The Anæsthetic Revelation

I have made the preceding digest of current philosophy in the hope of familiarizing its mental spectres, and of authenticating if not justifying the halting discomfiture of even the most cultured patients of the anæsthetic revelation. If I have rightly indicated the obstacles and pitfalls which disrupt the course of satisfactory explanation, and have sufficiently emphasized the confessed failures of philosophical endeavor, the reader should foresee that the seemingly promising rubric, “Anæsthetic Revelation,” may forecast rather unutterable Mystery than satisfaction, although our better insight of the dialectic shifts, and the more familiar use of the logical conventions, may clear, to some extent, the mental area in which the Mystery is encountered.

Our hope is not so much to philosophize the Mystery as it is to signalize in it an unequivocal impasse whose obstruction can be neither obviated nor defined—if the confusion of philosophy may attest the fact.

The illumination, or the obsession, which has prompted this treatise, will have rarely arrested the attention of the boor or the bigot; but for the world-wise it will determine as his ultimate and only possible insight of the genius of being and the secret of the world. Any essay upon the anæsthetic (or presumptively any other) revelation, as proposing a detail of what it is or is like, is immediately baffled by the consideration that its topic is and must be unique. It has no class, no relation to any comparable fact or theory whatsoever. Its best remembered impression is the sense of initiation, as into the immemorial, the inevitable, the time-out-of-mind, the something of fate or destiny which, in even justice, at least for once every sane consciousness should realize.

All analogies anticipate the concession that the unique cannot be articulate. Nor does the revelation require for its reception, however it may for its entertainment, the thoughts of language, wherein man excels the beasts of the field. One may be advised of a handicap which the lack of conventional language imposes upon a dumb intelligence, potentially as apprehensive, possibly, as his own.

An English dictionary, with its 2,000 pages, carries some 350,000 different words, of whose meanings the average citizen may know one tenth. Our Indians, of the time of Columbus, may have had 200 words, among which were a few adjectives, but no sign of an abstraction. Conceive then the utter latency—saying nothing of the potentiality—in the Indian mind, of such meanings as memory, objectivity, veracity, heredity, and ten thousand of the like, which were wholly beyond his faculty of expression, or even of focalization in his attention. Under strong emotion he could merely contort his habitually immobile visage, or gesticulate in rude imitation, while his heart might be voluble of an inarticulate and helpless meaning. He could not know, he could not connectedly think, he could not be said to feel the meanings which only culture could educate up to sane and conventional expression, even to himself. Yet the basis for all this exploitation was within him, his birthright as a monad and a soul; he was not a stock or a stone, but counted as one in the spirit world, where even the beast is open to some revelation which in the instant shall carry, however cryptically, the hint of initiation—the hint that Now You Know.

I have wondered at psychology and “natural history,” that they have nowhere noticed or identified what has been long known to me as the voice of the blood. They should have heeded the injunction, to “search the Scriptures.” For centuries ago, when there were cattle upon a thousand hills, and the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and had no abattoirs for slaughtering purposes, they bled the stalled ox and the fatted calf in the open field, and the blood sank directly into the grassy ground, where it must have frequently occasioned the metaphysical phenomenon which I have mentioned as the voice of the blood, so impressively quoted in Genesis, in these words:

“And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?—And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”

The dwellers in cities may live and die with no pathetic suggestion from this incident, they regarding its language as merely poetic and symbolical; but it undoubtedly grew out of a peculiarity well known to every plainsman, and which shall have been observed, however carelessly, by many a farmer’s boy—a peculiarity of the following character: Where the blood of an animal has been freshly shed upon the ground—particularly, in my own experience, the blood of an ox, or of a cow or a calf—any other member of the herd passing over the fatal spot will be arrested and entranced, seemingly by some exhalation from the vital fluid. The animal stares, with a rapt and distracted expression, moaning and pawing the ground, as if in fierce remonstrance, though apparently “more in sorrow than in anger.” This abstraction may last for several seconds; but any noise or intrusion which would ordinarily call attention will break the spell, which, as in the case of “bearing pain,” seems to be instantly gone and forgotten. Having had largely to do with flocks and herds I have witnessed this wonder many times; but after all our Psychical Research I have never seen it in secular print.

I cannot make less of this phenomenon than a revelation, addressed to some atavism of the bovine race, wherein it is as susceptible of the genius of being as man himself has proved it. Of what cataclysm in the history of the creature’s species may not this trance afford a reminiscence. The animal has no formal or consecutive thought, probably, but neither, so far as I have gathered, has the anæsthetic patient, save as an informal memory that baffles recollection.

One may ponder long the manifest elements of animal mentality, as transcending the passive receptivity of native instinct—considering not only how much the dumb creatures may be taught, but how many æsthetic traits they show, in the vanity of play and imitation and rivalry, and how deep and lasting their affections are—before he will attain any clear conception of the metaphysical possibilities of this animal trance, or reverie, or illumination, or whatever it may be called—learn, for instance, if it has any imagination, any hint of palingenesis, or metempsychosis, or any scintil of a past, or of being itself, or fate. Very probably it is the creature’s supreme moment, his nearest relation to what we think of as spiritual life. And it is so pronounced, so wholly unique in scientific metaphysics, that I have come to regard it as the monad’s most palpable connection with an unseen world.

There are various other instinctual obsessions or possessions which lend a superstitious atmosphere to animal life. A cow, when she leaves her calf resting while she roams in pursuit of her own forage, seems to have left a spell upon it that holds it motionless against her return. It will not leave the spot save for some extraordinary and threatening intrusion; but if really driven by some compelling apprehension to escape, it will run as for its life, and recall the mother with frantic and pitiful appeals.

So a brooding hen, however timid has been her previous habits, is so inspired by a courage and loyalty to her eggs—which must not be allowed to cool—that she will not budge for man or beast. We may easily generalize these instances as provisions of nature, and so forth, but they have a mystical appeal.

