nd obscenity
about both pain and pleasure when in their voracious maw they devour
the magic of the unfathomable world. Thus it may be noted that most
great and heroic souls hold their supreme pain at a distance from
them, with a proud gesture of contempt, and go down at the last
with their complex vision unruffled and unimpaired. There is indeed
a still deeper "final moment" than this; but it is so rare as to be
out of the reach of average humanity. I refer to an attitude like that
of Jesus upon the cross; in whose mood towards his own suffering
there was no element of "pride of will" but only an immense pity for
the terrible sensitiveness of all life, and a supreme heightening of
the emotion of love towards all life.

It will be noted that in my analysis of "sensation" I have said
nothing of what are usually called "the five senses." These senses
are obviously the material "feelers" or the gates of material
sentiency by which the soul's attribute of sensation feeds itself from
the objective world; but they are so penetrated and percolated,
through and through, by the other basic activities of the soul, that it
is extremely difficult to disentangle from our impressions of sight,
of sound, of touch, of taste, and of smell, those interwoven threads
of reason, imagination and so forth which so profoundly modify and
transmute, even in the art of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and
smelling, the various manifestations of "the objective mystery"
which we apprehend in our sensuous grasp.

By emphasizing the feelings of pleasure and pain as the primary
characteristics of the attribute of sensation we are indicating the
fact that every sensation we experience carries with it in some
perceptible degree or other, the feeling of "well-being" or the
feeling of distress.

We now come to consider that dim, obscure, but nevertheless
powerful energy, which the universal tradition of language dignifies
by the name of "instinct." This "instinct" is the portion of the
activity of the soul which works more blindly and less consciously
than any other.

The French philosopher Bergson isolates and emphasizes this
subterranean activity until it seems to him to hold in its grasp a
deeper secret of life than any other energy which man possesses To
secure for instinct this primary place in the panorama of life it is
necessary to eliminate from the situation that silent witness which
we call "the mind" or self-consciousness; that witness