instead of mastering
such of the facts they met with as could be captured easily-which facts
would have betrayed the hiding-places of others, and these again of
others, and so ad infinitum-they overlooked what was within their reach,
and followed hotly through brier and brake after an imaginary greater
prize.

Great thoughts are not to be caught in this way. They must present
themselves for capture of their own free will, or be taken after a
little coyness only. They are like wealth and power, which, if a man
is not born to them, are the more likely to take him, the more he has
restrained himself from an attempt to snatch them. They hanker after
those only who have tamed their nearer thoughts. Nevertheless, it is
impossible not to feel that the early Pantheists were true prophets and
seers, though the things were unknown to them without which a complete
view was unattainable. What does Linus mean, we ask ourselves, when he
says:--"One sole energy governs all things"? How can one sole energy
govern, we will say, the reader and the chair on which he sits? What
is meant by an energy governing a chair? If by an effort we have made
ourselves believe we understand something which can be better expressed
by these words than by any others, no sooner do we turn our backs than
the ideas so painfully collected fly apart again. No matter how often we
go in search of them, and force them into juxtaposition, they prove to
have none of that innate coherent power with which ideas combine that we
can hold as true and profitable.

Yet if Linus had confined his statement to living things, and had said
that one sole energy governed all plants and animals, he would have come
near both to being intelligible and true. For if, as we now believe,
all animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must be
considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like
animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and
the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old
is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown.
This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made to appear simpler
presently.

When Linus says, "All things are unity, and each portion is All; for of
one integer all things were born," it is impossible for plain people-who
do not wish to use words unless they mean the same things by them as
both they and others have been in the habit of meaning-t