences (machines for our souls) we have arrived at such an
extraordinary division of labour, both of body and mind, that people of
the same classes are farther apart than they used to be in different
classes. Lawyers, for insta