n Appearance;--some
embodied, visualized 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 colors 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-colored 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
first