The categories of imagination are the poet's tools; those of the reason, the implements of the naturalist. The dialectic philosopher is master of both. The tools to those only who can handle them skilfully. All others but gash themselves and their subject, at best. Ask not a man of understanding to solve a problem in metaphysics. He has neither wit, weights, nor scales for the task. But a man of reason or of imagination solves readily the problems of understanding the moment these are fairly stated. Ideas are solvents of all mysteries, whether in matter or mind. 'Tis clear Mind's sphere Is not here; The Ideal guest In ceaseless quest Pursues the Best: The very Better The while her fetter, Her desire Higher, still higher; Ever is fleeing Past Seeming to Being; Nor doth the sight content itself with seeing, As forms emerge they fast from sense are fleeing, Things but appear to vanish into Being. So the Greeks represented thought in their winged god, Hermes, as the father of speech and messenger of intelligence; they conceiving the visible world as a globe of forms, whereby objects of thought were pictured to sense, and held forth to fancy,--a geometry of ideas, a rhetoric of images. Sallying forth into nature, the mind clothes its ideas in fitting images, and thus reflects itself upon the understanding. Things are symbols of thoughts, and nature the mind's dictionary. Mind omnipresent is, All round about us lies, To fashion forth itself In thought and ecstacy, In fancy and surprise, Things with ideas fraught, And nature our dissolving thought. GOETHE. WEDNESDAY, 23. "As good Not write as not be understood." Yet the deepest truths are best read between the lines, and, for the most part, refuse to be written. Who tells all tells falsely. There are untold subtleties in things seen as unseen. Only the idealist touches the core of their secret tenderly, and extracts the mystery; Nature, like the coy Isis, disclosing these to none else. Most edifying is the author who suggests, and leaves to his reader the pleasure and profit of following his thought into its various relations with the whole of things, thus stimulating him to explore matters to their issues. The great masters have observed this fine law, and of modern scholars especially Goethe.