The intellect has at last again got to work upon thought:  too long fascinated by matter and prisoned to motive geometry, genius—­wisdom seem once more to have become human, to have put on man, and to speak with divine simplicity.  Kosmon, Sophon, again welcome! your journey is well-timed; Christian, my young friend, of whom I have often written to you, this morning tells me by letter that to-day he will pay me his long-promised visit.  You, I know, must rejoice to meet him:  this interchange of knowledge cannot fail to improve us, both by knocking down and building up:  what is true we shall hold in common; what is false not less in common detest.  The debateable ground, if at last equally debateable as it was at first, is yet ploughed; and some after-comer may sow it with seed, and reap therefrom a plentiful harvest.

Sophon. Kalon, you speak wisely.  Truth hath many sides like a diamond with innumerable facets, each one alike brilliant and piercing.  Your information respecting your friend Christian has not a little interested me, and made me desirous of knowing him.

Kosmon. And I, no less than Sophon, am delighted to hear that we shall both see and taste your friend.

Sophon. Kalon, by what you just now said, you would seem to think a dearth of original thought in the world, at any time, was an evil:  perhaps it is not so; nay, perhaps, it is a good!  Is not an interregnum of genius necessary somewhere?  A great genius, sun-like, compels lesser suns to gravitate with and to him; and this is subversive of originality.  Age is as visible in thought as it is in man.  Death is indispensably requisite for a new life.  Genius is like a tree, sheltering and affording support to numberless creepers and climbers, which latter die and live many times before their protecting tree does; flourishing even whilst that decays, and thus, lending to it a greenness not its own; but no new life can come out of that expiring tree; it must die:  and it is not until it is dead, and fallen, and rotted into compost, that another tree can grow there; and many years will elapse before the new birth can increase and occupy the room the previous one occupied, and flourish anew with a greenness all its own.  This on one side.  On another; genius is essentially imitative, or rather, as I just now said, gravitative; it gravitates towards that point peculiarly important at the moment of its existence; as air, more rarified in some places than in others, causes the winds to rush towards them as toward a centre:  so that if poetry, painting, or music slumbers, oratory may ravish the world, or chemistry, or steam-power may seduce and rule, or the sciences sit enthroned.  Thus, nature ever compensates one art with another; her balance alone is the always just one; for, like her course of the seasons, she grows, ripens, and lies fallow, only that stronger, larger and better food may be reared.

Kalon. By your speaking of chemistry, and the mechanical arts and sciences, as periodically ruling the world along with poetry, painting, and music,—­am I to understand that you deem them powers intellectually equal, and to require of their respective professors as mighty, original, and human a genius for their successful practice?