, inviting our contemplation perpetually,
but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too
arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its
way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that
transition: for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of
the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture,
a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild
birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with
wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of
the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they
have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world
of morning-glory; where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger,
and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of
life.

There will be many who feel a certain scepticism as to the
possibility of the undertaking here suggested to them; a prudent
unwillingness to sacrifice their old comfortably upholstered
universe, on the mere promise that they will receive a new
heaven and a new earth in exchange. These careful ones may like
to remind themselves that the vision of the world presented to us
by all the great artists and poets--those creatures whose very
existence would seem so strange to us, were we not accustomed
to them--perpetually demonstrates the many-graded character of
human consciousness; the new worlds which await it, once it
frees itself from the tyranny of those labour-saving contrivances
with which it usually works. Leaving on one side the more subtle
apprehensions which we call "spiritual," even the pictures of the
old Chinese draughtsmen and the modern impressionists, of
Watteau and of Turner, of Manet, Degas, and Cezanne; the
poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman--these, and
countless others, assure you that their creators have enjoyed
direct communion, not with some vague world of fancy, but with
a visible natural order which you have never known. These have
seized and woven into their pictures strands which never
presented themselves to you; significant forms which elude you,
tones and relations to which you are blind, living facts for which
your conventional world provides no place. They prove by their
works that Blake was right when he said that "a fool sees not the
same tree that a wise man sees"; and that psychologists, insisting
on the selective action of the mind, the fact that our preconceptions
govern the char