ANALOGY — TEUE AND FALSE 45 



drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They 

 lose their taste for simple, natural, healthful things, 

 — for good sound literature, — and crave sensational 

 novels and the Sunday newspapers. Doubtless a 

 large part of the reading of the American people to- 

 day is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by 

 an abnormal craving for mental excitement. There 

 is degeneration in the physical world, and there is 

 degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual 

 world. There are proportion, relation, cause and 

 effect, health and disease, in one as in the other. 

 Logic is but the natural relation of parts as we see 

 them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but 

 health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any 

 more than the body can ; it progresses from one 

 fact or consideration to another, step by step, though 

 often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of 

 the steps. A large view of truth may be suddenly 

 revealed to the mind, as of a landscape from a 

 hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage 

 ground ; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure 

 process. 



The world is simpler than we think. The modes 

 and processes of things widely dissimilar are more 

 likely to be identical than we suspect. There are 

 homologies where we see apparent contradiction. 

 There is but one protoplasm for animal and vege- 

 table. A little more or less heat makes the gaseous, 

 makes the liquid, makes the solid. Lava crystal- 

 lizes or freezes at a high temperature ; water, at a low 

 one; mercury, at a still lower. Charcoal and the 