There is another supreme instant, often noticed of the dying patient—a stare of seeming recognition, as of some wonderful import, just before but distinctly not inclusive with the “setting” of the eyes. We should consent that the meanest creature ever favored with this miracle of consciousness, this flower of all evolution, may well be given, at least for once, a glimpse of history, or some abnormal reality.

And here, again, the most astute and critical may need warning, against any skeptical and peremptory demand upon the mystic, as to what he knows or sees. This what gives the skeptic away, in his naïve presumption that the world-mystery can be of a class, and so comparable and definable. But the basis of all metaphysical insight is the primary fact that being is unique. Until one can identify this logical necessity he is not of the illuminati, although he may be wearing the broadest horns of the herd. He should see that this import cannot be writ on any scroll; he must have the background of its meaning in himself—if indeed he ever may, after our hopeless account, or discount of self-relation. Nevertheless, although we may not profane the one mystery as a topic among others, it seems possible that we should rise to it at our best, and learn that it is a mystery only because we are living on a plane below our best, while its higher sanity is still within the homogeneity of an intelligence which transcends the portals of formal enunciation.

It were manifestly absurd, claiming a “revelation” not amenable to intelligence; but if we may understand Socrates’ proof that Meno’s slave had latent geometry in his mind, or believe that a proud and sulky Indian may be chafing under the pressure of abstractions so easily connoted by us, the reader may at least “believe in” a revelation unique and manageable, and withheld from popular appreciation not only, but instantly unthinkable by the most profound of mental experts. The latter will claim, under his modern lights (which reveal below the “threshold”) that he may live the secret although he has not yet language in which to formulate it, and so hold the world to the rule of reason, pound for pound. But it is peculiarly this flippant and chipper rationality and “matter of course” that the revelation embarrasses and disconcerts. Here is no static accountable equation, but rather a constant excess, and a going on simply because it is going on, in which the natural endeavor to account for itself proves to be of a piece with and continuing the same stuff that it is meant to account for. Strong in the revelation is this sense of an inevitable going on “because of” the curious interest in the fact that it is going on, helplessly and fatedly going on, with a sense of immemorial initiation into the truth that this is the inevitable and eternal world-condition, and however piquant or unique, as what inevitably and of course must be, and ever must have been. There never was a time that did not recognize the presumption of time and the push of its own necessity, and also that any question of its motive was itself a sufficient reason at once for its continuance and for its precedence, but with no relation to a beginning. This is what stultifies the argument for cause: that there is no possibility of a beginning, and therefore no place in which to locate a cause. Above all, it is a revelation of the one truth that is supremely “worth while,” but baffled of content by the too-evident fatuity of turning upon itself to achieve a self-relation—a real self-consciousness, in which concept and percept should unite in a whole cognition.

It is fairly presumptive that thought, newly wrought to its highest tension, should revert with curious interest to its remembered experience (or its self) and be baffled in its attempts at instant self-relation, while realizing at the same time that the effort of understanding is itself continuing (and in a certain sense accounting for) the very activity which arrests its attention—affording a presumption from the past as enforcing time’s continuance.

With this sense of an effort of the soul to turn upon itself for an escaping and unachievable self-knowledge, the anæsthetic insight attests the only presumable or possible first principle of thought and being, namely, fact, philosophy, explanation, “cause”—all this curiosity and discontent, is to get before the fact, to surround and comprehend the fact of consciousness; and it discovers at last that, in a process of factual thought beginning is impossible, and hence fact is a foregone conclusion, or necessary presumption; and since here is everywhere, comprehension is inconceivable save as in this vain and continuous obsession of self-relation, which keeps the Hound of Heaven on his own trail.

“The wonderful thing is fact,” said Carlyle. The gritty Scot was very near to the mystic sanity. And all through German philosophy crops out this desperate and illogical finality of fact, in such sayings as “it is because it is”—using the given fact of knowledge (or of process) as the “cause” of it, and as objectively before it—whereas (as I have laboriously sought to show) the cause is subjectively and miraculously given as the first of facts, and fact (not cause) is the prime reality of being as experience—the given percept which must ground all conception.

Now if this necessary analysis were all—this secular Kantian thought, which thousands of introspective people have revolved as the puzzle and crux of philosophy—our “revelation” would be none such! But the immemorial atavism, the sense of initiation, the voice of the blood, the unique assurance that it is a revelation of the historical and inevitable and the time out of mind—all this admonishes the philosophical parasite that he is not here as a cosmopolitan critic of worlds, with a vocation to put this being in its class, but rather that there is but this; and that, for his once and all, he knows reality. It was a strong saying of William James: “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear: for me the living sense of reality comes only in the artificial-mystic state of mind.”

It should be obvious that a generalization of such an experience—involving as it must all the ancillary shadings of the present tense—would have to be told in tentative and provisional and poetical rather than factual terms. Continuous but reverting, sure and yet questioning, at once real, reminiscent and expectant, the genius of it might well regard sardonically any attempt at its factual expression.

We are not to infer that the status of the world is necessarily weakened or undermined by this interpretation of it as a mystery to us and our philosophy. The spirit still transcends. There is no finite consciousness or conviction that should forestall the cosmic afterthought of our parasital and secondary nature, or authoritatively declare the surd ultimate in itself. We might say that for one as great as the world the world could be reasonable; but if we have any faith in our own judgment there is no such one, nor any such world. The cosmos itself is no unit, but rather an egotistic fetich, which the multiverse shall dissipate and overwhelm.

A proof that the revelation is homogeneous with intelligence at its best tension is, that it rarely follows recovery from the major operations which have required prolonged anæsthesia, and which have doubtless benumbed the reflective faculties of the patient. It attends rather the “coming to” from a trance of but a few moments’ duration, when presumably the mental faculties are still fresh, although under abnormal exhilaration. It is of common knowledge that we think faster and more comprehensively at some times than we do or can at others.

That eminent psychologist, William James, was specially insistent—particularly in view of the notorious trances of Lord Tennyson—that any revelation, however occult, must still be sane, and that there can be no other than the homogeneous intelligence. While he was apt enough to agree that knowledge is unaccountable and insoluble, he could not consent that a really false knowledge might be imposed upon intelligence as such; he “felt” that hypothesis to be contradictory, however deeply the “unknown root” might be buried.

