, an Appearance;--some
embodied, visualised Idea in the Eternal Mind? _Cogito, ergo sum._
Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, I
am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? Whereto? The answer lies
around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of
jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious
Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written
Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless
Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the
remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: sounds and
many-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering,
whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare
half-waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies before us,
like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us,
hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows
as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves
most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than a
dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor
and dividend are both unknown? What are all your national Wars, with
their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the
Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is
what we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly
wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise
who know that they know nothing.

'Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly
unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's
secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he
suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, and
Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles
are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good
Logic-mortar, wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _The
whole is greater than the part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors
a vacuum_: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can
act but where it is_: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the
slave of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and
long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as
the floor I stand on? But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are
from the