can glimpse
scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the
very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued
with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a
wilderness of barren deduction--their one inspired vision of a stable
premiss distorted and at last forgotten.

How then shall we hope to find words to adumbrate a philosophy which
starts by the assumption that we can have no impression of reality until
we have rid ourselves of the interposing and utterly false concepts of
space and time, which delimit the whole world of human thought.

I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present
limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two
original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure
every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any
image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with
that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however
dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent
of, those twin bases of our means of thought.

Here it is that Challis has paused. Here he says that we must wait, that
no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that
only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding
of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive
hypotheses.

"But then," I have pressed him, "why do you hesitate to speak of what
you heard on that afternoon?"

And once he answered me:

"I glimpsed a finality," he said, "and that appalled me. Don't you see
that ignorance is the means of our intellectual pleasure? It is the
solving of the problem that brings enjoyment--the solved problem has no
further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases;
when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge
implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one--our
pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.

"Oh! pity the child," said Challis, "for whom there could be no mystery.
Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate there
is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. When that is explored,
there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond
the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements
of the unknown life in which we are cir