which is no less visible to us than to him. We are looking on the
same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.
The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear
and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive
the aspect and drift of his intention. The longest argument is but
a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and
we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old
street-lamp. And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is
because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our
prophet, and to think of different things in the same order. To be
of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same
perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near
at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest
flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in
the centre of his vision that whatever he may express, your eyes
will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to
declare, your mind will at once accept. You do not belong to the
school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that theft
is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at
noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested. We
are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of
knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
take them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the
moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the
purpose of any system looks towards those extreme points where it
steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint
of things outside. Then only can you be certain that the words are
not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you