The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. We know truth when we see it, let skeptic and scoffer say what they choose. Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not wish to hear, 'How do you know it is truth, and not an error of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, as we know when we are awake that we are awake.

The reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye.

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and not for life.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

And dazzling memory revive.Refresh the faded tints, Recut the aged prints, And write my old adventures, with the pen Which, on the first day, drew Upon the tablets blue The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted.