space, are welcomed by the mind as in a
sense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so
that Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal
wisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if
expected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it
assaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation
individual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may please
in their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres to
the thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The
shock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We should
retire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent and
rational thoughts.

[Sidenote: Naturalism sad.]

It is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that while
all the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated with
external things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe material
laws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion of
melancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat
reason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our best
hopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful a
universe? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powers
and for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, while
nature's voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look, act,
and enjoy? And when someone, in protest against such senseless oracular
prejudices, has actually embraced the life and faith of nature and
taught others to look to the natural world for all motives and
sanctions, expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigorate
human life, why have those innocent hopes failed so miserably? Why is
that sensuous optimism we may call Greek, or that industrial optimism we
may call American, such a thin disguise for despair? Why does each melt
away and become a mockery at the first approach of reflection? Why has
man's conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and
reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?

[Sidenote: The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.]

We may answer in the words of Saint Paul: because things seen are
temporal and things not seen are eternal. And we may add, remembering
our analysis of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eternal is the
truly human, that which is akin to the