Look now for your shadows. O man of
formulae, is this a place for you? Have you fitted the
spirit to a single case? Alas, in the cycle of the ages
when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of
man? Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood
is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows,
tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the
whole carpet leaps and becomes new. Can you or your heart
say more?
*
Indeed, I can see no dishonesty in not avowing a
difference; and especially in these high matters, where we
have all a sufficient assurance that, whoever may be in the
wrong, we ourselves are not completely right.... I know
right well that we are all embarked upon a troublesome
world, the children of one Father, striving in many
essential points to do and to become the same.
*
The word 'facts' is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken
with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and
poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in
bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word 'facts'
in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get
no nearer the principle of their division. What was
essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue. We
could come to no compromise as to what was, or what was
not, important in the life of man. Turn as we pleased, we
all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another
quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along
the sky-line and different constellations overhead.
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