sunshine in the happy heart!  Common as 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 merely in the sensuous but in every sphere of our consciousness, the mind simplifies its experience, compacts its knowledge, and economizes its energies.  To this work it brings, also, the method of experiment.  It then interferes arbitrarily with the natural occurrence of facts, and brings that to pass which otherwise would not have been; and this method it uses to investigate, to illustrate what was previously known, and to confirm what was surmised.  Its end, whether through observation or experiment, is to reach general truth as opposed to matter-of-fact, universals more or less embracing as opposed to particulars, the units of thought as opposed to the units of phenomena.  The body of these constitutes rational knowledge.