to calculation who
can solve at a glance any new problem in the arithmetic of chances?"

"You evade my question."

"No; but I will adapt my answer the better to your comprehension, for
it is upon this very point that I have sought you. Listen to me!"
Zanoni fixed his eyes earnestly on his listener, and continued: "For the
accomplishment of whatever is great and lofty, the clear perception of
truths is the first requisite,--truths adapted to the object desired.
The warrior thus reduces the chances of battle to combinations almost
of mathematics. He can predict a result, if he can but depend upon
the materials he is forced to employ. At such a loss he can cross that
bridge; in such a time he can reduce that fort. Still more accurately,
for he depends less on material causes than ideas at his command, can
the commander of the purer science or diviner art, if he once perceive
the truths that are in him and around, foretell what he can achieve,
and in what he is condemned to fail. But this perception of truths is
disturbed by many causes,--vanity, passion, fear, indolence in himself,
ignorance of the fitting means without to accomplish what he designs. He
may miscalculate his own forces; he may have no chart of the country
he would invade. It is only in a peculiar state of the mind that it is
capable of perceiving truth; and that state is profound serenity. Your
mind is fevered by a desire for truth: you would compel it to your
embraces; you would ask me to impart to you, without ordeal or
preparation, the grandest secrets that exist in Nature. But truth can no
more be seen by the mind unprepared for it, than the sun can dawn upon
the midst of night. Such a mind receives truth only to pollute it: to
use the simile of one who has wandered near to the secret of the sublime
Goetia (or the magic that lies within Nature, as electricity within the
cloud), 'He who pours water into the muddy well, does but disturb the
mud.'" ("Iamb. de Vit. Pythag.")

"What do you tend to?"

"This: that you have faculties that may attain to surpassing power, that
may rank you among those enchanters who, greater than the magian,
leave behind them an enduring influence, worshipped wherever beauty is
comprehended, wherever the soul is sensible of a higher world than that
in which matter struggles for crude and incomplete existence.

"But to make available those faculties, need I be a prophet to tell you
that you must learn to concentre upon great