“‘There are few who have the time or taste for any deep philosophic study. There are fewer still who have any faith in the outcome of such study, and of these few but a handful who get started on the right road and persist until they attain results. Moreover, as truly in philosophy as in religion must one be “born again”; and, unlike religious birth, it cannot be instantaneous, for it is not a matter of will. It takes years to bring about this new and deeper insight. “‘I rarely find a person whom I would advise to study philosophy, for here, if anywhere, a little learning is a dangerous thing, and one is maddened by the superficial talk of those who have not learned its a-b-c, but yet presume to argue as if they had mastered everything from Aristotle to Schelling. I have come to find that there are very few people who even dream of what philosophy is. The average man fancies that speculative philosophy must be simply guess-work or some vague theorizing, unworthy of a Christian man who has any practical work to do in this world in the way of earning his living and helping to hasten the kingdom of God. “‘But the average Christian is largely materialistic in his thought. His heaven, his hell, are localities; his God a huge, anthropomorphic being, and the universe a kind of vast machine, guided by some external Power; or a sort of precipitate or sediment, as it were, of the eternal thought. “‘If this is true of a man who professes and in some measure accepts a real spiritual faith, how much more true is it of the average worldly man of common sense! He looks upon the ground he walks on as something real. It is something that appeals to his senses, and he smiles with calm contempt if you tell him that an idea is far more real than the earth beneath his foot; that it is thought, and thought alone, that sustains this planet; and that all the things that he considers real are in fact mere passing phenomena, absolutely nothing in themselves, except as they exist in relation to other things.’ “I looked up somewhat perplexed at this and was about to ask a question, but Mr. Everett was too preoccupied with his own thought to notice this. Leaning his head against a gray tree-trunk, he looked with absent eyes far off at the purple hills. Presently he went on: “‘Just as the sensualist can never understand the spiritually-minded man and his infinitely higher capacity for joy, so the man of mere _common_ sense can never understand the man of philosophic insight, the man of more than common sense, until he has been mentally born again, and has transcended the materialistic phase of thought in which we all begin to do our thinking, and which most of us never pass beyond. As said the man whose dust lies at our feet, “Every man’s words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part.”’