IT was a glorious summer day. The sky was softly blue and the fields and hillsides were white with daisies. Each blossom was exquisite and complete in itself, and yet this particular corner of the world owed its wealth of beauty this summer morn, not so much to the perfection of each individual daisy, although this was a vital requisite, as it did to the great brotherhood or collective mass of snow-capped, golden-centered blossoms.
Immediately I fell to pondering. The botanist knows but one daisy. In viewing these waving fields of thousands of blossoms, he would say, "It is the manifold expression of the one idea." Furthermore, the botanist would know that, although to mortal sight this snowy denizen of the hills and fields appears but for a season, then to be scorched by summer heat and nipped by autumnal frosts, this is not true of the ideal daisy, which is never absent and which reappears to human sense year after year, to reassure poor limited material vision that the flowers, like all things else of beauty and life, are ideas in Mind and therefore cannot be destroyed or permanently obscured.
The botanist's daisy is not subject to heat or cold, is not dependent upon the seasons to give it birth, for it abides in understanding,—tangible, beautiful, depictable, during the long chill days of winter as well as beneath the golden summer sunshine. The botanist, viewing this scene of loveliness, would stoop and pluck a blossom, dissect it, and explain its genus, nature, and characteristics. Then each daisy upon the wide sweeping slopes would suddenly seem to lift its happy little face toward the smiling blue above it, and exclaim,"Behold, I am that daisy!" and nodding toward its neighbors each and all, it would whisper, "And so are you, and you, and you."
