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Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/153

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The Art of Education
149

mind a suggestion how to discover the Laws of Light. The type of mind which asks "Cui bono?" of every lesson for which there is nothing to show at Examination is the same as the type of mind which sneers because the Sacred Ark of the Hebrew Covenant contains, practically, Nothing—a few old-world tales illustrative of a state of society long passed away; a few self-evident laws of morality; and a mass of rules, very uninteresting, and to a large extent negative in form, tedious to carry out, of no obvious utility, but, on the contrary, in themselves a hindrance to active life. Of positive information, Nothing. It is time that teachers at least should be taught to understand that, though man has a right to desire and procure whatever he wants, the inner shrine whence Truth issues to hold converse with man may not be desecrated by the presence of immediately realizable results. If it be so desecrated, the Blessed Guest departs. In that Ark is preserved what the Rainbow leaves behind when it fades into white light:—the Keys of the Infinite Store-house of Science; the canons of the Art of Thinking; the Secret of the Method whereby man may draw down Truth from Heaven, without blighting either his body or his soul Life lives in that empty Ark; the true life of man's brain. For we are the children of the Creator; not His mere handiwork, made arbitrarily, unlike Himself; but the outcome of His very thought-processes; and sanity, for us, means thinking as He thinks, so far as we think at all. And (if His work reveals His manner of thinking) He thinks in an incessant rhythmic pulsation of alternate "positing and denying," of constructing and sweeping away; a pulsation which produces the appear-