after an imaginary greater prize.

Great thoughts are not to be caught in this way. They must
present themselves for capture of their own free will, or be
taken after a little coyness only. They are like wealth and
power, which, if a man is not born to them, are the more likely
to take him, the more he has restrained himself from an attempt
to snatch them. They hanker after those only who have tamed their
nearer thoughts. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to feel that
the early Pantheists were true prophets and seers, though the
things were unknown to them without which a complete view was
unattainable. What does Linus mean, we ask ourselves, when he
says :- "One sole energy governs all things" ? How can one sole
energy govern, we will say, the reader and the chair on which he
sits? What is meant by an energy governing a chair? If by an
effort we have made ourselves believe we understand something
which can be better expressed by these words than by any others,
no sooner do we turn our backs than the ideas so painfully
collected fly apart again. No matter how often we go in search of
them, and force them into juxtaposition, they prove to have none
of that innate coherent power with which ideas combine that we
can hold as true and profitable.

Yet if Linus had confined his statement to living things, and had
said that one sole energy governed all plants and animals, he
would have come near both to being intelligible and true. For if,
as we now believe, all animals and plants are descended from a
single cell, they must be considered as cousins to one another,
and as forming a single tree-like animal, every individual plant
or animal of which is as truly one and the same person with the