270 BRAINS OF RATS AND MEN 



spiration, whether artistic or scientific, is like the 

 Kingdom of God; it cometh not with observation, 

 for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you. 



But, let it not be forgotten, it does not come at all 

 unless there is already something of value within us. 

 To most of us most of the time the primroses by the 

 wayside mean no more than to Peter Bell; they are 

 yellow primroses and nothing more. To Alfred Ten- 

 nyson a flower in the crannied wall can unfold "what 

 God and man is." Nature speaks her varied language 

 only to those who hold sympathetic communion with 

 her visible forms; to the casual passer-by she is dumb. 

 A receptive mind, saturated with experiences of na- 

 ture which have been absorbed perhaps in solitary 

 places by running waters or lofty mountains or per- 

 haps accumulated during years of painstaking ob- 

 servation and experiment in the laboratory — a mind 

 thus generously furnished with raw facts and naive 

 experiences is a hospitable land for the kingdom of 

 science, the kingdom of art, the Kingdom of God. 

 And the king and his retinue of ministers may come 

 uninvited at any time when the barriers of self-deter- 

 mination and conventionalized thinking are down. 

 The slothful mind is vacuous even in reverie. 



My sleeping porch faces to the east, and I love to 

 lie with curtains drawn aside so that if awake betimes 

 I can watch the miraculous rebirth of the dawn, pro- 

 claimed with spectacular flames of color or unob- 

 trusively stealing out from black night into a gray 



