Instinct, like a glow-worm, lights up the depths from which man comes forth, but intelligence casts no light into the boundless expanse on high, wherein it loses itself, just at the point where God begins.--Ah! how mysterious is God! Yes, between the intelligence and man's origin, instinct stretches like a bridge. Between the intelligence and man's end, there is a yawning chasm. The reason cannot cross it. There is no way but to leap. Man finds it easy to imagine what lies below; his own weight draws him down to a point where he can understand it. To understand what is above, it is essential to have a power of lightening one's self, a wing which man has not. Here instinct acts upon the mind in a direction opposed to mental effort. To some minds this faculty of rising sometimes comes, but man's conceptions depend upon his experiences, and the time has passed when reliance was placed upon the "wise men," upon those whose conceptions far outran their experiences. Perhaps it is better so. Perhaps every man ought to form his ideas for himself and no one will know anything _for good and all_ until he has earned the right. Sometimes, for a moment, especially in dreams, but occasionally in his waking hours, man _knows_. He has profound intuition; but nothing is more fleeting than this sudden glimpse of eternity. The best of us are blind men haunted by the memory of a flash of light. Which of us has not known, by personal experience, how a man can fly away from himself? The sense of mystery, scarcely detected, has escaped us, but who has not been conscious of it for a second? Truth, like love, reveals itself for a second only, but we must believe in it--forever. These thoughts are properly presented here, for everything is in everything. One man studies the hyssop, another the oak; Cuvier the mastodon, and Lubbock the ant, but they all arrive at the same point, a point which includes everything. Do you know why the gipsies, Bohemians, gitanos, zincali, zingari, zigeuners, zinganes, tziganes, romani, romichâl,--all different appellations of the same wandering race,--arouse such intense interest on the part of civilized peoples? There are two reasons. The first is, that the gipsy, being very primitive and wild, appears among civilized beings as the image of themselves in the past. It is as if they were our own ghosts. When we see them among us, we amuse ourselves, in the shelter of our established homes, by thinking regretfully that we no longer have before us the broad plains so dear to the beasts we are; that we are no longer in constant contact with the earth, the plants, the animals, which are the _mothers_ that bore us, and whom we love for that reason. They have remained what we were when we left them, and that touches us. The second reason is that they really discovered long ago something of the meaning of life.