The Materialist, as 'his name betrays, tries to believe in Matter. He does not believe in it, because no man can do so, but his mind is turned matterward. The mind of the Idealist is turned strengthward. The Idealist tries to believe in Untied Strength, commonly called the Absolute. He does not succeed any better than the Materialist. But that is the way in which the two minds are first opposed. It is the difference between potential and kinetic. And this difference is exhibited in the field of Literature in the difference between the Academician and the Prophet. The Academician cannot write without a meaning, nor the Prophet without words. But the one is turned formward and the other spiritward.

However, that distinction is partly unreal. It partakes of the unreality of Matter itself. The real distinction is the unreal one repeated in terms of Strength. As we have seen, the Materialist has given up his mock-belief in Matter, and the Idealist must now give up his mock-belief. in the Absolute. The two meet on the common ground of Strength. mathematical figure of the strength-ball is not other than the figure which has been forming in the mind of great materialist learners. It is in their ways of looking at it that the real difference between the two minds will be found.

The

We cannot think of strength going only one way, or shrinking in any measure without swelling in equal measure. We cannot think of strength going out into the dustbin of Andronicus Rhodius. Nor can we think of it shrinking into the point of Euclid, and staying there. As fast as it whirls inward it must swirl outward, and the whirl and swirl must

compensate each other. So that the strength-ball ought rightly to be called a Whirl-Swirl.

Now the materialist is busy measuring the whirl, and as it seems to me his eyes are sometimes so far dazed by watching it as to be no longer able to mark the swirl. Again his speech bewrays him, when he uses words like whirl and universe, as though he had nothing but a whirlpool before him. One materialist has likened the life of man to a whirlpool. Whereas what we have before us is more like a waterspout, and the spiral of life points upward instead of downward. Now the business of the Idealist is measuring the swirl.

This is the real parting of the ways. And the unreality of the other is shown by this, that when. the Materialist does enter the field of literature, his work is apt to be unbearably informal, and his words unbearably bad; and his highest achievement is History; whereas when the Idealist enters the same field, his work is apt to take on the severe and crystal form of poetry; his words are apt to be the most careful words; and his highest achievement is the Parable. And all that is the turning inside out of strength.

It seems to me, therefore, that it is the word Swirl which we have been in search of all along, as the interpretation of the word Idealist. I still like it better than radio-activity. The swirl is the inversion of the whirl. It is a whirl going the other way. It is to whirl what Energy was to Force. It is a very common word. The children know it well. And yet what sounds too strange for a coincidence-the learned Doctor Latham, in his four

huge volumes, somehow has succeeded in leaving out this very word.

So, after diving through the end of the whirl, 1 have come up in the swirl, bringing in my hand this poor little forgotten word, shimmering to my eyes like a tiny seed-pearl of verihood, though it should show to other eyes like a glass bead, not worth the fetching up.

Let us put this word inside the Testator's word, as the child puts a little candle inside a toy house, and look how it will light it up.

V

My selfish interest in this inquiry has here reached its end. The search for the right name of Idealism has brought me to the right name of Truth. I have found it, not in the tidily arranged and ticketed glass-cases of learned museums, but in the lonely wind-swept barrow of the Viking. I am as one of those who

From grass-grown hills,

Their ancient and forgotten burial-places, Draw forth the dragon hoard of gold and gems. And lo! the right Name is a mighty spell, and no sooner is it uttered than Verihood herself is called

out of her enchanted sleep; she stirs, and the vain cerements are rent; she rises up, and the gravestone is rolled away.

Well did they who cast her into that trance, and bound the graveclothes round about her, and set the gravestone in its place,-well did they know the might that is in Names. Is it not written in one of the books of the enchanters,-"Thou shalt not take my Name in vain;" and in another,-

"Lo! dreadful faces show, and, threatening Troy, The mighty Names of Gods."

Magical lore is this: the secret lies here: I also am a magician; I understand that other oracle of the Chaldaeans

"Never change native Names;

For there are Names in every nation, God-given,
Of untold power in the Mysteries. "

FOURTEENTH HEAD

THE MAGIC CRYSTAL

Pure Verihood. - 1. The Art of Speech. 2. The Sign. -3. The Shape. - 4. The Symbol. 5. Ideal Dynamite.

So far the whirl-swirl is a mathematical figure. That is to say it is a word, like Euclid's triangle. It is Pure Verihood.

To be more than a word it must take shape. Verihood must put on falsehood ere it can dwell among us. The outline must be gained in battle.

We can only draw the of overlapping straight light by painting the

It is my business to write this word more distinctly, knowing that what we gain in clearness we must lose in verihood. So, even a work of an idealist tendency cannot be quite true, because literature cannot be quite true. round by drawing a series lines. We can only paint shadows cast by light. We can only give to our God the figure of an Idol. Is not that why the perfect Idealist uttered his cryptic saying,—“ They who know do not tell; they who tell do not know."