oughts that have grasped the same truth, of
two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and
imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and
resident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two
instants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could
not come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold
one object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being
independent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their
burden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this
ideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting
anything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would
open between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely
ideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render
their union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought
there may be rivalry and impact--the two thinkers may compete and
clash--but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does
not love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and
provincial accent. Doctors disagree in so far as they are not truly
doctors, but, as Plato would say, seek, like sophists and wage-earners,
to circumvent and defeat one another. The conflict is physical and can
extend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by
individual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the
intellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The
intellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and
single; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of
perspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant
worlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called
truth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for
mental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations
which converge upon it.

This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not
physical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are
innumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment
and habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or
ideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method
and grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant
in proportion to the constancy in meaning which wor