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That human reason can comprehend some causes is past denial; and once we are forced to recognize a given element in experience, it is reasonable to await positive evidence, before we complicate our acknowledgment with qualifications. Otherwise, why venture beyond direct observation? Illustrations of this principle abound in physical science. Since, then, it is certain that man is able to understand the laws and the causes of some phenomena, it is reasonable to assume, in regard to any given problem, that it would get rightly solved by man, if a sufficiency of
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time and attention were devoted to it. Moreover, those problems that at first blush appear utterly insoluble receive, in that very circumstance,—as Edgar Poe remarked in his 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,'—their smoothly-fitting keys. This particularly adapts them to the Play of Musement.
Forty or fifty minutes of vigorous and unslackened analytic thought bestowed upon one of them usually suffices to educe from it all there is to educe, its general solution. There is no kind of reasoning that I should wish to discourage in
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Musement; and I should lament to find anybody confining it to a method of such moderate fertility as logical analysis. Only the Player should bear in mind that the higher weapons in the arsenal of thought are not play-things, but edge-tools. In any mere Play they can only be used by way of exercise; while logical analysis can be put to its full efficiency in Musement. So, continuing the counsels that had been asked of me, I should say, "Enter your skiff of Musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within
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you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation. It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments.
Different people have such wonderfully different ways of thinking that it would be far beyond my competence to say what courses Musements might not take; but a brain endowed with automatic control,—as man's indirectly is,—is so naturally and rightly interested in its own faculties that some psychological and semi-psychological questions would doubtless get touched; such, in the latter class, as this:
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Darwinians, with truly surprising ingenuity, have concocted, and with still more astonishing confidence have accepted as proved, one explanation for the diverse and delicate beauties of flowers, another for those of butterflies, and so on; but why is all nature,—the forms of trees, the compositions of sunsets,—suffused with such beauties throughout,—and not nature only, but the other two Universes as well? Among more purely psychological questions, the nature of pleasure and pain will be likely to attract attention. Are they mere qualities of feeling, or are they rather motor instincts attracting us to some