And how may you know that you have reached to Philosophy?  You touch her skirts when you share her hatred of the sham decent, her derision of sentimentalism.  You are one with her when—­but I would not have you a thousand years older!  Get to her, if in no other way, by the sentimental route:—­that very winding path, which again and again brings you round to the point of original impetus, where you have to be unwound for another whirl; your point of original impetus being the grossly material, not at all the spiritual.  It is most true that sentimentalism springs from the former, merely and badly aping the latter,—­fine flower, or pinnacle flame-spire, of sensualism that it is, could it do other? and accompanying the former it traverses tracts of desert here and there couching in a garden, catching with one hand at fruits, with another at colours; imagining a secret ahead, and goaded by an appetite, sustained by sheer gratifications.  Fiddle in harmonics as it may, it will have these gratifications at all costs.  Should none be discoverable, at once you are at the Cave of Despair, beneath the funereal orb of Glaucoma, in the thick midst of poniarded, slit-throat, rope-dependant figures, placarded across the bosom Disillusioned, Infidel, Agnostic, Miserrimus.  That is the sentimental route to advancement.  Spirituality does not light it; evanescent dreams:  are its oil-lamps, often with wick askant in the socket.

A thousand years!  You may count full many a thousand by this route before you are one with divine Philosophy.  Whereas a single flight of brains will reach and embrace her; give you the savour of Truth, the right use of the senses, Reality’s infinite sweetness; for these things are in philosophy; and the fiction which is the summary of actual Life, the within and without of us, is, prose or verse, plodding or soaring, philosophy’s elect handmaiden.  To such an end let us bend our aim to work, knowing that every form of labour, even this flimsiest, as you esteem it, should minister to growth.  If in any branch of us we fail in growth, there is, you are aware, an unfailing aboriginal democratic old monster that waits to pull us down; certainly the branch, possibly the tree; and for the welfare of Life we fall.  You are acutely conscious of yonder old monster when he is mouthing at you in politics.  Be wary of him in the heart; especially be wary of the disrelish of brainstuff.  You must feed on something.  Matter that is not nourishing to brains can help to constitute nothing but the bodies which are pitched on rubbish heaps.  Brainstuff is not lean stuff;—­the brainstuff of fiction is internal history, and to suppose it dull is the profoundest of errors; how deep, you will understand when I tell you that it is the very football of the holiday-afternoon imps below.  They kick it for pastime; they are intelligences perverted.  The comic of it, the adventurous, the tragic, they make devilish, to kindle their Ogygian hilarity.  But—­sharply