ght in minds
perhaps at a great distance? Is there nation-wide multiform reverie, every
mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and
reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dumb the
lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, and yet one could never
say which was man and which was shadow, or how many the shadows that he
cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers,
bound together by these parallel streams or shadows; that Unity of Image,
which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol?

From the moment when these speculations grew vivid, I had created for
myself an intellectual solitude, most arguments that could influence
action had lost something of their meaning. How could I judge any scheme
of education, or of social reform, when I could not measure what the
different classes and occupations contributed to that invisible commerce
of reverie and of sleep; and what is luxury and what necessity when a
fragment of gold braid, or a flower in the wallpaper may be an originating
impulse to revolution or to philosophy? I began to feel myself not only
solitary but helpless.

IV

I had not taken up these subjects wilfully, nor through love of
strangeness, nor love of excitement, nor because I found myself in some
experimental circle, but because unaccountable things had happened even in
my childhood, and because of an ungovernable craving. When supernatural
events begin, a man first doubts his own testimony, but when they repeat
themselves again and again, he doubts all human testimony. At least he
knows his own bias, and may perhaps allow for it, but how trust historian
and psychologist that have for two hundred years ignored in writing of the
history of the world, or of the human mind, so momentous a part of human
experience? What else had they ignored and distorted? When Mesmerists
first travelled about as public entertainers, a favourite trick was to
tell a mesmerised man that some letter of the alphabet had ceased to
exist, and after that to make him write his name upon the blackboard.
Brown, or Jones, or Robinson would become upon the instant, and without
any surprise or hesitation, Rown, or Ones, or Obinson.

Was modern civilisation a conspiracy of the sub-conscious? Did we turn
away from certain thoughts and things because the Middle Ages lived in
terror of the dark, or had some seminal illusion been imposed