an supposes himself to
dwell. For him the hare of Reality is always ready-jugged: he
conceives not the living lovely, wild, swift-moving creature
which has been sacrificed in order that he may be fed on the
deplorable dish which he calls "things as they really are." So
complete, indeed, is the separation of his consciousness from the
facts of being, that he feels no sense of loss. He is happy enough
"understanding," garnishing, assimilating the carcass from which
the principle of life and growth has been ejected, and whereof
only the most digestible portions have been retained. He is not
"mystical."

But sometimes it is suggested to him that his knowledge is not
quite so thorough as he supposed. Philosophers in particular have
a way of pointing out its clumsy and superficial character; of
demonstrating the fact that he habitually mistakes his own private
sensations for qualities inherent in the mysterious objects of the
external world. From those few qualities of colour, size, texture,
and the rest, which his mind has been able to register and
classify, he makes a label which registers the sum of his own
experiences. This he knows, with this he "unites"; for it is his
own creature. It is neat, flat, unchanging, with edges well
defined: a thing one can trust. He forgets the existence of other
conscious creatures, provided with their own standards of reality.
Yet the sea as the fish feels it, the borage as the bee sees it, the
intricate sounds of the hedgerow as heard by the rabbit, the
impact of light on the eager face of the primrose, the landscape as
known in its vastness to the wood-louse and ant--all these
experiences, denied to him for ever, have just as much claim to
the attribute of Being as his own partial and subjective
interpretations of things.

Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most
part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin
of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the
infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent. We simply
do not attempt to unite with Reality. But now and then that
symbolic character is suddenly brought home to us. Some great
emotion, some devastating visitation of beauty, love, or pain, lifts
us to another level of consciousness; and we are aware for a
moment of the difference between the neat collection of discrete
objects and experiences which we call the world, and the height,
the depth, the breadth of that l