Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world,
which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not
to exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters
in unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb human
labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to
make this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward taming
experience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a
weapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature
makes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural life
has still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar
articulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very
act that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her
side or rather in her bosom.

That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point
useful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry,
metaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, or
whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could
find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the
brain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man's apprehension long
before mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for
the objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives,
naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material
world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which
culminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now
familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is
not derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient
concomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.
Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateral
projections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or
the other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to
various ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum
subsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failure
to find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does
not indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of
God--for history proves the contrary--but indicates rather the atrophy
in this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had