Whitman, is more than a guide-board to
the universe, who deliberately takes time to live in the whole of it,
who becomes a part of the universe to all who live always, who makes the
universe human to us--companionable,--such a man may not be able to fix
a latch on a kitchen door, but I can only say for one that if there is a
man who can lift a universe bodily, and set it down in my front yard
where I can feel it helping me do my work all day and guarding my sleep
at night, that man is practical. Who can say he does not "come to
anything"? To have heard it rumoured that such a man has lived, can
live, is a result--the most practical result of all to most of the
workers of the world. A bare fact about such a man is a gospel. Why work
for nothing (that is, with no result) in a universe where you can play
for nothing--and by playing earn everything?

Such a man is not only practical, serving those who know him by merely
being, but he serves all men always. They will not let him go. He
becomes a part of the structure of the world. The generations keep
flocking to him the way they flock to the great sane silent ministries
of the sky and of the earth. Their being drawn to them is their being
drawn to him. The strength of clouds is in him, and the spirit of
falling water, and he knoweth the way of the wind. When a man can be
said by the way he lives his life to have made himself the companion of
his unborn brothers and of God; when he can be said to have made
himself, not a mere scientist, but a younger brother, a real companion
of air, water, fire, mist, and of the great gentle ground beneath his
feet--he has secured a result.

VI--Reading for Feelings

I

The Passion of Truth

Reading resolves itself sooner or later into two elements in the
reader's mind:

1. Tables of facts. (a) Rows of raw fact; (b) Principles, spiritual or
sum-total facts.

2. Feelings about the facts.

But the Man with the Scientific Method, who lives just around the corner
from me, tells me that reading for feelings is quite out of the question
for a scientific mind. It is foreign to the nature of knowledge to want
knowledge for the feelings that go with it. Feelings get in the way.

I find it impossible not to admit that there is a certain force in this,
but I notice that when the average small scientist, the man around the
corner, for instance, says to me what he is always saying, "Science
requires the elimination of feelings,"--say