Towards democracy

A Note — 515

passing clouds of desire, fear, and all ordinary thought and Semotion; in that sense another and separate faculty ; and as yvision always means a sense of light, so here is a sense of liinward light, unconnected of course with the mortal eye, but dbringing to the eye of the mind the impression that it sees, and dby means of a medium which washes as it were the intertor asurfaces of all objects and things and persons—how can I express it?—and yet this is most defective, for the sense is 2a sense that one zs those objects and things and persons that 9one perceives, (and even that one is the whole universe, )sense in which sight and touch and hearing are all fused in jidentity. Nor can the matter be understood without realising j that the whole faculty is deeply and intimately rooted on the 1 far side of the moral and emotional nature, and beyond the 7 thought-region of the brain.

_ And now with regard to the ‘‘I” which occurs so freely in } this book. In this and in other such cases the author is 1 naturally liable to a charge of egotism—and I personally do 1 not feel disposed to combat any such charge that may be t made, That there are mere egotisms and vanities embodied i in these pages I do not for a moment doubt ; and that so far 2 as they exist they mar the expression and purpose of the book | I also do not doubt. But the existence of these things does 1_not affect the real question: What or Who in the main is the I” spoken of?

2] do not know any description in its way better that one attributed to Tennyson :—‘‘ All at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the con; sciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and | fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the ) clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words,

where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality

—if sa it were—seeming no extinction but the only true life. I am ; ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly | beyond words?” Compare also his poem, ‘‘ The Ancient Sage.”

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