Euryalus, is it the gods who put this fire on our minds |
Or is it that each man's restless longing becomes a god to him. (Vigil)

It is presumed that every person living has such a share of vanity to be hurt by remarks of slight and contempt. Every person does not pretend to be a poet, a mathematician or a states person, and considered as such; but every person wishes to be seen to have common sense, and to fill his place in the world with his or her conception of common decency; and consequently does not easily forgive that which seems to call to question or utterly deny both of these perceptions.

Do we think we think with our brains? Could our thoughts only be memory to assist us when travelling familiar paths? Could every object in nature be only a group of words to signify some belief of the mind? What then when the belief is not yet put into words, and we look at the grand impression the stars and heavenly bodies make on us. Does our reverence signify our inability to comprehend, and overwhelm us with such majesty?

It appears that when we converse with thoughts, they exist as transparent forces. The thought which was in the world, part and parcel of the world, has disengaged itself and taken an independent existence.

The student of nature should learn to appreciate the miracle of the mind, begin to learn its subtle but immense power. He then should experience, that in seeing with no tradition, he may find his own truth and see the source of tradition.

If he finds at first with some alarm how impossible it is to accept many things that tradition insists on his believing, he may find he will be armed by his insight and will be brave enough to meet all inconvenience and resistance.

But there is another hindrance, namely practicality. Each must have a special talent, and bring something to pass; must do something excellent, have a certain adoration towards action and knowledge. In fact we have to say that there is a certain radiance to which we all are entitled, demonstrated in different degrees, which is the perfection of our nature.

What is life but an angle of vision? Are we measured by the angle at which we look at objects? What is life but what each is thinking all day? Is this our fate and employer? Is knowledge the measure of every person? Is how much we know, how much we are?

The wonder of the intellect is such that it brings out the subtlety and immensity of life objects. We have so many guides and so many failures. We study the comprehension of the eyes instead of what the eyes see.

The direction of the intellectual powers is from within outward, and that, just in proportion to the activity of thoughts on the study of outward objects, of human nature, of history, etc. In direct proportion to the application, is the healthy growth of the faculties of the mind. Can the study in the opposite direction have damaging effects on the mind? Does our attempt to understand our direction and inspiration defeat us? Is it true that looking within cannot improve our life because we are trapped in the sphere of our own experience?

Is our experience relived opening any new doors? Does the skill for living come from looking and experiencing information on world terms? Do we find that in comprehending the inability to understand the complexity of our environment we find a key of understanding?

It is not the logic but the power, if any, which it brings into science. Someone who can humanise this logic with deductive reasoning, and give results is what is needed. We need the competent individuals who value pure geometry and build suspension bridges across the crevice with arches and abutments of pure reason.

The power behind the philosophy of the mind is apparent in the end use. It is the alert that know the laws of this wonderful power, that domesticate it, use it, and observe its rising and settings with curiosity, that learn to live with it wisely.

Wisdom is an eternal sea, which ebbs and flows, which surges and washes carrying its whole virtue into every creek and inlet which it bathes. To this sea every house has a water front. But this force, creating nature, visits only when invited by those who have made accommodation, making day when it comes and leaving night when it departs. It is no property of man or angel. It blankets everyone with its entirety on the same terms.

To be, is the unsolved, not solvable wonder. To be, in its two connections of inward and outward, the mind and nature. In thought, we seem to stand on the bank of a river and watch the endless flow of the stream, floating objects of all shapes colours and natures; we can't detain them as they pass, except by running beside them a little way along the bank. From where they come or where they go is out of our control.

We suspect that as every river makes its own valley, so does this mystic stream. It makes its valley, its banks and perhaps the observer also. Who has drafted the chart of its channel?

Leaving aside the question of what came first, the chicken or the egg, could it be possible that the power behind the intellect is the Creator of the world, and is ever creating? The mind makes the senses it sees with. The genius of man is a continuation of the power that made him, and has not finished making him.

We dare not deal with this element in its pure essence. It is too rare for the wings of words. Yet we see the power behind the intellect as a science of degrees, and that as man is conscious of the laws of plant and animal nature, he is also aware of an intellect which overhangs his consciousness like the sky, of degree above degree, of heaven within heaven.

Every just thinker has attempted to indicate these degrees, these steps on the heavenly stair, until he comes to the height where language fails him. Above the intellect and thought is a higher truth, truth as yet undomesticated and therefore not formulated.

There are minds that produce their thoughts as complete men, like armed soldiers ready and swift to go out and conquer all the armies of error. There are others that deposit their unripe thoughts here and there for a time, to be brooded in other minds, sometimes for years and decades of years to begin again with new individuals.

They take to themselves solid, liquid, air, and their absence to become ships, cities, nations and servants. Also, the thought buries itself in new thoughts of larger scope and the old is recomposed into something new.

There is in nature a parallel unity which corresponds to the unity of the mind and makes it available. This method meets no resistance in its attempts; the mind attempts to make scattered blocks form a symmetrical structure. The design that follows brings joy. It is not only that man puts things in a row, but things belong in a row. However, it is that we may conceive this wonderful world made of bricks, it is necessary to suppose that each hose in nature fits a hydrant. Without this identity as a basis, chaos should be everywhere.

And as mind, our mind or a mind like ours, reappears to us in our study of nature, nature being everywhere formed after a method which we can well understand. Therefore our own organisation is a perpetual key, and a well ordered mind brings to the study of every new fact or class of facts, a certain divine wisdom.

We should remain aware that the reduction of a few laws into one law is not a choice of the individual, it is the dictatorship instinct of the mind. There is no solitary flower and no solitary thought. A thought comes single like a foreign traveller, but find out its surname and it is related to a powerful and numerous family. Wonderful is their working and relation each to each. Every new thought modifies and interprets old problems. The retrospective value of each new thought is immense, like a spark applied to a meandering arrangement of gunpowder.

Each should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across the mind from within. In every work of genius we recognise our own rejected thoughts and wonder why we had dismissed it because it was ours. We must learn to keep with our spontaneous impressions with good humoured flexibility, or be forced into shame to take our own opinion from another.

Everyone is relieved and happy when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver.

Each must also be a nonconformist. Nothing in a lifetime is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Forgive yourself to yourself for no law is sacred to you but the law of your own nature. How can you function in the presence of opposition if you oppose some part of yourself. For truth is handsomer than the affection of love. Goodness must have some edge to it, to have substance . . . I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the assurance of my fellows any second testimony.

I must do what concerns me, not what people think. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the person with substance is one who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Do your work and all shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself. Most people have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to a community of opinions. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.