literary, scientific, or historical tastes, the problem of what to think about is specially easy. A thousand delightful vistas of thought are open before them, and in these shady avenues they may wander with infinite delight. They must, no doubt, go through the somewhat laborious preliminary of definitely choosing a subject, and determining to think about it; but this done, their path is easy and pleasant.

What, for instance, could be more delightful than to speculate why the arts of sculpture and painting are given to some nations and withheld from others, or why the ancient world, so exquisitely sensitive to the beauty of the human form, had but a feeble appreciation of the beauty of landscape; or to wonder what would have happened to the East if Clive's pistol had not missed fire when he put it to his temple; or, to follow out the thought-would it be possible, given some means of overcoming the physical difficulty of boring so deep, to pierce the earth, and what would happen to the law of gravity when the centre was reached? And when such speculations as these tire, what can be more entertaining than the luxury of a little castle-building in the airy highlands of Spain? Wondering what one would do if one had a million is not a game that need, in the nature of things, be confined to girls and boys.

It is all nonsense to say that the domestic mutton tastes worse because one has been picturing a perfect short dinner served in the little dining-room in a palace in Park Lane, to which Dorchester House would look like a superior parsonage. On the contrary, the excursion into the realms of the unreal is not unlikely to give one an appetite. And even for those who do not want more

luxuries than they have there are plenty of day-dreams possible. Few people have built an ideal house and laid out an ideal garden and park. Let those, then, who have not, lay down their visionary plans, and rear for themselves chimneys that never smoke, and trees that never grow where they ought not, but exactly where they should.

We have not dealt here with the more serious side of the value of thinking. That is so often pressed upon men's minds by religious teachers of all kinds that it would seem out of place to restate it here. It is hardly necessary to say that all men need to 'swing' the moral compass from time to time, and to take their bearings in the sea of life. The advice is as true as it is conventional. Upon the use of thinking for such purposes we shall not, then, dwell. We may, however, point out that, as a means of strengthening and invigorating the mind in a secular and worldly sense, the habit of thinking is of the greatest possible value. The minds of those who dread thinking as if it were a penance become like the bodies of those fed solely on spoon-meat-soft, and unable to stand the slightest strain. Reading, as one ordinarily reads, is like swallowing pap; thinking, like eating solid food.

The man who trains his mental powers by meditation and by following out lines of thought obtains an intellectual instrument a hundred times more powerful than he who is content never to think seriously and consecutively. The things one merely reads about never stick. Those on which one thinks become permanent acquisitions. Hence the man who is not afraid of thinking, and who does not dread 'that cursed hour in the dark,' is

at a distinct advantage on every ground. He passes the time without being bored, and he strengthens his mind. To say this may, no doubt, sound slightly priggish, but it is none the less true. The man who can enjoy and make use of his own thoughts has a heritage which can never be alienated. Even blindness for him loses some of its terrors.

THE HORROR OF ASTRONOMY

MOST people are shy of confessing even to themselves that they have experienced in regard to any intellectual conception the real sense of horror-the sense which benumbs and oppresses the intellect with a dull ache. If, however, the civilised portion of the human race could be put to the question, we believe that the majority would be found to experience this feeling in regard to the facts and deductions of astronomy. Every human being knows what it is to feel at times a sudden nameless horror-a shivering fit of the soul as well defined as an ague of the body. The mental agitation and distress caused by doubts, forebodings, and difficulties connected with religion, or with the sense of misconduct, is something very different. The sensation we mean is neither a matter of melancholy, of religious opinion, nor of remorse. It is, instead, if we may be allowed the expression, a physical experience of the intellect.

For some reason or other this formless sense of horror is evoked more strongly by the science of astronomy than by any other. That it is not due to fear, in the ordinary sense of the word, is quite obvious. Astronomy may have disclosed certain risks run by mankind, but they are nothing when compared with

those that are made known by plenty of other sciences. The notion that we may some day be rammed by a comet can perhaps be rendered alarming; but, as a rule, the alarms of astronomy concern a distant age, when the sun shall have cooled, or when a new force of attraction shall have arisen to lead the errant earth into a dangerous and untravelled path. Again, many of the astronomical facts which most easily conjure up this sense of awe and terror have little or no relation to our planet. What is so heart-shaking as the thought of a star that has foundered and gone out in the mid-firmament of heaven? We may be reasoned into regarding it as commonplace, but at first it is terrific and aweinspiring in no ordinary degree. Yet even if, when the lost star cooled or burst into a million meteorites, or was cannoned into space by the impact of some other world, it contained ten thousand million of inhabitants, no ground exists for any special regret. If subject to death, they would have been dead by now. The catastrophe of the heavens which overtook them only shortened their lives. It is clear that it is not merely pity for the possible inhabitants that causes the

sensation.

Again, the sensation is called up equally acutely by thought of the vastness and the solitude of space, by the height and fury of the flames that are leaping from the sun, and by the thought that the whole Solar System, and all the million systems that are its neighbours, are hurrying from some unknown and unknowable starting-point to some equally unknown and unknowable goal. What we would fain discover is the reason why these thoughts stun and intimidate the soul.

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