It is a great thing for a man to put the whole meaning of his life into a few paragraphs, if he does it so that others can make anything out of it.  If he conveys his wisdom after the fashion of the old alchemists, he may as well let it alone.  He must talk in very plain words, and that is what I have done.  You want to know what a certain number of scores of years have taught me that I think best worth telling.  If I had half a dozen square inches of paper, and one penful of ink, and five minutes to use them in for the instruction of those who come after me, what should I put down in writing?  That is the question.

Perhaps I should be wiser if I refused to attempt any such brief statement of the most valuable lesson that life has taught me.  I am by no means sure that I had not better draw my pen through the page that holds the quintessence of my vital experiences, and leave those who wish to know what it is to distil to themselves from my many printed pages.  But I have excited your curiosity, and I see that you are impatient to hear what the wisdom, or the folly, it may be, of a life shows for, when it is crowded into a few lines as the fragrance of a gardenful of roses is concentrated in a few drops of perfume.

—­By this time I confess I was myself a little excited.  What was he going to tell us?  The Young Astronomer looked upon him with an eye as clear and steady and brilliant as the evening star, but I could see that he too was a little nervous, wondering what would come next.

The old Master adjusted his large round spectacles, and began: 

—­It has cost me fifty years to find my place in the Order of Things.  I had explored all the sciences; I had studied the literature of all ages; I had travelled in many lands; I had learned how to follow the working of thought in men and of sentiment and instinct in women.  I had examined for myself all the religions that could make out any claim for themselves.  I had fasted and prayed with the monks of a lonely convent; I had mingled with the crowds that shouted glory at camp-meetings; I had listened to the threats of Calvinists and the promises of Universalists; I had been a devout attendant on a Jewish Synagogue; I was in correspondence with an intelligent Buddhist; and I met frequently with the inner circle of Rationalists, who believed in the persistence of Force, and the identity of alimentary substances with virtue, and were reconstructing the universe on this basis, with absolute exclusion of all Supernumeraries.  In these pursuits I had passed the larger part of my half-century of existence, as yet with little satisfaction.  It was on the morning of my fiftieth birthday that the solution of the great problem I had sought so long came to me as a simple formula, with a few grand but obvious inferences.  I will repeat the substance of this final intuition: 

The one central fact an the Order of Things which solves all questions is: