The general mind possesses a kind of divination which discovers itself in
those comments, criticisms, and judgments which pass from man to man
through a wide area and sometimes through long periods of time. The
opinion which appears at first glance to be an expression of materialism
often shows, upon closer study, an element of idealism or a touch of
spiritual discernment. It is customary, for instance, to say of a man that
he lives in his works; as if the enduring quality of his fame rested in
and was dependent upon the tangible products of his genius or his skill.
There is truth in the phrase even when its scope is limited to this
obvious meaning; but there is a deeper truth behind the truism,--the truth
that a man lives in his works, not only because they commemorate but
because they express him. They are products of his skill; but they are
also the products of his soul. The man is revealed in them, and abides in
them, not as a statue in a temple, but as a seed in the grain and the
fruit. They have grown out of him, and they uncover the secrets of his
spiritual life. No man can conceal himself from his fellows; everything he
fashions or creates interprets and explains him.

This deepest significance of work has always been divined even when it has
not been clearly perceived. Men have understood that there is a spiritual
quality even in the most material products of a man's activity, and, even
in ruder times, they have discerned the inner relation of the things which
a man makes with the man himself. In our time, when the immense
significance of this essential harmony between spirit and product has been
accepted as a guiding principle in historic investigation, the stray
spear-head and broken potsherd are prized by the anthropologist, because a
past race lives in them. The lowest and commonest kind of domestic vessels
and implements disclose to the student of to-day not only the stage of
manual skill which their makers had reached, but also the general ideas of