g for myself. I
have thought of having a rubber stamp for this book, a stamp with IT
SEEMS TO ME on it. A good many of these pages need going over with it
afterwards. I do not suppose there is a man living--either I or any
other dogmatist--who would not enjoy more speaking for himself (if
anybody would notice it) than speaking for God. I have a hope that if I
can only hold myself to it on this subject I shall do much better in
speaking for myself, and may speak accidentally for God besides. I leave
it for others to say, but it is hard not to point a little--in a few
places.]

But here is the conviction. As I was going to say, knowledge which comes
to a man with any particular sweep or scope is in the very nature of
things dramatic. If the minds of two men expressing opinions in the dark
could be flashed on a canvas, if there could be such a thing as a
composite photograph of an opinion--a biograph of it,--it would prove to
be, with nine men out of ten, a dissolving view of faces. The unspoken
sides of thought are all dramatic. The palest generalisation a man can
express, if it could be first stretched out into its origins, and then
in its origins could be crowded up and focused, would be found to be a
long unconscious procession of human beings--a murmur of countless
voices. All our knowledge is conceived at first, taken up and organised
in actual men, flashed through the delights of souls and the music of
voices upon our brains. If it is true even in the business of the street
that the greatest efficiency is reached by dealers who mix with the
knowledge of their subject a keen appreciation and mastery of men, it is
still more true of the business of the mind that the greatest, most
natural and comprehensive results are reached through the dramatic or
human insights.

All our knowledge is dead drama. Wisdom is always some old play faded
out, blurred into abstractions. A principle is a wonderful disguised
biograph. The power of Carlyle's _French Revolution_ is that it is a
great spiritual play, a series of pictures and faces.

It was the French Revolution all happening over again to Carlyle, and it
was another French Revolution to every one of his readers. It was
dynamic, an induced current from Paris via Craigenputtock, because it
was dramatic--great abstractions, playing magnificently over great
concretes. Every man in Carlyle's history is a philosophy, and every
abstraction in it a man's face, a beckoning to us. He