And why?

Because Analysis can only explain to you a little about dead things, like stones—­inorganic things as they are called.  Living things—­organisms, as they are called—­he cannot explain to you at all.  When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the golden eggs.  He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead stuff of the flower.

And therefore he will never do anything but fail, when he tries to find out the life in things.  How can he, when he has to take the life out of them first?  He could not even find out how a plum-pudding is made by merely analysing it.  He might part the sugar, and the flour, and the suet; he might even (for he is very clever, and very patient too, the more honour to him) take every atom of sugar out of the flour with which it had got mixed, and every atom of brown colour which had got out of the plums and currants into the body of the pudding, and then, for aught I know, put the colouring matter back again into the plums and currants; and then, for aught I know, turn the boiled pudding into a raw one again,—­for he is a great conjurer, as Madam How’s grandson is bound to be:  but yet he would never find out how the pudding was made, unless some one told him the great secret which the sailors in the old story forgot—­that the cook boiled it in a cloth.

This is Analysis’s weak point—­don’t let it be yours—­that in all his calculations he is apt to forget the cloth, and indeed the cook likewise.  No doubt he can analyse the matter of things:  but he will keep forgetting that he cannot analyse their form.

Do I mean their shape?

No, my child; no.  I mean something which makes the shape of things, and the matter of them likewise, but which folks have lost sight of nowadays, and do not seem likely to get sight of again for a few hundred years.  So I suppose that you need not trouble your head about it, but may just follow the fashions as long as they last.

About this piece of lime, however, Analysis can tell us a great deal.  And we may trust what he says, and believe that he understands what he says.

Why?

Think now.  If you took your watch to pieces, you would probably spoil it for ever; you would have perhaps broken, and certainly mislaid, some of the bits; and not even a watchmaker could put it together again.  You would have analysed the watch wrongly.  But if a watchmaker took it to pieces then any other watchmaker could put it together again to go as well as ever, because they both understand the works, how they fit into each other, and what the use and the power of each is.  Its being put together again rightly would be a proof that it had been taken to pieces rightly.

And so with Master Analysis.  If he can take a thing to pieces so that his brother Synthesis can put it together again, you may be sure that he has done his work rightly.