Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to see everything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a different principle.  He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personal peculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies.  It is as difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish without developing a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if they were the latest article of personal adornment.  But if a fish is to be approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome.  The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop off his legs.  And similarly the student of birds will eliminate his arms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove all his teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fears of jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarming extent.  It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and all its natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, is rather an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate things as they should be appreciated.  We do actually go through a process of mental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish to feel the abounding good in all things.  It is good for us at certain times that ourselves should be like a mere window—­as clear, as luminous, and as invisible.

In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, it is stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude.  Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are—­of immeasurable stature.  That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature.  But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.  Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not have dared to dream.  These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small.  Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller.  World after world falls from him into insignificance; the whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is