harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is
no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by
flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of
thinking have drawn up for our instruction. These rules may be good
enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of
masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for
philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have
thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and
have no more miracle, but see God and live--nor has confusion of
tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said
well that the just shall live by faith; and the question "By what
faith?" is a detail of minor moment, for there are as many faiths as
species, whether of plants or animals, and each of them is in its
own way both living and saving.

All, then, whether fusion or diffusion, whether of ideas or things,
is miraculous. It is the two in one, and at the same time one in
two, which is only two and two making five put before us in another
shape; yet this fusion--so easy to think so long as it is not
thought about, and so unthinkable if we try to think it--is, as it
were, the matrix from which our more thinkable thought is taken; it
is the cloud gathering in the unseen world from which the waters of
life descend in an impalpable dew. Granted that all, whether fusion
or diffusion, whether of ideas or things, is, if we dwell upon it
and take it seriously, an outrage upon our understandings which
common sense alone enables us to brook; granted that it carries with
it a distinctly miraculous element which should vitiate the whole
process ab initio, still, if we have faith we can so work these
miracles as Orpheus-like to charm denizens of the unseen world into
the seen again--provided we do not look back, and provided also we