Of course, feeling can be no arbiter of contradiction; and “the prime fact of knowledge,” as Prof. Ladd calls it, cannot be proved or authenticated; we cannot double-think, as Fichte assumed to do, in his doctrine of consciousness as transcending mere sense by a “knowing that you know.” Kant firmly settled the ultimate authority as to knowledge—the canon and last word of human reason and certainty—in the plain “I think”—of course, of the cultivated man. For there is a plenty of error and illusion, which he would not consent to call false thinking, but rather would stoutly hold to be not thinking at all—he having himself determined the only sure method of thought.

Emerson, on the other hand, would seem to have favored the more intuitive confidence of Prof. James. He said: “We know truth when we see it, as we know, when we are awake, that we are awake.” But this is rather high morality than astute metaphysics. (“Truth” is explicitly the condemnation of knowledge; it is a quality of resemblance, not of identity, which last is the only reality of possession. Knowledge cannot realize the life of that which it in fact is not. Truth is a false pretence of the representation of an originality which does not appear in its portrait. In other words, the truth of a mere—i. e. pretended—re-presentation would disqualify the original, as being no more essential than is a copy.)

However, the same self-reliance appears in the consciousness of Tennyson, as shown in an anecdote which has been extensively published, as related by John Tyndall:

Tennyson and Tyndall had been in consultation with “Master” Jowett, of Balliol College, and Tyndall relates that after the Master had retired the poet resumed the previous discussion, which had involved his peculiar trances, and had provoked certain rather cavalier suggestions by the eminent translator of Plato as to their possible illusion. According to Tyndall’s account, Tennyson immediately retorted upon the animadversions of his late guest with the utmost seriousness and (for him at least) extraordinary heat. He said: “By God Almighty, there is no illusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, no confused state, but a condition of transcendent wonder associated with absolute clearness of mind.”

This striking expression—the very ideal of what one must think the announcement of a “mystery” should be—comports perfectly with the definition which the poet vouchsafed to me in 1874, and which, with his implied permission, was widely published at that time. I quote partially this letter:

“Faringford, Freshwater, Isle of Wight,

May 7, 1874.

“Sir:—I have to thank you for your essay. . . .

“It is a very notable sketch of metaphysic, ending yet once more, apparently, in the strange history of human thought, with the placid Buddha, as verified by nineteenth century anæsthetics.

“Although I have a gleam of Kant, I have never turned a page of Hegel—all that I know of him having come to me obiter, and obscurely through the talk of others; nor have I ever rigorously delivered myself to dialectics.

“I have never had any revelations through anæsthetics, but a kind of waking trance—this for lack of a better word—I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable impossibility—the loss of personality (if so 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? But in a moment when I come back to my normal condition of ‘sanity’ I am ready to fight for ‘meine liebes ich,’ and to hold that it will last for æons of æons.”

On page 158 of Vol. 2, of the “Tennyson Memoirs,” is given a previous draft of this letter, found among the laureate’s papers. The first paragraph is nearly identical with the first of this; but the latter part runs to an account of Tennyson’s only occasion of being subjected to anæsthetic treatment and this for a surgical operation. He wrote: “The friend who held my hand and supplied the handkerchief, told me that first of all” (after he came to) “I blurted out a long metaphysical term which he could not reword for me.”

Had Tennyson repeated the experience he would have recalled this expression.

In 1880, Sir William, then Professor, Ramsay, conducted certain experiments upon himself, with anæsthetic agents, chiefly ether, the results of which experience, and others of later date, appeared in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, of 1893–4.

In opening the topic Prof. Ramsay says (in view of the fact that the various anæsthetics afford various kinds of mental effect upon different persons): “On me all anæsthetics produce the same mental state . . . they all produce the same curious delusion.” He had a kind of culture in his process, which in the early stages was oriented by natural preconceptions and habits of thought; but these, ever recurring at first, came gradually to be suppressed and ignored, as he settled into one clear and permanent insight, until at last he ceased to observe them. Of this permanent insight he says: “An overwhelming impression forced itself upon me that the state in which I then was, was reality; that now I had reached the true solution of the secret of the universe, in understanding the secret of my own mind; that all outside objects were merely passing reflections on the eternal mirror of my mind—something quite trivial and transitory. The main and impressive fact for me was that I was self-existent, and that time and space were illusions. This was the real ego, on whose surface ripples of incident arose, to fade and vanish like the waves on a pond. . . . Any remark (of others) wearied me because I had heard it so often before; I conceived a low opinion of the being who could pass his life in saying such a trivial and unimportant thing, and I disdained to answer. . . . I not merely knew that it had happened before, but that I could have predicted that it would happen at that particular moment.”

He speaks: “Absurdly self-conscious all through—every little event so signal and important as eternally the item for this particular instant. I swallow—important. . .this is a stage in the cycle of the universe (all events led up to this). . . Each time I am under the influence of an anæsthetic I am able to penetrate a little further into the unfathomable mystery. The recognition of past stages does much to render the path familiar.” (All this is soliloquy, recorded by his secretary.)

“I do not think that I am a follower of Bishop Berkeley in my ordinary everyday existence; my tendency of mind is by training and by the nature of my daily avocations, to suspend judgment—a condition of scientific skepticism. But under the influence of an anæsthetic all doubts vanish; I know the truth of Berkeley’s theory of existence—that all fellow creatures are products of my consciousness, and that although they may be real to themselves, and have each a world of his own, to me they are only parts of my thoughts, and moreover not very important elements in the chain of my life.

“But the feelings evoked are disappointing. It is not satisfying to realize that the goal of the universe is of this nature. The circumstances are so trivial as to make it painful to believe that this is the scheme of nature; that ‘that far off divine event to which the whole creation moves’ should have in its progress no higher deeds, and for its outcome no nobler aim than I am then conscious of.”

(Observe here how this scientist has then forgotten, in the primordial secret as it is for all, the world of later man’s achievements—the wonders of astronomy and politics and religion and art.)

