los, which gradually colour the total content of consciousness; they
live each in the bosom of his fellow.

"I am the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of
his statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as
soon as observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact.
In a passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in
a ray of moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams.
A thought, a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas,
my sensations, are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the
multiple unity of the ego did not present the essential characteristic
of vibrating in its entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried
or rather determined in it by analysis? All physical determinations
envelop and imply each other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul
is thus present in its entirety in each of its acts, its feelings,
for example, or its ideas in its sensations, its recollections in its
percepts, its inclinations in its obvious states, is the justifying
principle of metaphors, the source of all poetry, the truth which
modern philosophy proclaims with more force every day under the name of
immanence of thought, the fact which explains our moral responsibility
with regard to our affections and our beliefs themselves; and finally,
it is the best of us, since it is this which ensures our being able
to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly, and this which
constitutes the real unity of our person.

Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we
are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape,
where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the
darkness which ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail
us. Words are useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their
mysterious task like an invisible shiver of running water through the
mossy shadow of the caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon
myself to the delight of being a pulsing reality. I no longer know
whether I see scents, breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I
think? The question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete
self, each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which
is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have resumed
contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits no form