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Wherever there was opportunity, he stopped and talked, scattering seed-thoughts in the dark minds of the Indians. Wherever he paused a crowd would gather; whenever he entered a wigwam a throng collected at the door. Let us glance for a moment into the domestic life of the Indians as Cecil saw it that morning.
Look at the strong people, how they manage to implant their seed-thoughts in the minds of the masses of the people, thus causing the latter to think thoughts in accordance with the desires and wills of the strong individuals. This is why the masses of people are such sheeplike creatures, never originating an idea of their own, nor using their own powers of mental activity.
We regard it, so far as there is truth in it, as one of those great germinant seed-thoughts, which at long intervals are dropped into the soil of the human mind; and though the mind of the age, in its first impulses of joy, may play wild gambols with it, it is destined in the end to mould and control the thinking of the civilized world.
A palpitant imagination outranks "cold intelligence;" sensation, divorced from all its bearings or functions, is its own excuse for being. Of responsibility, hardly a misty trace; realities are playthings and to be treated allegorically. The step was not a long one to the thesis that "disorder and confusion are the pledge of true efficiency" such being one of the "seed-thoughts" of Novalis.
Of course, the individual who understands the Truth, and who has mentally divorced himself from the fruits of his actions who has robbed material Desire of its vital force by seeing it as it is, and not as a part of his Real Self his seed-thoughts do not spring into blossom and fruit in future lives, for he has killed their germ.
The registry and the charging-desks offer chances for acquaintance to begin naturally and unconsciously and for much incidental imparting of seed-thoughts. And it is in these every-day chances, if appreciated and made the most of, that the work of the children's library is going to tell.
Neither Peter nor Paul stops in the midst of his earnest appeals to men's hearts, in order to give a lecture on Systematic Theology, but both scatter seed-thoughts all over their inspired pages, which are abundant in fruitage to the candid and reflecting mind.
Practically all of his other published works are posthumous: his unfinished novel, Henry of Ofterdingen; a set of religious hymns; the beginnings of a "physical novel," The Novices at Saïs. Novalis's aphoristic "seed-thoughts" reveal Fichte's transcendental idealistic philosophy as the fine-spun web of all his observations on life.
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