“My feelings are sometimes those of despair at finding the secret of existence so little worthy of regard. It is as if the veil that hides whence we come, what we are, and what will become of us, were suddenly rent, and as if a glimpse of the Absolute burst upon us. The conviction of its truth is overwhelming, but it is painful in the extreme. I have exclaimed—‘Good heavens! is this all?’ Such impressions, exceedingly difficult to express in words, pass off gradually. After five minutes they begin to fade in intensity; the conviction of their absolute truth is less deep-seated; that there exists an ordinary workaday world, in which I and innumerable others play our parts, is again realized, and in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour the state of mind is again perfectly normal. There is no after impression, and my nerves are as steady as usual.”

(It is to be remembered that these impressions are not crescent in anæsthesia as such, but occur as the effect is passing off. In his experiments Prof. Ramsay kept renewing the dose at intervals of from one or two up to fifteen minutes and then reporting.)

Prof. Ramsay furnished in his account certain notes taken by his secretary, giving some of his exclamations at different stages of his anæsthesia, of which I copy a few. Observe that “the universe” is his constant burthen:

“Everything has recurred before—sense of having been here before . . . the table, mantel, etc., having been always there. . . . This one little piece of enormous coherence of universe—utterly ridiculous in its smallness. . . . Every bit of these events recurred; cycle of events recurring bothers me greatly, because I expect each stage to go further—that is, stage in evolution of the universe. This is the scheme of the universe and my being here, but I never before reached the point of having taken ether before. I will stop short and explain (here he was nearly in his normal state of mind): In the ordinary workaday world this is an untenable theory—I mean the sense of ‘myself alone’—of what affects me—there is a sense of precisely similar events. I believe, as far as I can comprehend, that this is the universe. Here I have recognized the ultimate scheme (genius?) of the universe as far as I am concerned up to a certain stage. It will probably be worked out when I die. Yet that is not the end—I shall go on after that, but to what?” (Resumes the ether.) “Oh, by Jove! Yes, I know: After all it comes to this: It is one or the other theory of the universe, and mine must be the most probable—mine or somebody else’s. Well, I may be the central person in the universe—I don’t mind—I can’t help it. . . . Have I been unconscious for a considerable time? By Jove! if one only knew the whole thing. This may be the truth; it is my own view, and deserves to be known. . . . People choose to imagine that there are worlds—that is to say, build mental cosmogonies. Of course it is an open question, whether other people have existence as well as one’s self. By some chance I am picked out for the central purpose of the universe. In this state of mind quarrels and reconciliations, woes and fears, are no longer the chief things of the universe, but one asks, where does it come from? what is it all for—which is the normal, which is the abnormal state of affairs? When I come back to my sane consciousness I hold the ether state to be abnormal, and vice versa. Of course this is utterly absurd in ordinary life. Now I am sane again—but under ether there is only me.”

Sir William then recalls a work by Sir H. Davy on nitrous oxide, published in 1800, at the end of which is an account of a symposium of twenty-nine persons who took the gas with varying effects, of which he (Sir William) recognized chiefly those upon Sir Humphrey himself. He quotes Davy as follows: “As I recovered my former state of mind I felt an inclination to communicate the discoveries I had made during the experiment. I endeavored to recall the ideas; they were feeble and indistinct. One collection of terms, however, presented itself, and with the most intense belief and prophetic manner I exclaimed to Dr. Kinglake, ‘Nothing exists but thoughts! The universe (sic) is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains.’” Sir William adds: “It is curious that this, with Davy, was an isolated occurrence—with me it was a permanent impression.” It should be remembered, in this regard, that Sir Humphrey was probably the first to discover this effect of modern anæsthetics.

At the conclusion of his paper Sir William offers the following reflections:

“It is somewhat startling to be confronted with an unexpected condition of one’s own mind. The saying ‘in vino veritas’ is, I suppose, intended to imply that an intoxicated person will blurt out the truth; but the intoxication of anæsthetics forces me, while in that condition, to believe that what I think is true. The theory attributed to Bishop Berkeley is a perfectly consistent one, and can be disputed only on grounds of what we call ‘common sense.’ I do not, in my ordinary state of mind, attribute any importance to this theory, beyond regarding it as a somewhat improbable, but incontrovertible speculation; but I confess that, since my experience with anæsthetics, I am disposed to regard it as worthy of a little more consideration than it usually receives. The difficulty in accepting it is our practically absolute certainty of the existence of our fellow creatures; and the deduction that if A and B receive the same impression at the same time, that impression must be caused by some thing, external to both. But in my anæsthetic state this objection presents no difficulty to me; I conceive each ego (monad?) to have its orbit, and to stand absolutely alone, conscious of but uninterfered with by the other egos.”

(Observe that this is his inference, and not his insight—which was of himself as the only centre.)

“To choose a crude illustration: two mirrors reflect, but do not influence each other in any mechanical or material sense. The recollection, which remains after return to the ordinary state of mind, of having had such Berkeleyan views, is, perhaps naturally, not without some influence on the normal mind, and, as I have said, it appears to me not wholly absurd to reconsider the usual postulates of ‘common sense.’ In short, I am confronted under ether, with what I may term ‘recurrent events.’ It is necessary to form some theory which will reconcile myself with this new environment; and the idea that the universe centres itself in one appears to me, while in the anæsthetized state, to be a satisfactory one. The fact remains that, while anæsthetized, my belief in that theory of existence which we may call for short the Berkeleyan hypothesis, is immeasurably more firm and decided than, in my normal state, is my belief in the ordinarily accepted views of matter and motion which regulate the lives of most human beings.”

He finally declares that in giving this account he has been careful to exclude any intimations which might otherwise have lingered in his mind as to experiences of which he had heard or read of others under anæsthetic conditions.

We may remark that Ramsay’s disappointment or disillusion is in the fact that the revelation makes so intensely secular, inevitable and homely what he had before regarded as necessarily sacred and imposing and foreign.

