Now it is with this "main miracle," that I am I, and you, you--with this personality, that my first train of thought will busy itself; and I shall try to show by several concrete illustrations from the lines and between the lines of Æschylus and Plato and the like writers, compared with several modern writers, how feeble the sense and influence of it is in their time as contrasted with ours. In my second line of development, I shall call your attention to what seems to me a very remarkable and suggestive fact: to-wit, that Physical Science, Music, and the Novel, all take their rise at the same time; of course, I mean what we moderns call science, music, and the novel. For example, if we select, for the sake of well-known representative names, Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Sebastian Bach (1685), and Samuel Richardson (1689), the first standing for the rise of modern science, the second for the rise of modern music, the third for the rise of the modern novel, and observe that these three men are born within fifty years of each other, we cannot fail to find ourselves in the midst of a thousand surprising suggestions and inferences. For in our sweeping arc from Æschylus to the present time, fifty years subtend scarcely any space; we may say then these men are born together. And here the word accident has no meaning. Time, progress, then, have no accident. Now in this second train of thought I shall endeavor to connect these phenomena with the principle of personality developed in the first train, and shall try to show that this science, music, and the novel, are flowerings-out of that principle in various directions; for instance, each man in this growth of personality feeling himself in direct and personal relations with physical nature (not in relations obscured by the vague intermediary, hamadryads and forms of the Greek system), a general desire to know the exact truth about nature arises; and this desire carried to a certain enthusiasm in the nature of given men--behold the man of science; a similar feeling of direct personal relation to the Unknown, acting similarly upon particular men,--behold the musician, and the ever-increasing tendency of the modern to worship God in terms of music; likewise, a similar feeling of direct personal relation to each individual member of humanity, high or low, rich or poor, acting similarly, gives us such a novel as the _Mill on the Floss_, for instance, when for a long time we find ourselves interested in two mere children--Tom and Maggie Tulliver--or such novels as those of Dickens and his fellow-host who have called upon our human relation to poor, unheroic people.