he nightfall, and takes the dim leagues
with a fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this
experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I
renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know--as having
known--the meaning of Existence: the sane centre of the universe-- at
once the wonder and the assurance of the soul--for which the speech of
reason has as yet no name but the Anaesthetic Revelation." --I have
considerably abridged the quotation.

This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A.
Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as
follows:--

'After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a
state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light,
alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on
in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was
near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was
manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense
personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon
me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually
awoke from the influence of the anaesthetics, the old sense of my
relation to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to
God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I
was sitting, and shrieked out, 'It is too horrible, it is too horrible,
it is too horrible,' meaning that I could not bear this
disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke
covered with blood, calling to the two surgeons (who were frightened),
'Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?' Only think of
it. To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very
God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then
to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been
tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.

"Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of
reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from
without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a
delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that
moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the
undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?"[235]

[235] Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it,
another int