The ideal vision which they see arising out of the actual is for them so illuminated, as though by a kind of limelight, that the details of the actual, thrown into comparative obscurity, either cannot be minutely distinguished by them, or, like the words of an unwelcome talker, cannot fix their attention.

Without habitual concentration of the attention on the subject-matter with which reason deals, no reasoning can deal with it to any practical purpose; and men of that class from which socialists of the higher kind are recruited, are men who fail to understand the modern industrial process, because they are hindered by their temperament from giving a sufficient attention to its details.

They derive from them vivid impressions, but no practical knowledge, like Turner when he painted a train swathed in its own vapour, and flushing the wet air with the fires of its lamps and furnace.

From a study of Turner's picture of "Rain, Steam, and Speed," it would be impossible for any human being to conjecture how a locomotive was constructed.

It would be still more impossible to form any judgment as to how its slide-valves, or its blast, or the tubes of its boiler might be improved.