Surcharged and sultry with a power
That works its will on age and hour.

IX. THE OVER-SOUL.

THERE is a difference between one and another hour of life in their
authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is
habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains
us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. For
this reason the argument which is always forthcoming to silence
those who conceive extraordinary hopes of man, namely the appeal to
experience, is for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the
objector, and yet we hope. He must explain this hope. We grant that
human life is mean, but how did we find out that it was mean? What is
the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old discontent? What
is the universal sense of want and ignorance, but the fine innuendo
by which the soul makes its enormous claim? Why do men feel that the
natural history of man has never been written, but he is always leaving
behind what you have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of
metaphysics worthless? The philosophy of six thousand years has not
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its experiments
there has always remained, in the last analysis, a residuum it could not
resolve. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending
into us from we know not whence. The most exact calculator has no
prescience that somewhat incalculable may not balk the very next moment.
I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events
than the will I call mine.

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river,
which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me,
I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of
this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the
attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the
only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we
rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity,
that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained
and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere
conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission;
that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and
constrains every on