Unity of Being.

But these Thoughts are not my thoughts; they eddy through my mind like
scraps of old paper, or withered leaves in the wind. What I really feel
is the survival of a much more primitive mood--a view of the world which
dates indeed from before the invention of language. It has never been
put into literature; no poet has sung of it, no historian of human
thought has so much as alluded to it; astronomers in their glazed
observatories, with their eyes glued to the ends of telescopes, seem to
have had no notion of it.

But sometimes, far off at night, I have heard a dog howling it at the
Moon.

THE ALIEN

The older I grow, the more of an alien I find myself in the world; I
cannot get used to it, cannot believe that it is real. I think I must
have been made to live on some other Star. Or perhaps I am subject to
hallucinations and hear voices; perhaps what I seem to see is delusion
and doesn't happen; perhaps people don't really say the things I think I
hear them saying.

Ah, some one ought to have told me when I was young, I should certainly
have been told of the horrible songs that are sung in drawing-rooms;
they ought to have warned me about the great fat women who suddenly get
up and bellow out incredible recitations.

HYPOTHESES

I got up with Stoic fortitude of mind in the cold this morning; but
afterwards, in my hot bath, I joined the school of Epicurus. I was a
Materialist at breakfast; after it an Idealist, as I smoked my first
cigarette and turned the world to transcendental vapour. But when I
began to read the _Times_ I had no doubt of the existence of an external
world.

So all the morning and all the afternoon opinions kept flowing into and
out of the receptacle of my mind; till, by the time the enormous day was
over, it had been filled by most of the widely-known Theories of
Existence, and then emptied of them.

THE ARGUMENT

This long speculation of life, this thinking and syllogising that always
goes on inside me, this running over and over of hypothesis and surmise
and supposition--one day this infinite Argument will have ended, the
debate will be forever over, I shall have come to an indisputable
conclusion, and my brain will be at rest.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MORE TRIVIA***

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