ead on and on, till I
reached the end. Then I began the 'Symposium;' and the sun was shining
on the shrubs outside the ground floor on which I slept before I shut
the book up. I have related these unimportant details because that
night was one of the most important nights of my life.... Here in the
'Phaedrus' and the 'Symposium,' in the 'Myth of the Soul,' I discovered
the revelation I had been waiting for, the consecration of a
long-cherished idealism. It was just as though the voice of my own
soul spoke to me through Plato. Harrow vanished into unreality. I had
touched solid ground. Here was the poetry, the philosophy of my own
enthusiasm, expressed with all the magic of unrivalled style." The
experience recorded in these words is typical; it comes to every one
who has the capacity for the highest form of enjoyment and the highest
kind of growth. It was an experience which was both emotional and
spiritual; delight and expansion were involved in it; the joy of
contact with something beautiful, and the sudden enlargement which
comes from touch with a great nature dealing with fundamental truth.
In every experience of this kind there comes an access of life, as if
one had drunk at a fountain of vitality.

A thrilling chapter in the spiritual history of the race might be
written by bringing together the reports of such experiences which are
to be found in almost all literatures,--experiences which vary greatly
in depth and significance, which have in common the unfailing interest
of discovery and growth. If this collocation of vital contacts could
be expanded so as to include the history of the intellectual commerce
of races, we should be able to read the story of humanity in a new and
searching light. For the transmission of Greek thought and beauty to
the Oriental world, the wide diffusion of Hebrew ideas of man and his
life, the contact of the modern with the antique world in the
Renaissance, for instance, effected changes in the spiritual
constitution of man more subtle, pervasive, and radical than we are
yet in a position to understand. The spiritual history of men is
largely a history of discovery,--the record of those fruitful moments
when we come upon new things, and our ideas are swiftly or slowly
expanded to include them. That process is generally both rapid and
continuous; the discovery of this continent made an instant and
striking impression on the older world, but that older world has not
yet entirely adjus