my point: only the illusion of the supremacy of conversation -diplomatic or logical—could ever have persuaded either the world or the British that theirs is a mindless destinyfor mindlessness is a very different thing from the power of verbal predetermination, and British sagacity in politics is assuredly no alien to wisdom.

Indeed, the British themselves, and we, own and must own that the Empire could not have been possible without sentiment. Yes, indeed! Sentiment played and is playing such a rôle in the design of the edifice that even nature (economic and mechanic) is baffled by it. This, at least, we in America have accepted as the sole reason why the Canadian dominions still cling to what seems to us their archaic fidelity to the imperial notion. That sentiment harks back to individuals: to the pertinacious, courageous, inventive, self-responsible, "bucked-up" minds of the thousands of young men who have been the fashioners and keepers of the imperial keys; it is they, these men with minds. of such gift and direction, that have made the empire one of the buildings built by men on this earth, and one of the time-reckoned manifestations of our human intelligence. Is a branch of mathematics, a natural science, a metaphysics more the work of intelligent mind than such a great manynationed political institution?

I might draw an added illustration from our own political life. For there are many nowadays who are ready to announce with reasoned finality that American democracy is and must be a failure, that it, too, belies nature (meaning this mechanic thing nature has come to in definition), and will vanish with its own illusion. And yet, can history ever deny that this American democracy, at least in its own time. and season, did actually create the democratic man? He still survives, nay, he still fights, and that means he still lives, in his own character, and is one of the facts! Such facts are the residues, the nubs, of the knowable world; they will not resolve nor dissolve; and the democratic man, with all his perverse (as we deem) sentiments of equality, and of liberty, and of human rights, is indestructibly a

pattern of living mind, however illogical we may deem him. And here again, assuming even that he is passing, was he a thing of unintelligence? We ask it, naming Lincoln.

Beyond politics the modes of alogistic thought, in a complicity of directions, move out into creative expressions of the human mind. I would cite another which our modern and mechanic reason is nowadays smug to deny: chivalric honor and romantic love. Don Quixote, we say, is the last laugh over this vainglory. But supposing it true, suppose that the mill has disarmed the knight and that calculation has bought out chivalry, is it still true that there were no lovers for whom the truth of life-aye, and of death-was not bound up in honor and in romance? Here there is no rebuttal; and we shall add that chivalry, too, was a mindmade construction, beautiful and filled with genius. And I will say a like word of yet one more thing which this numbermastered age of ours is vociferously giving the lie to; I will say it also of religion, and of the Christian religion. "I threw all my old shoes out of the car window when I came here," said a campus girl, and she meant Christianity. It is the fashion, and the road to and through college is littered with old shoes. But for there is a "but"-but, after all, for you and me, realizing that men with believing hearts wrote those Gospels—and died for them—reading Tertullian and Augustine, reading Calvin and Pascal (I do not say Dante and Milton only), can we wholly define all this as unintelligence, or as beyond the survey of philosophical wisdom? For there at the center of it is the Dramasuch a Drama that sometimes it seems to be the only one that man has created and lived. Were it wholly alone, were there naught but the Drama, I should vouch for it that Christianity could not die—but religion, too, in more than one day, has been caught in the chill grip of logistic, and if it be dead today it is its theologians who have slain the Christian faith. But of the Truth—the Drama is assuredly one of its attestations.

Is my understanding of the alogistic intelligence made clear? Wherever mind struggles into form, into a vesture of

life, there intelligence is, and there the wisdom of philosophy is to be sought. Of fallacies the one unpardonable is to forget this, and to make of some single restricted stream of human images the sole bearer of the barque of Truth. Mind is not so mean a thing as to measure out in a single dimension; rather, as Plato long ago made unmistakable, the excellence of living is the world's reality, and this is to be known as the Good, and it may be caught only in a net of many strands. We have moved with the Greeks long and splendidly; we shall not move profitably forward forgetting them. But neither shall we move either for gain or loss--if we affix ourselves narrowly to the modes of the logic, the mathematics, the mechanics which we have derived from the Greeks, and make of these our last measures of all truth. Philosophy, if it would live, must seek truth also in the forms of the alogistic intelligence of man, and its wisdom must have for estate the richest of grants from this, our human mind; otherwise it remains impoverished, and a thing ridiculous.

