No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. - William James

"To breathe the air, how delicious! To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand!... To be this incredible God I am!... O amazement of things, even the least particle! O spirituality of things! I too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting; I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of all the growths of the earth.... I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old, I sing the endless finales of things, I say Nature continues — glory continues. I praise with electric voice, For I do not see one imperfection in the universe, And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last." So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he spent at Annecy, with nothing but his happiness to tell: —

A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all.

But even the distant reader must allow that Clifford's mental personality belonged to the highest possible type to say no more. The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal. And if in these modern days we are to look for any prophet or saviour who shall influence our feelings towards the universe as the founders and renewers of past religions have influenced the minds of our fathers, that prophet, if he ever come, must, like Clifford, be no mere sentimental worshipper of science, but an expert in her ways. And he must have what Clifford had in so extraordinary a degree—that lavishly generous confidence in the worthiness of average human nature to be told all truth, the lack of which in Goethe made him an inspiration to the few but a cold riddle to the many.