So truth and law, reality and righteousness, expressions of the thought and will of God, are the everlasting facts to which man is to adjust his intellect and will, if he is to cross the oceans, travel the continents, and claim the possessions which in the universe belong to him. If he misreads the facts, he will of course misread the laws which govern the facts, and will thus be unable to get facts or laws to serve him. But clearly seeing the truth of things, he is able to avail himself of the laws of things. As long as he only saw things in the lump, and looked upon the world as so much air and earth and fire and water, he missed the subtle laws which regulate the atomic and molecular structure of bodies, and failed to make them his servants. When, by the aid of observation and experiment, he reduced the earth to its ultimate particles and came to such knowledge of it as corresponded to the facts of it; when he came to see the laws and drift of things, the tendencies and affinities of things; he had only to put the productions of his will in line with the way things were going, to have them serve him. Seeing that forces have power to do work in proportion to their energy of position, and applying this insight to the river with forty feet fall, he builds his mill beside it and thus utilizes it to grind his wheat. Seeing what soil and sunlight and rain can do when they combine to unwrap the life in a seed, he commits his wheat to their benevolent tendencies and gets a harvest of twenty bushels for every one he seems to lose. He studies fire. He sees it wrap in flame and level in an hour fortunes it took a lifetime to accumulate. He learns what a furious and awful force it is. He gets insight into its real nature. He gets knowledge of it that corresponds to the reality of it. He sees that it is only a flaming and lurid method of movement. With the truth of it he gets the law of it. So by the aid of volition, put forth in accordance with intelligence, he contrives a machine corresponding to the laws of heat, as a mode of motion. In this way he utilizes the heat that burned up his cities, to transport him in ease and comfort over the country. He studies the stars until his knowledge of them corresponds to them as they are; along with this knowledge, he comes to an understanding of their laws, their uniform methods of action. Then he builds his great ships and commits them to the wild and storm-tossed sea, sure that his power to guide them will never fail as long as law and order remain in the heavens.