has become to them so sweet a
thing that the infatuation has seemed to the rest of their fellows to be a
celestial madness. Beggars' rags to their unhesitating lips grew fit for
kissing, because humanity had touched the garb; there were no longer any
menial acts, but only welcome services.... Remember by how much man is the
subtlest circumstance in the world; at how many points he can attach
relationships; how manifold and perennial he is in his results. All other
things are dull, meager, tame beside him."[69]

It may be added that even if we still believe that lover and artist and
saint are drawing the main elements of their conceptions from the depths
of their own consciousness, there is a sense in which they are coming
nearer to the truth of things than those for whom their conceptions are
mere illusions. The aptitude for realizing beauty has involved an
adjustment of the nerves and the associated brain centers through
countless ages that began before man was. When the vision of supreme
beauty is slowly or suddenly realized by anyone, with a reverberation that
extends throughout his organism, he has attained to something which for
his species, and for far more than his species, is truth, and can only be
illusion to one who has artificially placed himself outside the stream of
life.

In an essay on "The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life," Edward
Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well
states the matter: "The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance
face, a chance outline, amid the most banal surroundings. But it
gives the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminiscence. The
mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within,
and there rises into consciousness a shining form, glorious, not
belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of
humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams. The waking of
this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a
goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of
his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the
world is changed." "He sees something" (the same writer continues
in a subsequent essay, "Beauty and Duty") "which, in a sense, is
more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something
that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of
the race; something which has been one of the great forma