The adumbration of Sir William Ramsay on the seeming inconsequence of the anæsthetic revelation—such as his protest, “Is this all?” etc.—recurs emphatically in the following letter addressed to me in May, 1911, from No. 19 Chester Terrace, Regents Park, N. W. London: “Dear Sir:—It is interesting to find that your experiences under anæsthetics have been similar to mine. I fancy that a good many people are thus affected. I have been at least fifty times. But I don’t think there is anything ‘behind.’ Anyhow, I don’t intend to study it further, for one gets no further by repetition, and I am sure it is bad for the nerves.

“Yours faithfully,

“W. Ramsay.”

This phrase, “anything behind”—doubtless meant to repress any metaphysical expectations from the experience—has for the philosopher a practical significance. There is nothing imminent in it for one whose outlook is expectant of a royal and monistic explanation. If any really great intellectual achievement is to be recorded, I fancy it rather in the Egyptian style, in which England said to Pharaoh, “I will make a man of you”:

Sir William’s depression under the commonplace and secular tone of the world-mystery accords very well with our democratic multiverse, which dispenses with the brazen general Absolute, and the tape-tied Infinite, whose quasi prestige is that it is unlimited; but just therefore it has no definition, and consequently it has no practical use. Perhaps our heavenly expectations have been too prodigious to prove either possible or just. Strictly, we have no right to an opinion about anything. The moment that anything is classed, as “this,” or “the,” it is emasculated of the subjective element, and for idealism cannot be real.

About ten years after the publication of these experiences of Sir William Ramsay there was held a symposium of persons who had been led by his example to test the anæsthetic vision for themselves, at No. 20 Hanover Square, London, June 24, 1904. The gathering comprised representatives of quite distinguished literary and social eminence, and the current discussion of the topic had the advantage of not only frank and ingenuous expression but of scientific and historical criticism. A considerable number of the associates related their individual experiences, which, however various in seemingly temperamental details, fell generally under the summing-up of Mr. Ernest Dunbar, the lecturer of the evening:

“After the first effects of ether have passed off, there comes a time of profound intellectual stimulation, during which the mind reasons with astonishing rapidity, choosing, in some individuals, transcendental lines, appearing to solve, once and for all, the mystery of the universe.”

The hundreds of letters that came to me after the distribution of my pamphlet in 1874 gave a feeling or sentiment indited by Emerson, as if “all the books in the world were written by one man.” An expert knows the hand. Why do we call a certain class of unsophisticated persons “naturals”? The charge carries nothing against them, either moral or intellectual, often quite the contrary, yet they are—simple. (We need not to dwell upon their psychology.) So when we look at a good portrait, we know there was an original behind it, although we may have never seen the party who sat for it: such an artist could not be so depraved as to have misrepresented his subject. Even so with these letters: they all struggle with an ineluctable purport that shames the best definition. I select one that is rather more “literary” than the average:

“I haven’t got what you would call an intellectual memory. Things come to me in flashes out of experience, and pull me up short, and I say to myself, ‘Yes, that’s it—that’s it, I understand; I see why it is so, and what it means, and how far it extends. It is five thousand years old. Adam thought it after Cain killed Abel—or Abel thought it, just before he died—or Eve learned it from Lilith—or it struck Abraham when he went to sacrifice Isaac. Sometimes things like that hit me deep, here in the desert. I can see just over on the horizon the tents of Moab in the wilderness. I feel that yesterday and to-day are the same; that I have crossed the prairies of the everlasting years, and played with Ishmael in the wild hills, and fought with Ahab; and I feel that time and the world are small affairs. You see how it is: I never was trained to think, and I get stunned by thoughts that strike me as from right out of the centre. Sometimes I’d like to write them down, but I can’t write—in fact I can’t think. You’ll know how it is.”

Is not this fine, however tantalized by “cacœthes scribendi”? Here was your poet of the light that fails, of the matter that cannot rise to form. Given the something born but never made—the something that touched Isaiah’s hallowed lips with fire—this fellow might have voiced the intelligible forms of ancient poets and the fair humanities of old religion; he too, like the lost Keats, might have stood with Ruth amid the alien corn, or with stout Cortez and his men, silent upon a peak of Darien. He too—why not? might have sniffed the Paestan gardens, where the air is sweet with violets running wild through broken friezes and fallen capitals:

The reader shall need to consent to this being of genius, however at last we fail of the genius of being. We have read, of those explorers for the Pole, that he who once enters the Arctic dream can never recur, with his former interest, to the temperate vocations of his race; for evermore the loadstone draws him, and evermore his fancy kindles the opaline splendors of the eternal ice. And it is even so with those who have discarded the sensuous limitation of reality, and realized that a comprehension is unthinkable; there is a wanderlust of the monad that is ever tangent from the fabulous One. There is a larger sanity and a surer fixity for the far stars whose orbits know no centre of pluriversal space.

To these experimenters, whose besetting and baffling thought is ever of the “universe,” and again the universe, we may say, You are sane, although, so far as explanation is concerned you are using the wrong words. For holding the revelation strictly to the homogeneity of intelligence, and as due to pure thought at its highest tension, the solipsism that puzzled Ramsay and Tennyson and Davy and so many others is scientific sanity at its best. Until one has realized that his present thought is the ultimate triumph of nature—that all history has led up to this—that all the efficiencies of the universe have resulted in this, and pre-eminently in the criticism of this, as the iris reflected from the highest bubble on the last wave of time, he has not been wholly and truly sane.

Your solid Englishman or German appeals to the great world, and deems the Frenchman extravagant when he calls the universe to witness his exploit; but the French spirit is of the three the most highly generalized; its enthusiasm shows no distraction, however averse to the company of less volatile dispositions. It will rather stay at home than emigrate; your Frenchman belongs in France. He has the deepest sense of national solidarity and fatality, inspiring a financial faith beyond that of other nations. His national debt, which no one cares to have paid—and why should it be, if rightly incurred? was, at the beginning of the world war some five hundred million francs more than the debts of England, Germany and the United States combined.

It shall not be surprising, then, if the high tension of the Gallic spirit appreciates certain æsthetic values, among which a blunder might be worse than a crime, and the angels of high heaven, who weep at man’s fantastic tricks, should be less grieved at the exceeding sinfulness of sin than they are discomfited by the utter fatuity of foolishness and fudge.

