is evolved a sublime phenomenon: the
soul growing vast through its sense of wonder. A reverent fear is
peculiar to man; the beasts know no such fear.

His intelligence becomes conscious in this august terror of its own
power and its own weakness.

Darkness has unity, hence arises horror; at the same time it is complex,
and hence terror. Its unity weighs on the spirit and destroys all desire
of resistance. Its complexity causes us to look around on all sides;
apparently we have reason to fear sudden happenings. We yield and yet
are on guard. We are in presence of the whole, hence submission; and of
the many, hence defiance.

The unity of darkness contains a multiple, a mysterious
plurality--visible in matter, realised in thought. Silence rules all;
another reason for watchfulness.

Night--and he who writes this has said it elsewhere--is the right and
normal condition of that special part of creation to which we belong.
Light, brief of duration here as throughout space, is but the nearness
of a star. This universal, prodigious night does not fulfil itself,
without friction, and all such friction in such a mechanism means what
we call evil. We feel this darkness to be evil, a latent denial of
divine order, the implicit blasphemy of the real rebelling against the
ideal. Evil complicates, by one knows not what hydra-headed monstrosity,
the vast, cosmic whole.

Everywhere it arises and resists.

It is the tempest, and hinders the hastening ship; it is chaos, and
trammels the birth of a world. Good is one; evil is ubiquitous. Evil
dislocates the logic of Life. It causes the bird to devour the fly and
the comet to destroy the planet. Evil is a blot on the page of creation.

The darkness of night is full of vertiginous uncertainty.

Whoso would sound its depths is submerged, and struggles therein.

What fatigue to be compared to this contemplation of shadows. It is the
study of annihilation.

There is no sure hold on which the soul may rest. There are ports of
departure, and no havens for arrival. The interlacing of contradictory
solutions; all the branches of doubt seen at a glance; the ramifications
of phenomena budding limitlessly from some undefined impulse; laws
intersecting each other; an incomprehensible promiscuity causing the
mineral to become vegetable; the vegetable to rise to higher life;
thought to gather weight; love to shine and gravitation to attract; the
immense range presented to view by all questi