ch
takes account only of the personal self; again ascending to the heights of
the impersonal fearlessness and unassailable confidence that is the
heritage of those who have reached the full stature of the "man-god whom we
await"--the cosmic conscious race that is to be.

All commentators upon modern instances of Illumination unite in regarding
Walt Whitman as one of the most, if not _the most_, perfect example of whom
we have any record of cosmic consciousness and its sublime effects upon the
character and personality of the illumined one.

Whitman is a sublime type for reasons which are of first importance in
their relation to character as viewed from the ideals of the cosmic
conscious race-to-be.

Moralists have criticized Whitman as immoral; religionists have deplored
his lack of a religious creed; literary critics have denied his claim to
high rank in the world of literature; but Walt Whitman is unquestionably
without a peer in the roundness of his genius; in the simplicity of his
soul; in the catholicity of his sympathy; in the perfect poise and
self-control and imperturbability of his kindness. His biographers agree as
to his never-failing good nature. He was without any of those fits of
unrest and temperamental eccentricities which are supposed to be the "sign
manual" of the child of the poetic muse.

In Whitman it would seem that all those petty prejudices against any
nationality or class of men, were entirely absent. He exalted the
common-place, not as a pose, nor because he had given himself to that task,
but because to him there was no common-place. In the cosmic perception of
the universe, everything is exalted to the plane of _fitness_. As to the
pure all things are pure, so to the one who is steeped in the sublimity
of Divine Illumination, there is no high or low, no good or bad, no white
or black, or rich or poor; all--all is a part of the plan, and, in its
place in cosmic evolution, it _fits_.

Whitman cries:

"All! all! Let others ignore what they may, I make the poem of evil also, I
commemorate that part also; I am myself just as much evil as good, and my
nation is, and I say there, is in fact no evil."

Compared to the religious aspect of cosmic consciousness in which, previous
to the time of Illumination, the devotee had striven to rise to spiritual
heights through disdaining the flesh, this note of Whitman's is a new
note--the nothingness of evil as such; the righteousness of the flesh and
t