

Now that all outlines are softened, all dis- 

 tinctive features are lost, Nature loses its 

 materialism, and becomes to our thought 

 the vast, silent, unbroken flow of force 

 which the later science has substituted for 

 an earlier and cruder conception. And this 

 invisible stream leads us back, as our 

 thoughts unconsciously follow it, to One 

 whose thought it is and whose mind shares 

 with our mind something of the unsearch- 

 able mystery of its purpose and nature. 



Some one has said that a man is great 

 rather by reason of his unconscious thought 

 than by reason of his deliberate and self- 

 directed thinking. Released from medita- 

 tion on definite and special themes, the 

 thought of a great man instinctively returns 

 to the mystery of life. No poet creates a 

 Hamlet unless he has brooded long and 

 almost unconsciously on the deeper things 

 that make up the inner life ; such a figure, 

 forever externalising the profounder and 

 more obscure phases of being, is born of 

 secret and habitual contact with the deepest 

 experiences and the most fundamental 

 148 



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