r appearances. You are such an appearance, composed of countless
appearances out of the past. All an appearance can know is mirage. You
know mirages of desire. These very mirages are the unthinkable and
incalculable congeries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you
out of the past, and that sweep you on into dissemination into other
unthinkable and incalculable congeries of appearances to people the ghost
land of the future. Life is apparitional, and passes. You are an
apparition. Through all the apparitions that preceded you and that
compose the parts of you, you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire,
and gibbering you will pass on, interfusing, permeating the procession of
apparitions that will succeed you."

And of course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the
evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the
world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered:
"Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are
glad to be at rest."

But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is
a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his
hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of
life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like
a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their
deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks.
One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled
claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable
specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly.

"His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the
White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the
dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and
obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened
to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous
bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with
self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself
titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars.
Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made
for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial
and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of
semblance an