186 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Carpenter. He adds thirty-five cases, " some of them lesser, imperfect 

 and doubtful instances." These include Moses, Gideon, Isaiah, Socra- 

 tes, Pascal, Spinoza, Swedenborg, Wordsworth, Finney, Pushkin, Emer- 

 son, Tennyson, Thoreau, Bucke himself and many more. Collecting and 

 comparing their recorded experiences, he finds sufficient data for a 

 general induction. There are, he thinks, perceptible in the history 

 of human consciousness, three distinct stages of evolution, simple con- 

 sciousness, self consciousness and cosmic consciousness. " The priine 

 characteristic of cosmic consciousness is, as its name implies, a con- 

 sciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe." 

 AVith it occur, among other phenomena, an intellectual enlightenment 

 or illumination, moral exaltation and a quickening of the moral sense, 

 and withal "' a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, 

 not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that 

 he has it already." This position he supports by quoting in each case 

 the words of the original records. 



The theory is that this higher form of consciousness is at present 

 making its appearance in the human race, that the comparatively few 

 cases cited are forerunners of a time, when by regular and orderly 

 evolution the whole human race will reach the higher plane, along 

 which it will proceed on its path of further infinite development. 



This conclusion is based upon the fact, which he considers estab- 

 lished by the records, that there is a progressive increase throughout 

 human history since the earliest recorded instances in the number of 

 persons who have attained to cosmic consciousness. 



Another physician, who was also a philosopher. Dr. Oliver Wendell 

 Holmes, hints at such a conclusion, in a remarkable passage in the 

 ^' Professor at the Breakfast Table." 



" I think of it," he says, referring to a similar intuition in his 

 own experience and that of others, " as a disclosure of certain relations 

 of our personal being to time and space, to other intelligences, to the 

 procession of events, and to their First Great Cause .... I am 

 disposed to consider our beliefs about such a possible disclosure rather 

 as a kind of premonition of an enlargement of our faculties in some 

 future state than as an expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in 

 this life. Persons, however, have fallen into trances — as did the 

 Eeverend William Tennant, among many others — and learned some 

 things which they could not tell in our human words." 



Conversion, the "; inner light,'" illumination, mysticism, transcen- 

 dentalism, are psychological facts pertaining to religion in its higher 

 manifestations. In '' Cosmic Consciousness " they are subjected by a 