(An American, however, can hardly accept any foreigner as the highest æsthetic result. Our mongrel breed has absorbed and submerged all racial peculiarities. An American actor will imitate the speech of any alien people, but on no foreign stage can be heard any attempt to mimic plain United States. This is what Walt called “the tasteless water of souls.”)

The following letter, characteristic of a large class, was sent to me through the kindness of Prof. Hodgson (45 Conduit St. Regent Street, London, January 18, 1883), he having furnished the writer (Edmund Gurney, 26 Montpelier Square, London, S. W.,) a copy of my essay:

“I had this extraordinary experience myself last year, under nitrous oxide, harmonizing with your description; but the result was almost ludicrously disappointing. For half a minute or more after I had ‘come to,’ I was quite sure that the problem was solved and that when I got my breath I could tell the dentist about it, and that it had something to do with time. When I got my breath I found that I could not get it out, then and there; but walking home I meditated an article about it in a philosophical journal. Somehow this conception dwindled in the course of the evening, and my plan reduced itself to a letter to William James, which, however, would (I felt sure) teem with interest; but when, after a few days, I sat about the writing of the letter, there was no more to tell than I have told you.”

Many patients who have recovered from near drowning have reported wonderful reminiscences of their past lives. Probably the pressure of an unusual volume of blood distends the wrinkled and faded palimpsests of the brain, and freshens the field of memory under anxious introspection. And doubtless the exhilaration, of which anæsthesia seems to be or to follow an excess, is still vivifying the mentation of the patient while he is “coming to.” Nor is it surprising that one under high stimulation should be lured to the more poetical regions of his own culture, which for us are apt to be in the historical and sacred past, and to savor of the problems of philosophy.

Dr. Holmes, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” etc., although sharing that contempt for human nature and its manifestations which characterises the medical profession—whose patrons are mostly lying on their backs—was yet thoroughly loyal to the ether revelation as a unique concernment with the universe as the Mystery and the Whole, or as he oftenest said, with Being. I quote a reminiscence of his conversation with Moncure D. Conway, a literary cosmopolite:

“He told me that when ether was discovered he had such reverence for it that he thought it might possess some spiritual virtue, and resolved to experiment on himself to find if it had any psychological effect. He prepared the ether, and having placed beside his bed a small table, with pencil and paper to record his impressions on awakening, he lay down and applied the drug. Sure enough, he presently found himself just sufficiently conscious to seize the pencil, and with a sentiment of vast thought wrote something down. It proved to be these words: ‘A strong scent of turpentine pervades the Whole.’

“But he was not satisfied with that, and made another effort. ‘This time,’ he said, ‘I felt as I wrote that I really had seen the secret of the universe. The words proved to be, ‘Put Jesus Christ into a Brahma press and that’s what you will get.’”

I need hardly remind the serious reader that there was a humorous quirk in the fibre of Dr. Holmes, that was sometimes prejudicial to his really fine genius. As more to our purpose, and in justice to him, I will recall in poor prose a poem of his, entitled “The Parson’s Mare”:

“She was a shambling nag, of unknown antecedents, that had come to the old clergyman in the way of a ‘donation,’ and at the county fair the neighboring boys, for a lark, had brought her, hitched to the parson’s dilapidated sulky, as an entry on the race track, a burlesque to the more pretentious contestants. The managers humorously gave her a place and a start with the rest. . . . But suddenly there was a surprise; the nondescript was forging to the front, and actually setting the pace. The experts were dumbfounded at her. What, in the name of all professionalism, possessed her? Could they but have looked within, and caught her inspiration, the atavism of a long-forgotten record was relighting the vestiges of a great career; it was a palingenesis out of the past. Sometime, somewhere—maybe when the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold—maybe when the warhorse laughed at the shaking of the spear—maybe while the dames of Rome their gilded hair waved to the wind—she had romped the stadium through victorious cheers!—She left them all behind. The confusion was such that her time was not taken (a shrewd omission on the part of the story teller), and having exhaled her inspiration she was led halting back to her stall.”

There is an unpublished supplement to the story, in which it appears that the ill-requited pastor had an authentic record of his shabby assistant, that he had trailed her marauders, and had observed the denouement through a crack in the fence.

Had my issue, in 1874, of “The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” brought no other responses than such as I have quoted here, I should have despaired of the audience on which the fate of the present essay may depend. There are plenty of people who have learned the impossibility of the old-fashioned “truth”—the false pretense of a genuine re-presentation of fact—and have characterized this as “a queer world”—which helps its psychology about as much as does the reminiscence of one who has overeaten of mince pie for supper, and had “a glimpse of his grandmother.” But there are well-practiced experts in the mechanism of thought who have clearly realized in this experience the impasse which halts the logical conception of self-knowledge.

Among the cleverest of these I recall Xenas Clark, a young philosopher of Amherst, who died in the ‘80’s, much regretted. In connection with the anæsthetic revelation he is quoted by James, in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” as follows:

“It is the one sole and sufficient insight why (or not why, but how) the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stopping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past. The real secret would be the formula by which the ‘now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating? The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer—we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a momentum. It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation adds: it goes because it is and was a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, just then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting. The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there)—which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upon the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late—that’s all. ‘You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,’ it says, ‘if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them.’

“The Anæsthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemorial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vortex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent—it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.

“It affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things; but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and intimately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent—as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.

“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directly such a matter of course—so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But no words may express the imposing certainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.

“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formulate its baffling import, with only this consolatory afterthought: that he has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual things.’”

