The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_ which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_ with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast, when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the heart, like the following?-- Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave. What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,) and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be detached as actions.[167] Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes. The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out, just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished. * * * * * Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded up.