It is because the general habit of reading for persons, acquiring one’s knowledge naturally and vitally and in its relation to life, has been temporarily swept one side in modern education that we are obliged to face the divorced condition of the educated world to-day. There seem to be, for the most part, but two kinds of men living in it, living on opposite sides of the same truths glaring at each other. On the one hand the anæmically spiritual, broad, big, pallid men, and on the other the funny, infinitesimal, provincial, matter cornered, matter-of-fact ones.

However useless it may seem to be there is but one way out. Some man is going to come to us, must come to us, who will have it in him to challenge these forces, do battle with them, fight with fog on one hand and desert on the other. There never will be one world in education until we have one man who can emphasise persons and things together, and do it every day, side by side, in his own mind. When there is one man who is an all-man, an epitome of a world, there shall be more all-men. He cannot help attracting them, drawing them out, creating them. With enough men who have a whole world in their hearts, we shall soon have a whole world.

Whether it is true or not that the universe is most swiftly known, most naturally enjoyed as related to one Creator or Person, as the self-expression of one Being who loved all these things enough to gather them together, it is generally admitted that the natural man seems to have been created to enjoy a universe as related to himself. His most natural and powerful way of enjoying it is to enjoy it in its relation to persons. A Person may not have created it, but it seems for the time being at least, and so far as persons are concerned, to have been created for persons. To know the persons and the things together, and particularly the things in relation to the persons, is the swiftest and simplest way of knowing the things. Persons are the nervous system of all knowledge. So far as man is concerned all truth is a sub-topic under his own soul, and the universe is the tool of his own life. Reading for different topics in it gives him a superficial knowledge of the men who write about them. Reading to know the men gives him a superficial knowledge, in the technical sense, of the things they write about. Let him stand up and take his choice like a man between being superficial in the letter and superficial in the spirit. Outside of his specialty, however, being superficial in the letter will lead him to the most knowledge. Man is the greatest topic. All other knowledge is a sub-topic under a Man, and the stars themselves are as footnotes to the thoughts of his heart.

“Things are not only related to other things,” the soul of the man says, “they are related to me.” This relation of things to me is a mutual affair, partly theirs and partly mine, and I am going to do my knowing, act on my own knowledge, as if I were of some importance in it. Shall I reckon with alkalis and acids and not reckon with myself? I say, “O great Nature, O infinite Things, by the charter of my soul (and whether I have a soul or not), I am not only going to know things, but things shall know me. I stamp myself upon them. I shall receive from them and love them and belong to them, but they shall be my things because they are things, and they shall be to me, what I make them.” “The sun is thy plaything,” my soul says to me, “O, mighty Child, the stars thy companions. Stand up! Come out in the day! laugh the great winds to thy side. The sea, if thou wilt have it so, is thy frog-pond and thou shalt play with the lightnings in thy breast.”

“Aye, aye,” I cry, “I know it! The youth of the world seizes my whole being. I hurrah like a child through all knowledge. I have taken all heaven for my nursery. The world is my rocking-horse. Things are not only for things, and my body in the end for things, but now I live, I live, and things are for me!” “Aye, aye, and they shall be to thee,” said my soul, “what thou biddest them.”

And now I go forth quietly. “Do you not see, O mountains, that you must reckon with me? I am the younger brother of the stars. I have faced nations in my heart. Great bullying, hulking, half-dead centuries I have faced. I have made them speak to me, and have dared against them. If there is history, I also am history. If there are facts, I also am a fact. If there are laws, it is one of the laws that I am one of the laws.”

All knowledge, I have said in my heart, instead of being a kind of vast overseer-and-slave system for a man to lock himself up in, and throw away his key in, becomes free, fluent, daring, and glorious the moment it is conceived through persons and for persons and with persons. Knowledge is not knowledge until it is conceived in relation to persons; that is, in relation to all the facts. Persons are facts also and on the whole the main facts, the facts which for seventy years, at least, or until the planet is too cooled off, all other facts are for. The world belongs to persons, is related to persons, and all the knowledge thereof, and by heaven, and by my soul’s delight, all the persons the knowledge is related to shall belong to me, and the knowledge that is related to them shall belong to me, the whole human round of it. The spirit and rhythm and song of their knowledge, the thing in it that is real to them, that sings out their lives to them, shall sing to me.

Book IV
What to Do Next

“I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,