fferent from
you who see. When I learned from Berkeley that your eyes receive an
inverted image of things which your brain unconsciously corrects, I
began to suspect that the eye is not a very reliable instrument after
all, and I felt as one who had been restored to equality with others,
glad, not because the senses avail them so little, but because in
God's eternal world, mind and spirit avail so much. It seemed to me
that philosophy had been written for my special consolation, whereby I
get even with some modern philosophers who apparently think that I was
intended as an experimental case for their special instruction! But in
a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in
the declaration of philosophy that the good is the only world, and
that world is a world of spirit. It is also a universe where order is
All, where an unbroken logic holds the parts together, where disorder
defines itself as non-existence, where evil, as St. Augustine held, is
delusion, and therefore is not.

The meaning of philosophy to me is not only in its principles, but
also in the happy isolation of its great expounders. They were seldom
of the world, even when like Plato and Leibnitz they moved in its
courts and drawing-rooms. To the tumult of life they were deaf, and
they were blind to its distraction and perplexing diversities. Sitting
alone, but not in darkness, they learned to find everything in
themselves, and failing to find it even there, they still trusted in
meeting the truth face to face when they should leave the earth behind
and become partakers in the wisdom of God. The great mystics lived
alone, deaf and blind, but dwelling with God.

I understand how it was possible for Spinoza to find deep and
sustained happiness when he was excommunicated, poor, despised and
suspected alike by Jew and Christian; not that the kind world of men
ever treated me so, but that his isolation from the universe of
sensuous joys is somewhat analogous to mine. He loved the good for its
own sake. Like many great spirits he accepted his place in the world,
and confided himself childlike to a higher power, believing that it
worked through his hands and predominated in his being. He trusted
implicitly, and that is what I do. Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to
me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the
individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but
a God who is very near every one of