der which we too
have glimpsed. Love, hope, pain, sorrow, disappointment, often
effect that momentary purgation which enables consciousness to
function independently of the tyrant will. These hours have for us a
noetic value--"some veil did fall"--revealing visions remembered
even unto the hour of death.

"DEATH"

That "failure of attention to life" which begets inspiration in the
man of genius comes, indeed, daily to every one, but without his
being able to profit by it. For what is sleep but a failure of
attention to life--so complete a failure that memory brings back
nothing save that little caught in the net of dreams--yet even this
little is so charged with creative energy as to give rise to the
saying that every man is a genius in his dreams.

Death also is a failure of attention to life, the greatest that we
know, and poorest therefore in plunder from supernatural realms.
Nevertheless reports of persons who have narrowly escaped death give
evidence at least that to those emancipated by death, life, viewed
from some higher region of space, is perceived as a unity. When a
man is brought face to face with death, the events of life pass
before the mind's eye in an instant, and he comes from such an
experience not only with deeper insight into himself, but into the
meaning and purpose of life also. The faces of the dead, those
parchments where are written the last testament of the departed
spirit, bear an expression of solemn peace, sometimes of joy,
sometimes of wonder: terror and agony are seldom written there, save
when the fatal change comes in some painful or unnatural way.

THE PLAY OF BRAHM

Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death--these things we
say are _irrational_, and so in a sense they are. Bergson has
compared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of a
cinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion by
flashing upon the screen a correlated series of _fixed_ images. In
like manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it to
consciousness part by part, but never as a whole. In supernormal
states however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrier
life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and
therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness.
Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances,
in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Might
it not be perceived as a repre