goes, rank as a creation, are as essential a factor of the phenomena we see around us, as is the other factor that they shall normally be on too small a scale for us to find it out.  Creations, then, there must be, but they must be so small that practically they are no creations.  We must have a continuity in discontinuity, and a discontinuity in continuity; that is to say, we can only conceive the help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms.  It comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction.  These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for philosophy.  Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—­nor has confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption.  Truly St. Paul said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question “By what faith?” is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its own way both living and saving.

All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is miraculous.  It is the two in one, and at the same time one in two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another shape; yet this fusion—­so easy to think so long as it is not thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it—­is, as it were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of life descend in an impalpable dew.  Granted that all, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into the seen again—­provided we do not look back, and provided also we do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time.  To think is to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed.  We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment we do this we taste of death.