eral, so am
I now not only firm and familiar in this once weird condition, but
triumphant, divine. To minds of sanguine imagination there will be a
sadness in the tenor of the mystery, as if the key-note of the universe
were low; for no poetry, no emotion known to the normal sanity of man,
can furnish a hint of its primeval prestige, and its all-but appalling
solemnity; but for such as have felt sadly the instability of temporal
things there is a comfort of serenity and ancient peace; while for the
resolved and imperious spirit there are majesty and supremacy
unspeakable. Nor can it be long until all who enter the anaesthetic
condition (and there are hundreds every secular day) will be taught to
expect this revelation, and will date from its experience their
initiation into the Secret of Life. . . .

"This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my
first printed mention of it I declared: 'The world is no more the alien
terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry
battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull
lifts her wing against the night fall, and takes the dim leagues with a
fearless eye.' And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience,
the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and
doubly emphasize that declaration. I know, as having known, the
meaning of Existence; the sane centre of the universe--at once the
wonder and the assurance of the soul."

After this rather literary interlude I return to Blood's philosophy
again. I spoke a while ago of its being an "irrationalistic"
philosophy in its latest phase. Behind every "fact" rationalism
postulates its "reason." Blood parodizes this demand in true
nominalistic fashion. "The goods are not enough, but they must have
the invoice with them. There must be a _name_, something to _read_. I
think of Dickens's horse that always fell down when they took him out
of the shafts; or of the fellow who felt weak when naked, but strong in
his overcoat." No bad mockery, this, surely, of rationalism's habit of
explaining things by putting verbal doubles of them beneath them as
their ground!

"All that philosophy has sought as cause, or reason," he says,
"pluralism subsumes in the status and the given fact, where it stands
as plausible as it may ever hope to stand. There may be disease in the
presence of a question as well as in the lack of an answer. We do not
wonder so s