"Their being produced as the final cause of man is, after all, not
more amazing than the production of perfume and color in a plant.
Perfumes _are_ ideas, perhaps!

"When we consider the line where flesh ends and the nail begins
contains the invisible and inexplicable mystery of the constant
transformation of a fluid into horn, we must confess that nothing is
impossible in the marvelous modifications of human tissue.

"And are there not in our inner nature phenomena of weight and motion
comparable to those of physical nature? Suspense, to choose an example
vividly familiar to everybody, is painful only as a result of the law
in virtue of which the weight of a body is multiplied by its velocity.
The weight of the feeling produced by suspense increases by the
constant addition of past pain to the pain of the moment.

"And then, to what, unless it be to the electric fluid, are we to
attribute the magic by which the Will enthrones itself so imperiously
in the eye to demolish obstacles at the behest of genius, thunders in
the voice, or filters, in spite of dissimulation, through the human
frame? The current of that sovereign fluid, which, in obedience to the
high pressure of thought or of feeling, flows in a torrent or is
reduced to a mere thread, and collects to flash in lightnings, is the
occult agent to which are due the evil or the beneficent efforts of
Art and Passion--intonation of voice, whether harsh or suave,
terrible, lascivious, horrifying or seductive by turns, thrilling the
heart, the nerves, or the brain at our will; the marvels of the touch,
the instrument of the mental transfusions of a myriad artists, whose
creative fingers are able, after passionate study, to reproduce the
forms of nature; or, again, the infinite gradations of the eye from