gion though they fail to give a map. At
any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of
insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical
significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is
as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict
make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not
only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus,
but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus,
and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark
saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I
cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean
something, something like what the hegelian philosophy means, if one
could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear,
let them hear; to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the
artificial mystic state of mind.[233]

[233] What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected
Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his
whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his
consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept
subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical
level and the Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's
intellect by mystical feeling.

I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anaesthetic revelation.
For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the OTHER in its
various forms appears absorbed into the One.

"Into this pervading genius," writes one of them, "we pass, forgetting
and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no
higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded.
'The One remains, the many change and pass;' and each and every one of
us IS the One that remains.... This is the ultimatum.... As sure as
being--whence is all our care--so sure is content, beyond duplexity,
antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God
is not above."[234]

[234] Benjamin Paul Blood: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made
several attempts to adumbrate the anaesthetic revelation, in pamphlets
of rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by
hi