[ak] The portrait of a lonely thinker searching out God has been painted in lively colours, as follows:--"O my friend, you would do me most grievous wrong, if you thought my heart empty of those feelings which make man the standing miracle of Nature. If your child fell into the river, would you stop to tell or think how you loved it, how dear and winsome and precious it was to you, how blank your home and bruised your heart would be without it? Or would you plunge into the stream in utter recklessness of your life, bear it swiftly out of the devouring flood, and then in silence strain the rescued little one to your bosom? Characters differ. It is mine to act, as well as to feel. What, do you imagine, prompts a thinker to give his days and nights to the rescue of man's faith in God, his heart-trust and moral inspiration and spiritual joy, when all these are put in jeopardy by the increase of a knowledge that is but half comprehended, even by those who in their own special lines are nobly increasing it? What lies back of the intense activity of his brain, as he toils over problems that wring the beads from his brow, gives up to the lonely pursuit of truth the hours that might be fertile of the prizes clutched after by the crowd, and turns his back on prizes that even he holds dear? What but a mighty hunger for God can explain this weary, unending search for Him? What else can explain the unthanked effort to make plain a path to Him that no man wants to travel?" American _Index_, Jan. 15, 1874. [178] Butler's Sermons, p. 184 seq. [179] _The Soul, her Sorrows and her Aspirations_, pp. 103, 104. CHAPTER V. PRODUCTION AND ITS LAW. "[Greek: Polla ta deina, kouden anthrôpou deinoteron pelei.]" Sophocles, _Antigone_. "These be the two parts of natural philosophy,--the inquisition of causes, and the production of effects; speculative, and operative; natural science, and natural prudence." Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_. Book II. "The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of _ideal_ affinities, for those only are real), enables the poet to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul. "Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty as his main end; the other Truth," Emerson. _Idealism._ "The question of questions for mankind--the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other--is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world." Huxley. _Man's Place in Nature_, p. 57.