hbor, and hast known him not, being blind.
Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this
illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in
all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's
power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive
and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness
and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to
the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found,
endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as
the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in
thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and
then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_
that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]

[E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
(abridged).

* * * * *

This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had
realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person
suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As
Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion
of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a
remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human
natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that
had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.--It was dark and rather
cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by
some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was
there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This
unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in
me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made
me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never enclose in a
conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this
form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
feels, but