The young man's lustrous eyes opened very widely as he asked me to explain what I meant.
--What is the Creator's divinest work?--I asked.
--Is there anything more divine than the sun; than a sun with its planets revolving about it, warming them, lighting them, and giving conscious life to the beings that move on them?
--You agree, then, that conscious life is the grand aim and end of all this vast mechanism.Without life that could feel and enjoy, the splendors and creative energy would all be thrown away.You know Harvey's saying, omnia animalia ex ovo,--all animals come from an egg.You ought to know it, for the great controversy going on about spontaneous generation has brought it into special prominence lately.
Well, then, the ovum, the egg, is, to speak in human phrase, the Creator's more private and sacred studio, for his magnum opus.Now, look at a hen's egg, which is a convenient one to study, because it is large enough and built solidly enough to look at and handle easily.That would be the form I would choose for my thinking-cell.
Build me an oval with smooth, translucent walls, and put me in the centre of it with Newton's "Principia" or Kant's "Kritik," and Ithink I shall develop "an eye for an equation," as you call it, and a capacity for an abstraction.
But do tell me,--said the Astronomer, a little incredulously,--what there is in that particular form which is going to help you to be a mathematician or a metaphysician?
--It is n't help I want, it is removing hindrances.I don't want to see anything to draw off my attention.I don't want a cornice, or an angle, or anything but a containing curve.I want diffused light and no single luminous centre to fix my eye, and so distract my mind from its one object of contemplation.The metaphysics of attention have hardly been sounded to their depths.The mere fixing the look on any single object for a long time may produce very strange effects.
Gibbon's well-known story of the monks of Mount Athos and their contemplative practice is often laughed over, but it has a meaning.
They were to shut the door of the cell, recline the beard and chin on the breast, and contemplate the abdominal centre.
"At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart, than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light." And Mr.Braid produces absolute anaesthesia, so that surgical operations can be performed without suffering to the patient, only by making him fix his eyes and his mind on a single object; and Newton is said to have said, as you remember, "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light." These are different, but certainly very wonderful, instances of what can be done by attention.But now suppose that your mind is in its nature discursive, erratic, subject to electric attractions and repulsions, volage; it may be impossible for you to compel your attention except by taking away all external disturbances.I think the poets have an advantage and a disadvantage as compared with the steadier-going people.Life is so vivid to the poet, that he is too eager to seize and exhaust its multitudinous impressions.Like Sindbad in the valley of precious stones, he wants to fill his pockets with diamonds, but, lo! there is a great ruby like a setting sun in its glory, and a sapphire that, like Bryant's blue gentian, seems to have dropped from the cerulean walls of heaven, and a nest of pearls that look as if they might be unhatched angel's eggs, and so he hardly knows what to seize, and tries for too many, and comes out of the enchanted valley with more gems than he can carry, and those that he lets fall by the wayside we call his poems.You may change the image a thousand ways to show you how hard it is to make a mathematician or a logician out of a poet.He carries the tropics with him wherever he goes; he is in the true sense felius naturae, and Nature tempts him, as she tempts a child walking through a garden where all the finest fruits are hanging over him and dropping round him, where The luscious clusters of the vine Upon (his) mouth do crush their wine, The nectarine and curious peach, Into (his) hands themselves do reach;and he takes a bite out of the sunny side of this and the other, and, ever stimulated and never satisfied, is hurried through the garden, and, before he knows it, finds himself at an iron gate which opens outward, and leaves the place he knows and loves --For one he will perhaps soon learn to love and know better,--said the Master.---But I can help you out with another comparison, not quite so poetical as yours.Why did not you think of a railway-station, where the cars stop five minutes for refreshments? Is n't that a picture of the poet's hungry and hurried feast at the banquet of life? The traveller flings himself on the bewildering miscellany of delicacies spread before him, the various tempting forms of ambrosia and seducing draughts of nectar, with the same eager hurry and restless ardor that you describe in the poet.Dear me! If it wasn't for All aboard! that summons of the deaf conductor which tears one away from his half-finished sponge-cake and coffee, how I, who do not call myself a poet, but only a questioner, should have enjoyed a good long stop--say a couple of thousand years--at this way-station on the great railroad leading to the unknown terminus!
--You say you are not a poet,--I said, after a little pause, in which I suppose both of us were thinking where the great railroad would land us after carrying us into the dark tunnel, the farther end of which no man has seen and taken a return train to bring us news about it,--you say you are not a poet, and yet it seems to me you have some of the elements which go to make one.
