The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. It proceeds by the magic of stimulation. A good judge can read a good brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages. If a thing is well put, it is almost our own before it is said. Ideas pass into us so quickly that Plato thought we knew them in a former existence. This is due to the subtlety of our apprehension. We are not satisfied except by an appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more alive. “Rien ne me choque” was Chopin’s highest praise. What wonder, then, that we resent the self-sufficiency of any inferior mind? The whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations, and all the books and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, and telegraph wires are the machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the mind of man. The world has been going on for so long that we have many such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author’s control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven’s Symphonies, with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”--with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, “These things were not made, they were seen.”