. "Joy," he said,
anticipating Spinosa--that, for the attainment of which men are ready
to surrender all beside--"is but the name of a passion in which the
mind passes to a greater perfection or power of thinking; as grief is
the name of the passion in which it passes to a less."

[106] Looking backward for the generative source of that creative power
of thought in him, from his own mysterious intellectual being to its
first cause, he still reflected, as one can but do, the enlarged
pattern of himself into the vague region of hypothesis. In this way,
some, at all events, would have explained his mental process. To him
that process was nothing less than the apprehension, the revelation, of
the greatest and most real of ideas--the true substance of all things.
He, too, with his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and
sensuous world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would
fain have made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its
struggle for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient
perturbation of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite
things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature
and man, and all that seems most like independent energy, are no more
than petty accidents or affections. Theorem and corollary! Thus they
stood:

"There can be only one substance: (corollary) it is the greatest of
errors to think that the non-existent, the world of finite things seen
and felt, really is: (theorem): for, whatever is, is but in that:
(practical corollary): one's wisdom, therefore, consists in hastening,
so far as may be, the action of those forces which tend to the
restoration of equilibrium, the calm surface of the absolute,
untroubled mind, to tabula rasa, by [107] the extinction in one's self
of all that is but correlative to the finite illusion--by the
suppression of ourselves."

In the loneliness which was gathering round him, and, oddly enough, as
a somewhat surprising thing, he wondered whether there were, or had
been, others possessed of like thoughts, ready to welcome any such as
his veritable compatriots. And in fact he became aware just then, in
readings difficult indeed, but which from their all-absorbing interest
seemed almost like an illicit pleasure, a sense of kinship with certain
older minds. The study of many an earlier adventurous theorist
satisfied his curiosity as the record of daring physical adventure, for
i