This, as I have said, is Nature’s way of giving to our investments in life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body, soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily returns to him year by year--not detached portions of his original outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between man’s energy and Nature’s, something new arises. And yet, though new, it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his, partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association. All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage--of the way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy. This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very little of human about them. The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two make--not two twos but four, which is, in fact, a fresh concept; and the mind that can embrace so much--the idea of four as a number with an identity of its own has already raised itself above the lowest level of savagery. In that mind something has begun out of which the social idea may presently be developed; for the man who has conceived the number four will presently be identifying his new concept with a variety of correspondencies under fresh aspects: he will discover that certain animals have four legs, whereas, until then, his view of them was rather that of the child who said that a horse had two legs in front, two legs behind, and two at each side--a statement which shows, indeed, that the horse has been earnestly considered from as many points of view as are sometimes necessary to enable a Cabinet Minister to make up his mind, but, for all that, never as a whole; and in such a mind, though the identity of the horse may be established from whatever point of view he presents himself, the thought of the horse, as a being of harmoniously related parts, having order and species, has not yet been established. Until a man can count, and sum up the results of his counting in synthesis, Nature is composed merely of a series of units--and the mind cannot begin that grouping and defining process which leads to association and from that to the development of the social idea. You will remember in _Alice through the Looking Glass_, when the two Queens set to work to test her educational proficiency--you will remember how the White Queen says (in order to discover whether Alice can do addition) “What’s one, and one, and one, and one, and one, and one?”