It is true that we who are philosophers are men of the tongue and the pen; it is true that logical speech is still the mode of our expression. But surely we need not overlook the fact that in the end the whole significance of Logos came to be as symbolic of a wisdom that is ineffable. Truth is superior to every language, and at the last every cunning of man's hand as well as all the device of his tongue must be employed in her service if understanding is to be worthily

ours.

I GO AFOOT

I try not to be arrogant about it. I suppose the poor devils who are hermetically sealed in glass showcases for exhibition on the highways of a Sunday afternoon, or who spend long hours acting as chambermaid to exacting gas engines, get their fun out of life. I admit that the mere fact that I can't see it doesn't prove that it doesn't exist. So when they tell me, as often they do, that they envy me, I try not to patronize them. With the best show of sincerity I can muster, I tell them that they might better their condition if they would only rouse themselves and make an effort, though even as I say it, I know in my heart that there is little hope.

There is Joe Tirebuck for example. Long ago he and I used to go afoot along the top of the world where the P. D. & Q. Railroad goes now. I don't know how it gets up there, but I believe it is there, because the last time we went over Rifle Pass we pulled up a bunch of their survey stakes, way up above timber line, to fry our bacon with, and we never went back to see what really happened. I met Joe the other day, and he asked me where I was going this summer, and I said Lone Lake. He didn't seem to know, so I told him how you go to the end of the stage line, and then up the canyon and cross under Pirate Peak and go down into South Fork, and over the ridge and across Middle Fork, and down that and up North Fork, and over the pass and so on. He said he wished he could go, and I said "Why don't you?" and he said he had promised his wife to take her camping in the car. Well, of course there wasn't anything I could say that would make things any better, so I just gripped his hand good and hard to let him know I felt for him and if there was anything I could do be sure to let me know, and said I had to be going.

And there is Tom Penfeather. He used to write delightful books, though he and I were almost the only ones who knew it at the time. But people gradually found it out, and now it isn't true. As soon as they began to find it out, Tom bought a gaudy creation of glass and red and nickel to which he very soon became a sort of appendix. Nowadays he does not dare write a book that will not sell, because tires cost so much. He has no time to write books anyway, so his secretary and his typist do it all for him. He spends all his time in the car. He is paunchy and pouchy. He used to be an intelligent man, one with whom a fellow could carry on a rational conversation. Now he never thinks; poor chap, he will never think again so long as he lives. He is always going from nothing to nowhere at all the speed the law allows plus whatever more his car can do. I too am bound from nothing to nowhere, but I go afoot in the hope that the journey may last the longer.

Tom and Joe and their tribe are slaves the most abject. We are freemen who roll by in the train and see them swarming on the highways like sowbugs when you turn up a stone in the garden. The instant we get beyond the last practicable road, we are rid of them. From there on, we pass up through the orders of the hierarchy: the one-day hikers, the two-day hikers, the three-day hikers. Three days from the road and beyond, we meet none but our peers, and that so seldom that we are ready to share the kingdom with them whenever we have the chance. The three-day hikers think they are pretty fine people till they meet us. The two-day hikers don't know the peerage; they know us only for their betters, and so assume that we are three-day hikers. The one-day hikers differ from the slaves in that they have one day of freedom once in so often. I judge from appearances that they cannot walk where they are not ankle-deep in hairpins and chewinggum wrappers. Since they must carry enormous supplies of these commodities, they cannot go far.

On the home stretch, when we come within the three-day radius, we adjust the lean packs with nicety on the lean burros, and throw the hitch with precision. Sure enough, a little before noon we meet them, and as we negotiate the ticklish passage on the narrow trail, they ask us how far it is to the top. We eye the height of the sun and the length of our shadows, and guess we came over the summit about nine o'clock. Hours are more significant than miles on the switchback trails. After a moment of silent calculation,