do not try to charm half a dozen Eurydices at a time. To think is
to fuse and diffuse ideas, and to fuse and diffuse ideas is to feed.
We can all feed, and by consequence within reasonable limits we can
fuse ideas; or we can fuse ideas, and by consequence within
reasonable limits we can feed; we know not which comes first, the
food or the ideas, but we must not overtax our strength; the moment
we do this we taste of death.

It is in the closest connection with this that we must chew our food
fine before we can digest it, and that the same food given in large
lumps will choke and kill which in small pieces feeds us; or, again,
that that which is impotent as a pellet may be potent as a gas.
Food is very thoughtful: through thought it comes, and back through
thought it shall return; the process of its conversion and
comprehension within our own system is mental as well as physical,
and here, as everywhere else with mind and evolution, there must be
a cross, but not too wide a cross--that is to say, there must be a
miracle, but not upon a large scale. Granted that no one can draw a
clear line and define the limits within which a miracle is healthy
working and beyond which it is unwholesome, any more than he can
prescribe the exact degree of fineness to which we must comminute
our food; granted, again, that some can do more than others, and
that at all times all men sport, so to speak, and surpass
themselves, still we know as a general rule near enough, and find
that the strongest can do but very little at a time, and, to return
to Mr. Spencer, the fusion of two such hitherto unassociated ideas
as race and experience was a miracle beyond our strength.

Assuredly when Mr. Spencer wrote the passages he quoted in the
letter to the Athenaeum above referred to, we were not in the habit