CORROBORATIVE READINGS 



" Is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences, 

 our persistent inner turning towards divine companion- 

 ship, to count for nothing? . . . 



" First, you and I, just as we are in this room; and 

 the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable 

 absolute itself ! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent 

 imagination? Isn't this brave universe made on a richer 

 pattern, with room in it, for a long hierarchy of be- 

 ings? . . . 



" Every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel 

 of a wider self, it quivers along various radii like the 

 wind-rose on a compass, and the actual in it is continu- 

 ously one with possibles not yet in our present sight. 

 And just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary 

 margin, may not we ourselves form the margin of some 

 more really central self in things which is co-conscious 

 with the whole of us? May not you and I be confluent 

 in a higher consciousness, and confluently active there, 

 though we now know it not? . . . The drift of all the 

 evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly 

 towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with 

 which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. 

 We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our 

 libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, 

 but having no inkling of the meaning of it all." 



WILLIAM JAMES: A Pluralistic Universe. 

 67 



