f the
fact that man's highest pleasure consists in acquiring and intensifying
consciousness. Not the pleasure of knowing, exactly, but rather that of
learning. In knowing a thing we tend to forget it, to convert it, if the
expression may be allowed, into unconscious knowledge. Man's pleasure,
his purest delight, is allied with the act of learning, of getting at
the truth of things, of acquiring knowledge with differentiation. And
hence the famous saying of Lessing which I have already quoted. There is
a story told of an ancient Spaniard who accompanied Vasco Nunez de
Balboa when he climbed that peak in Darien from which both the Atlantic
and the Pacific are visible. On beholding the two oceans the old man
fell on his knees and exclaimed, "I thank Thee, God, that Thou didst not
let me die without having seen so great a wonder." But if this man had
stayed there, very soon the wonder would have ceased to be wonderful,
and with the wonder the pleasure, too, would have vanished. His joy was
the joy of discovery. And perhaps the joy of the beatific vision may be
not exactly that of the contemplation of the supreme Truth, whole and
entire (for this the soul could not endure), but rather that of a
continual discovery of the Truth, of a ceaseless act of learning
involving an effort which keeps the sense of personal consciousness
continually active.

It is difficult for us to conceive a beatific vision of mental quiet, of
full knowledge and not of gradual apprehension, as in any way different
from a kind of Nirvana, a spiritual diffusion, a dissipation of energy
in the essence of God, a return to unconsciousness induced by the
absence of shock, of difference--in a word, of activity.

May it not be that the very condition which makes our eternal union with
God thinkable destroys our longing? What difference is there between
being absorbed by God and absorbing Him in ourself? Is it the stream
that is lost in the sea or the sea that is lost in the stream? It is all
the same.

Our fundamental feeling is our longing not to lose the sense of the
continuity of our consciousness, not to break the concatenation of our
memories, the feeling of our own personal concrete identity, even though
we may be gradually being absorbed in God, enriching Him. Who at eighty
years of age remembers the child that he was at eight, conscious though
he may be of the unbroken chain connecting the two? And it may be said
that the problem for feeling resolv