V

But they are

I have drawn near to certain ofd familiar words, which once were good and beautiful. become so deeply tarnished by evil use, so bent and battered, that I dare not use them; for if I were to, I should feel that I was no longer trying to write truly.

On the other hand it seems to me that as fast as some words are becoming ugly and meaningless, other words long deemed ugly and meaningless are becoming beautiful and full of meaning. The old confused cries of the savage are changing into prophecies; and one fairy tale succeeds another. The earth is turning eastwards, and certain stars are going down below the horizon, while other bright forgotten Signs are rising on us out of the deep. Yet it is still the same earth and the same heaven.

This is the virtue of the magic crystal in which each one sees himself. It is a touchstone of words. It is, as I have said, itself a word.

How shall I find courage to offer it to those great learners who have built the glorious temple they call

Science, wherein I see them standing like archbishops at the altar, talking with God; while I am no more than the little ragamuffin who has been put outside to clean the steps? I have not listened to them as I ought. Even in the last age there was a boy outside on the steps, looking on, and thinking his own thoughts, while the archbishops within were muttering solemnly their Mediterranean incantations; and when they came to the heart of their mystery, and recited the words-Hoc est corpus, the boy outside repeated to himself-Hocus pocus. That was how the Mediterranean words sounded to him.

But now suppose that boy has found a seed-pearl, or what he thinks may be a seed-pearl, on the steps; what must he do? He knows it is not his. He knows the great archbishop must have dropped it from his jewelled robes, as he was passing in. So all the boy can do is to go up to the archbishop as he comes out again, and say,-"Please, sir, is this yours?"

And lest my archbishops should not understand the street boy's words, and should not recognise their seed-pearl, I will name it for their sakes by an archbishop's word.

That is to say, Metastrophe.

By this word I mean more than the archbishops have meant by their word metabolism. I mean, not growth and decay, but growth turning into decay, and decay turning into growth. I mean involution in the midst of evolution. I mean life turning inside out. And I mean more than life; I mean also the expression of life. Metastrophe is a mood, and in so far as we attain this mood, so will the Strength

Within us chime more and more sweetly with the Strength Without; not in dead unity, but in living unison, and the faint gladness of our earthly voices climb and thread the thunder music rolling out of Heaven.

Here is ideal dynamite that shall break up the bony knobs that clog the brain, and set thought free. I cast this little seed into the mind. If it be a true life-seed, I have no fear but that it will take root and grow. It will be slower than the other kind of dynamite; it may take a thousand years; but it will do its work more surely in the end. For it is stronger than the real dynamite. It is alive. It will grow.

We have now made the passage from thoughts to things, or from words to reality. The whirl-swirl is no longer a mathematical figure. We have found it embodied within a greater Whirl-Swirl, without which it could not be.

So far I have spoken of these two realities as the Strength Within and the Strength Without. The names in vulgar use are Soul and God. We see already that it is not the task of the Idealist to prove that there are such things as a Soul and a God. Even if there could be such a thing as proof, it could not prove the beginnings of proof. These are the two points from which we begin to reckon. They are the elements of the mind. To try to prove them is like trying to lift the fulcrum by means of the lever. In establishing these two forethoughts I have worked, not as an idealist, but as an ontologist-as a learner of what words mean. I have been cutting open words and looking inside them, no more than that.

The science of the Idealist, like that of his partner, the Materialist, begins with the relationship between these two Strengths.

Science is closer knowledge, and all knowledge is of relations. As I have said, we measure strength by measuring its ways; and those ways are outlined for us by other ways that meet them. The famous command, Know Thyself, is meaningless as it stands, because we can only know the Strength Within by knowing its relations with the Strength Without. Hence Berkeley's puzzle for the atheists was itself the only perfect atheism, inasmuch as it denied the Strength Without.

The two great sciences which meet in my own science measure these relations from opposite points, and that is the right distinction between them. There is a vulgar distinction between them, which ought to be done away with, namely as to the relations which they measure. I may illustrate both by means of the noble saying,-"The Word of God is the creation we behold.

Uttered by the devout Thomas Paine as rebuke to the idolaters of Mediterranean manuscripts, that saying is true. But it is not the whole truth. It is just one-fourth of the truth. As we have seen, the Outer Strength flows in and out of the Inner Strength, whirling as sense, and swirling as emotion. The swirl is as much a revelation as the whirl, and Ideal science is the science of emotion. It is because the manuscripts are a precious record of emotion, that they deserve to be called a revelation, though not to be worshipped as the only revelation.