I have often thought that the fact that life does not originate in us, but is a thing supplied to us from moment to moment--as the power of the electric current is supplied to the light--accounts for the paradoxical nature of our minds and souls. It is a commonplace that the poet is inspired--that Orpheus was carried away by the god. So also it is a commonplace that the religious person is absorbed in the will of God--as St. Paul said, his own strength was due to his weakness. So also it is a commonplace of modern scientific psychology that unconsciousness accompanies high intellectual activity. Sir Isaac Newton solved his problems by the art he had of putting them off his mind--of committing them to the unconscious. All these are but different aspects of the same truth, and we must regard consciousness as resistance to the current of life. If this be true, it is clear that any wilful attempt to tell the truth must _pro tanto_ defeat itself, for it is only by the surrender of our will that truth becomes effective. This idea, being a universal idea, is illustrated by everything; and the less you try to understand it, the more fully will you understand it. In fact one great difficulty that a child or a man has in learning anything, comes from his trying too hard to understand. Once imagine that our understanding of a thing comes from our ceasing to prevent ourselves from understanding it, and we have the problem in its true form. Accept once for all that all will is illusion, and that the expressive power is something that acts most fully when least impeded by will, and there remains no paradox anywhere. The things we called paradoxes become deductions. Of course St. Paul’s weakness was the foundation of his strength; of course Orpheus was irresponsible; of course the maximum of intellectual power will be the maximum of unimpeded, unconscious activity. And as for our Comic, of course--whatever laughter may be in itself--laughter will be most strongly called forth by anything that merely calls and vanishes. Such things are jokes, burlesques, humor. They state nothing: they assume inaccuracy: they cry aloud and vanish, leaving the hearer to become awakened to his own thoughts. They are mere stimuli--mere gesture and motion, and hence the very truest, very strongest form of human appeal. THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.[C] [C] This was an address delivered before the graduating class at Hobart College in 1900.