no space between consecutive
thoughts or between the never-ending series of actions. All pack tight,
and mould their surfaces against each other, so that in the long run
there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms of both thoughts
and actions,--just as you find that cylinders crowded all become
hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed into regular
polyhedra.

Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and no
man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by him. So,
to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the layers of
thought, we may consider the mind, as it moves among thoughts or events,
like a circus-rider whirling round with a great troop of horses. He can
mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more or less completely, but he
cannot stop it. So, as I said in another way at the beginning, he can
stride two or three thoughts at once, but not break their steady walk,
trot, or gallop. He can only take his foot from the saddle of one
thought and put it on that of another.

----What is the saddle of a thought? Why, a word, of course.--Twenty
years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to you
through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and round
all that time without a rider.

The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving thought
upon that of another.

----I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are in
contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always _now_ to something.

--I will thank you for the dry toast,--was my answer.

----I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
elsewhere. One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--as
helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an Egyptian
mummy. He then proceeds, with the air and method of a master, to take
off the bandages. Nothing can be neater than the way in which he does
it. But as he takes off layer after layer, the truth seems to grow
smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines begin to look like
something we have seen before. At last, when he has got them all off,
and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it as a diminutive and
familiar acquaintance whom we h