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164 by studying a method of putting two and two together which comes to something very much more than a dead numerical result.

This, as I have said, is Nature's way of giving to our investments in life a compound interest. Man throws into life his whole capital, body, soul, and spirit; and as a result of that investment Nature steadily returns to him year by year—not detached portions of his original outlay, but something new and different. Out of every contact between man's energy and Nature's, something new arises. And yet, though new, it is not strange; it has features of familiarity; it is partly his, partly hers; and if his spirit rises above the merely mechanical, it is endeared to him by and derives its fullest value from association. All beautiful work, all work which is of real use and benefit to the community, bears implicitly within it this mark of parentage—of the way it has been come by, through patience, skill, ingenuity, something more intimate and subtle than the dead impenetrable surface of a thing mechanically formed without the accompaniment either of hope or joy.

This creation of new values by association (which you can trace through all right processes of labour) is seen even in things which have very little of human about them.

The germ of its expression is to be found in that simplest of arithmetic propositions to which I have just referred: two and two make—not two twos but four, which is, in