s light is love, sang Shelley; and equally common with beauty and truth
and love is all that is most vital to the soul, all that feeds it and
gives it power; if aught be lacking, it is the eye to see and the heart
to understand. Grain, fruit and vegetable, wool, silk and cotton, gold,
silver and iron, steam and electricity,--were not all, like the spark,
within arm's reach of savage man? The slow material progress of mankind
through ages is paralleled by the slow growth of the individual soul in
laying hold of and putting to use the resources of spiritual strength
that are nigh unto it. The service of man to man in the ways of the
spirit is, in truth, an act as simple as the giving of a cup of cold
water to him who is athirst.

Can there be any surprise when I say that the method of idealism is that
of all thought? that in its intellectual process the art of the poet, so
far from being a sort of incantation, is the same as belongs to the
logician, the chemist, the statesman? It is no more than to say that in
creating literature the mind acts; the action of the mind is thought;
and there are no more two ways of thinking than there are two kinds of
gravitation. Experience is the matter of all knowledge. It is given to
the mind as a complex of particular facts, a series, ever continuing, of
impressions outward and inward. It is stored in the memory, and were
memory the only mental faculty, no other knowledge than this of
particular facts in their temporal sequence could be acquired; the sole
method of obtaining knowledge would be by observation. All literature
would then be merely annals of the contents of successive moments in
their order. Reason, however, intervenes. Its process is well known. In
every object of perception, as it exists in the physical world and is
given by sensation to our consciousness, there is both in itself and in
its relations a likeness to other objects and relations, and this
likeness the mind takes notice of; it thus analyzes the complex of
experience, discerns the common element, and by this means classifies
particular facts, thereby condensing them into mental conceptions,--
abstract ideas, formulas, laws. The mind arrives at these in the
course of its normal operation. As soon as we think at all, we speak
of white and black, of bird and beast, of distance and size,--of
uniformities in the behaviour of nature, or laws; by such classification
of qualities, objects, and various relations, not mer