If one had casually asked in an esoteric circle (possibly antedating the incident), “What is the anæsthetic revelation?” this rather ambitious version of Clark would “stand him off,” at least for the moment, as the right psychology of the experience, with little or no claim to any philosophy of it. As for that, so much depends upon one’s viewpoint. I have just now brushed a wandering gnat from my manuscript, smearing the paper, and summarily effacing an ephemeral existence. This little citizen was one of us; yet the Congress will proceed with its enactments; the world war will not be ostensibly affected by its fate. And in a certain large sense it is not “considering too curiously” (as Horatio protested) to adjust our own parasitic humility by the gnat’s unimportance—providing that we do not erase its cosmic significance. For although we and our monuments and our memory are doomed to thus sink out of the sensuous reality of the everywhere-as-here (at which event no autocratic One shall make light of our poor individuality), the fact may remain that all centres are identical (though not co-incident) in this illumination, having each a significant importance and a dignity that gets no shadow from the fabulous and impossible Whole: nay, rather takes on a dynamic originality (if such may be) wherein the monad may strike heroically about him, for good or ill, assuming fearlessly that “the throne and equipage of God’s almightiness” have no deeper nor other realization than his own—that the pluriverse is of many, and that he is at least one, and as good an authority as are innumerable ones.

It was as aiming to reach this position that I arraigned the inconsequence of philosophy, having long observed its failure of any ultimate generalization or comprehension. And although neither have I achieved in thought any masterful conception of the dream which we inhabit, I feel that by eliminating the needless task of impossible comprehension and beginning, and more determinately orienting inward the path of explanation, I have brought to bear upon this anæsthetic expression a criticism of philosophy as the soul’s endeavor to envisage itself, and to adjust itself to an environment which, however to be admonished of a due humility, this insight cannot forego.

Not that I am expecting from this orientation of thought more determinately inward—as in fact it is modernly disposed—any clearer solution of the classic problems of philosophy. The microscope and the telescope alike fail of finality or ultimate limitation; the Midst is everywhere. Although the Many evaporate and disenchant the mystical One, as an outwardly objective expectation, still the infinitesimal route is as well bottomless as “the infinite” is indefinite. These are all scientific facts; and it were an idle and impudent esoteric pretension that the anæsthetic insight affords a clearance of them. If it were a revelation in that sense the reader might fairly demand what it is, while the proponent is merely trying to indicate where it is to be encountered. There is no pretense in our treatise of philosophising either this or anything else.

That there might have been a world of dead fact is a supposition comparatively easy to us; but when we add to the fact a knowledge of it, and are driven by idealism and solipsis to assume that the knowledge, so far as we are concerned, determines the nature of the fact, there results a convolution and confusion which a modest citizen may confess himself to not quite understand. But that these conditions culminate abnormally in the anæsthetic experience (still possibly as mere sanity at its best) only a negligible bigotry should hereafter deny.

It was said of old, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I shall not further arraign the translations of the Vulgate; suffice it that in the most critical usage the word “fear,” above, means a reverent cognition, which can only by implication carry a punitive inference. But surely, however the heart of the monad may be coincident with the only possible centre, and send its pulses through the pose of Ajax (who in our day would need only a rubber suit for his defiance of the lightning), we must perceive that as a transient visitor his rôle is one of humility, as in so large a sense ancillary and dependent. He has ample ground for reverence; and though he may conclude that no personal one is comprehensively all-important or controlling in the multiverse—and that all notions of beginning and cause are but shadows cast by the rims of his finite binoculars—it is a transcendent necessity of spirit to declare and wonder at this, and to regard it as so far One, and a wonder or miracle into which his entrance is attended by a sense of initiation as strong and definite as if some “all obliterated tongue” had warned him, in the voice of a common fate, Now You Know!

Doubtless there is a Mystery, but it must not stigmatize reality; the mystery is on our side of the fact. Despite Schwegler’s “certain existent unreason,” it were the height of presumption on our part to proclaim the ultimate surd. The factual world needs no such accounting for, in itself, as we need for it. We are late, we are ephemeral, and mainly inconsequent; yet the fact that the mystery is in our own incompetence only lends dignity and charm to its revelation, and to our initiation into a prestige supremely worth while. Even though by great progress we should come to a stage where this insight would be normal—and why not, since even now, if we cared, we could wire the round earth, and whisper into our own ears?—yet let it become commonplace, scientific, secular where now it is comparatively sacred, still in the culture of the newcomer it must ever be what Clark characterized as “an initiation of the past.”

The revelation, for us, is of sanity at its utmost tension and interest, realizing at once the effort and the fatuous incongruity and impossibility of self-vision, and having a clear and unquestionable consciousness that this condition and this effort realize the genius of being, and effect the process of time; but above all is a sense of admonition—perhaps an after-glow from our religious associations—that this is the secret of the world, inevitably such; no other account of it can be mentionable in the same connection.

I have to reiterate that this clear vision has nothing to do with philosophy. It stands alone, “like Adam’s recollection of his fall.” What we intend by “the genius of being” has no relation to the empirical facts of the world, nor to any purpose or process of “life.” The problems of metaphysics—the reconciliation of the static and dynamic viewpoints, the question as between a sufficient and managing intelligence and a fated collocation of monads and atoms, or as between a comprehended one or whole and an unlimited diversity of ones which carry the prime secret each at its own centre—all this is as nothing in the transcendent solipsis where the Monad is the only One. The rest are the things which are Cæsar’s.

We have now to gather up the dangling threads of our story, and knot them for a religion and a life;—hoping that the fasces may have a consistency and strength which may not have been apprehensible in the individual shafts; and that the fond monism that we have dialectically disparaged may be at least transcendentally and mystically rehabilitated. Our essay would be wholly impertinent (as possibly it is in any event) if it did not so far countenance the professorial obsession as to regard the world as this, and this one, at least as a topic for discourse—such discourse, maybe, as Emerson satirised as “puss and her tail.”

The pretensions of professional philosophy have been heartlessly disingenuous. Even with Fichte, they were oriented less toward a livable faith than to a triumphant demonstration of the ignorance in which faith habitually reposes. Your even Christian does but dream of the contradictions involved in what he calls “the truth.”

Firstly then, our philosophical curiosity arises as to the world’s beginning and its making; for we ourselves begin, and we do some making, and we naturally assume that the world at large should have such an accounting for—all the time forgetting that any objective thing accounting for it would have the same mystery as involves the thing itself, and serve to merely postpone or push back its “reason”—which must be in us if anywhere, and not otherwise required; i. e., the secret of a creation can be realized only in our own actually creating; to see the fact as being done were not to detect the motive force employed. Wherefore the saying, “the reason of things is reason.”

