And they are all disintegrating, so they take to psychic tricks. It is a certain sign of the disintegration of the psyche in a man, and much more so in a woman, when she takes to spiritualism, and table-rapping, and occult messages, or witchcraft and supernatural powers of that sort. When men want to be supernatural, be sure that something has gone wrong in their natural stuff. More so, even, with a woman. And yet the soul has its own profound subtleties of knowing. And the blood has its strange omniscience. But this isn't impudent and materialistic, like spiritualism and magic and all that range of pretentious supernaturalism. IX. DANA'S "TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST" You can't idealize brute labour. That is to say, you can't idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist. You can't idealize brute labour. That is to say, you can't idealize brute labour, without coming undone, as an idealist. The soil! The great ideal of the soil. Novels like Thomas Hardy's and pictures like the Frenchman Millet's. The soil. What happens when you idealize the soil, the mother-earth, and really go back to it? Then with overwhelming conviction it is borne in upon you, as it was upon Thomas Hardy, that the whole scheme of things is against you. The whole massive rolling of natural fate is coming down on you like a slow glacier, to crush you to extinction. As an idealist. Thomas Hardy's pessimism is an absolutely true finding. It is the absolutely true statement of the idealist's last realization, as he wrestles with the bitter soil of beloved mother-earth. He loves her, loves her, loves her. And she just entangles and crushes him like a slow Laocoön snake. The idealist must perish, says mother earth. Then let him perish. The great imaginative love of the soil itself! Tolstoi had it, and Thomas Hardy. And both are driven to a kind of fanatic denial of life, as a result. You can't idealize mother earth. You can try. You can even succeed. But succeeding, you succumb. She will have no pure idealist sons. None. If you are a child of mother earth, you must learn to discard your ideal self, in season, as you discard your clothes at night. Americans have never loved the soil of America as Europeans have loved the soil of Europe. America has never been a blood-home-land. Only an ideal home-land. The home-land of the idea, of the _spirit._ And of the pocket. Not of the blood. That has yet to come, when the idea and the spirit have collapsed from their false tyranny. Europe has been loved with a blood love. That has made it beautiful. In America, you have Fenimore Cooper's beautiful landscape: but that is wish-fulfilment, done from a distance. And you have Thoreau in Concord. But Thoreau sort of isolated his own bit of locality and put it under a lens, to examine it. He almost anatomized it, with his admiration. America isn't a blood-home-land. For every American, the blood-home-land is Europe. The spirit home-land is America.