lly
intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is
the Self) and the object in the foreground, whatever it may be. I must
refer the reader to the highly instructive article, which seems to me
to throw light upon the psychological conditions, though it fails to
account for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in
the Subject's eyes.

"Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which
sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise,
sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the
mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a
tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the
shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my
vision ranging through the Milky Way;--such grand and spacious,
immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one
owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our
thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes
with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the
ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; ... instants of
irresistible intuition in which one feels one's self great as the
universe, and calm as a god.... What hours, what memories! The
vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and
enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost."[238]

[238] Op cit., i. 43-44

Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German
idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug:--

"I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me,
liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant
days in the Alps of Dauphine, I was impelled to kneel down, this time
before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I
prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really
is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the
consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that
passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and
sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if
the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt
myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting:
'Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.'"[239]

[239] Memoiren einer Idealistin, Ste Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For