Part 17 (1/2)

The expected result of the th”; the soul is strengthened and unified, it becomes active; it can then act upon the seed around which it has concentrated and cause it to become fruitful

Now thetheir natural development is ”er so long over each individual task, and so to derive a gradual internal maturation therefrom The aim of the children who persevere in their ith an object, is certainly not to ”learn”; they are drawn to it by the needs of their inner life, which anized and developed by its rowth” This is the habit by which they gradually coordinate and enrich their intelligence As they ress which will continue without end

It is after an exercise of meditation on the objects that our children beco ”the silence exercise”; and then, having been rendered delicately susceptible to impressions, they try to make no noise when they move, to refrain fro the fruit of the ”concentration” of the spirit

It is thus that their personality is unified and strengthened The exercise which serves as the radually to perfect the accuracy hich they perceive the external world, observing, reasoning, and correcting the errors of the senses in a sustained and spontaneous activity It is they who act, they who choose the objects, they who persevere in their work, they who seek to win fro their minds upon it Each one of them moves in obedience to the motor poithin hi obviously superior to the poverty of those who are beginning life by her lofty intellectual riches, who darkens rather than illuminates, earies rather than refreshes; but they live in peace with her who, almost a priestess, is yet a servant As in some ideal convent, humility, simplicity, and work make up the environment where he who meditates will some day feel within himself the clearness of vision, the intuition, almost the sensibility, which make one ready to receive the truth

To a different end, but by the same road, amidst the silence, the simplicity, and the humility of the monastery, the spirit prepares itself to receive the faith at the outset of life

Many years ago, when I first received the ieneral principles of life which in practise we are only privileged to encounter a the intellectual and spiritual _elite_ of society, and that for this reason they were at the same time the revealers of a forhed down huth upon the matter to an intellectual lady, as much interested in my ”theories,”

and very anxious that I should make them the subject of an elaborate philosophical treatise; but she could not bring herself to accept the idea that it was a question of an experimental process When I spoke of the children, she showed some impatience: ”Oh, yes, I quite understand all about these children; in intelligence they are so els” But when, after so her come and _see_ for herself, she took my hands and looked earnestly in ht,” she asked, ”that you may die at any moment? Write at once, anyhow, in all haste, as you would write a will, a simple description of the facts, that you rave”

Nevertheless, I was in excellent health

If we exaenius to e discoveries which have opened new paths to thought, and have given us new sources of well-being and social progress, we shall have to admit that in themselves they cannot be described as extraordinary processes, inaccessible to mediocrity ”Genius coincides with the possession in a very high degree of the power of association by sienius,” says Bain Even at the ”central point” of discovery, it is only by accurate observation and a very si, of which most persons would consider themselves capable, that the discovery isof ”evidences” which, however, passed unnoticed by all but the discoverer

Wea fact in the consciousness, and of so distinguishi+ng it froht should fall upon a diale idea, then, causes a complete revolution in the consciousness, and is capable of constructing soreat and precious for all hunificance of ordinary things, and not the abnormal, which is the eneous field, not the intrinsic value of the thing, which determines the marvelous phenomenon Perhaps within countless thousands of chaotic perceptions the gem had existed, stored up amidst a multitude of useless and cu attention; meanwhile inertia continued to allo objects to penetrate continually within the distended and impotent walls After a discovery, many will perceive that they themselves held the same truth within them; but in this case it is not the truth itself that has value, but theit into relation with action

But very often it is not the case that the newly discovered truth already exists in the chaos of obscure consciousness; and then the new light, sih it be, can find no way by which to penetrate into the e and fallacious; and a certain lapse of tience, to enable the ”novelty” to enter Yet some day it will be considered clear as crystal It was not the ”nature” of man which shrank from it, but his ”errors” These errors not only make man incapable of production, but are in themselves hostile to receptivity

Thus it often happens that the pioneers of salvation are persecuted by a sort of unconscious ingratitude, which is the fruit of spiritual darkness

What was the arguht: ”If the earth is really round, he who starts from a certain point and advances steadily, will return to the point of departure” This was the _sum_ of the intellectual hich enriched reat continent should have lain in the track of Columbus, and that he should have encountered this and not death, was the destiny due to the chance of environs” of this kind in a surprising reat labor of hureat results; it was the triumph of this idea over the whole consciousness, and the heroic courage of the reat difficulty, for the man who had conceived the idea, was to persevere until he could persuade others to help hiive him shi+ps and followers It was the _faith_ and not the _idea_ of Colu kindled within hience, and enabled a single in, and almost uneducated, to present a world to a queen

We are told that Alessandro Volta's as ill with fever, and that he, in accordance with the practise of his day, was preparing the usual febrifuge, a broth of skinned frogs; it was a rainy day, and when he hung up the dead frogs on the iron bar of the , he noticed that their legs contracted ”If dead muscles contract, it must mean that some external force has penetrated thereat discoverer” And seeking this force, Volta, by means of his piles, was able to wrest frouratively, the ”gleaht upon a little fact, such as that of a dead being havingit soberly without any fanciful additions, and fixing theproblethy process by which one of the greatest conquests of civilization was achieved

Akin to this was Galileo's discovery, when, standing in Pisa Cathedral, he watched the oscillations of a hanging lamp He observed that the oscillations were all completed in the same space of ti of the measurement of time for all men, and of the measurement of worlds for the astronomer

How simple, too, is the story of Newton, who felt an apple fall upon hiht to hiin of the theory of the gravity of bodies, and that of universal gravitation

When we study of the life of Papin, we marvel at the culture which placed him on a level with the ist, and uished and honored by the universities of England and Gerave hireatness, was the fact that his attention had been arrested by the sight of the lid of a saucepan of boiling water raised by the steam ”Steam is a force which could lift a piston as it lifts the cover of a saucepan, and become the motor power of a ic wand in the history of an to work and travel without fatigue Hoonderful are such stories of great discoveries arising frohout the world!

These, in their origins, rese creatures, born of two imperceptible microscopic cells, the fusion of which inevitably tends to the creation of cos perceived logically is the work of the highest intelligence But this work is characterized by a peculiar power of attention, which causes the mind to dwell upon a subject in a species of enius; the outcoerminative cells are the fruit of internal existences It would seeuished from those of the ordinary type, not by their fororous life from which those two small intellectual sparks arise, which , independent personalities, capable of persistent effort and heroic self-sacrifice, those little intellectual works would have rethens the spiritual enius

Thus, as regards the intelligence in itself, the work it has to accomplish is a small matter, but it is clearly defined, and stripped of superfluous couide to discovery; simplicity which, like truth, should be naked Very little is necessary; but this little must constitute a powerful unity; the rest is vanity

And the greater this vanity, that is to say, the futile encuht of the spirit be darkened and its forces dissipated,it difficult or impossible not only to reason and act, but even to perceive reality, to see

It would be interesting to make a rapid survey of those collective individual errors by which the progress of a new discovery of a si humanity, has been impeded; errors which have even caused persistent denial of the existence of obvious facts, enerally known