Here the vulgar psychology comes in, and claims the whole secret of so simple an effect as the reason of reason, in the self-relation of consciousness—the “prime fact” that such is knowledge that it knows itself, and is its own ground and reason—showing the basic principle of all explanation and all being. But we have sufficiently shown that self-relation as a theory is not a philosophy or a logical account of our inspired thought and will.

Nevertheless all our advices from the anæsthetic field—and especially such as that of Xenas Clark—show that sanity at its highest tension (and interest) not only inheres in but evolves by a curiosity and effort for self-knowledge, never dreaming that it is but an orifice of the supernal deep—a mouthpiece or mask, to be sure, but the supernal has no other voice; the monad is your only one; for no man hath seen God at any time, save as the Son hath personated him.

(We should connote here the solipsism of Ramsay and Tennyson; for the world is full of worlds, as many as there are organisms; and to whom a thing appears, that thing is.)

But now, for a life, we turn back from philosophy, as from the green-eyed jealousy which makes the meat that it feeds upon, to the psychology of Jesus. Dropping all theological controversy as such, and listening only to the voice of experience and common sense, is it not pragmatically true that every creature is secondary and inspired, regardless of his instant conceit of originality—and yet more profoundly regardless of the mystery that in that conceit may lurk the only hope of ultimate and divine explanation?

Said Hegel: “It is truer to say not that we think, but that thinking goes on with us.”

Every breath that we voluntarily draw is, in the cosmic sense, an irrelevant interference with divine providence. We have no need to do it; with or without our volition it will be done; and the determination not to do it—which would be in the least violent method of suicide—is one that nature most essentially abhors. We have no account of any man succeeding in such an attempt, although many have thus experimented.

Have we not here, in this insistence of nature, the occult basis of that admonition of the Master, to take no thought for the morrow, nor for what we shall eat or drink, nor for wherewithal we shall be clothed? How shall a man’s sins of the past be remitted in the divine assumption of their responsibility; unless it shall be equally true of the present that our heart-strings are in divine hands, and that our native impulses are entitled to the secondthought of God with us?

But this taking no thought for the morrow, and the rendering unto Cæsar of the things which are Cæsar’s, require transcendental interpretation. Of course one shall take thought, lest he starve, or walk into the fire. These things will be according to intention, and faith without works is dead; but to intend them in the expectation of impunity were to “tempt the Lord, thy God.” But there should be obvious here the possibility of a serene composure, as of a double nature, at once active and passive, that should advance with a lofty courage, subject only to the categorical imperative of its better self, as interpreting all the divinity that concerns it.

What is hardest to express, or to believe that one has expressed, in this connection, is the unique fact which I have again and again reiterated, that it is a revelation—the revelation of the genius of being. When this in its turn is made a topic for criticism and gossip, and the assured and busied commonsense retorts that one knows as much as another about that; or when the metaphysical expert recalls the dialectic difficulties of knowledge trying to know itself, or of a becoming that continues with only becoming for its result, or of a quasi-reality between a future and a past—then the inveterate skeptic must have his fling: These puzzles, which philosophy has mumbled over for thousands of years, are in your tenser ideation only more emphatically intricated—i. e. you are more aghast at the Mystery which still baffles definition—else why not define it? There needs no ghost come from the grave to proclaim the Mystery; any pretense of a revelation should rationalize and resolve it. In brief, wherein are you didactically the wiser for it, as an instant generalization of the classic problems of philosophy?

Now, humbly begging pardon, philosophy has had heretofore no such generalization as is here so superiorly announced. I would respectfully recall the animadversion of William James, that there is no complete generalization, whether in theory or in fact, for us; I have but added my own conclusion that there can be none such for any one. (The notion of a finite God, if not utterly preposterous, is incongruous at its best.)

As Dr. Johnson remarked to the aspiring youth who sought his advice as to the best dictionary, “either of them is good enough for you,” so this treatise, which, eliminating monism, comprehension and self-relation, should clear the haze of what has been called philosophy, may well prove, if not a revelation, at least a clarification to the average student, especially if his culture has utilized the regretful sentence of Herr Eucken that philosophy as a pursuit has failed.

But all this pseudo disparagement or deprecation and quasi-explanation of the classic Mystery drifts idly over the weird and solemn consciousness—“clearest of the clearest, surest of the surest, weirdest of the weirdest”—of an intimate and personal relation to the Inevitable, whose continuance is in and through its wondrous appreciation of its own precedence and consequent necessity.

I have tried often, but cannot come nearer to the Anæsthetic Revelation. But what then? It is no fad or bantling of mine. On the contrary, as Sir William Ramsay noticed, many people have encountered it, and like Edmund Gurney have passed it as unthinkable in set terms—without which we can neither know nor remember. But the boasted progress of the race will be shamelessly inadequate if we have come to a time when the historical secret which philosophy has coveted is empirically accessible, only to be inconsequently neglected.

After this, our best (however unsatisfactory) pronouncement, the persistent reiteration, “What is your revelation?” or, “What is it about?” is in bad form—a kind of counting of the spoons. Knowing is the soul’s all, whether in her birth, her bridal, her business or her vacation. Man fell for knowledge. Knowing is the excellence and the ecstasy of being; it is everything, to be—a constant gratulation over what is not, or is potentially or conjecturally. It is investiture in the purple, in the divine right, and it is sufficient in itself.

And now inexorable Time admonishes me to have done with this world. I am thankful at having seen the show; and although, after eighty-five years, the stars are flickering slightly, and the winds are something worn, I am still clear and confident in that religion of courage and content which cherishes neither regrets nor anticipations.

Yet one little dream I would have come true: Somewhere, anywhere, though hopefully at some not-unfrequented garden-side, my dust, with its “all-obliterated tongue,” should seem to inspire the legend—low by the veiling grass, but cut deep into enduring stone:

greeting—if thou hast known!