inite ghostliness for which the language
of man has not any word....

This experience had been produced by study of the first volume of
the Synthetic Philosophy, which an American friend had taught me
how to read. I did not find it easy reading; partly because I am a
slow thinker, but chiefly because my mind had never been trained to
sustained effort in such directions. To learn the "First Principles"
occupied me many months: no other volume of the series gave me equal
trouble. I would read one section at a time,--rarely two,--never
venturing upon a fresh section until I thought that I had made sure
of the preceding. Very cautious and slow my progress was, like that
of a man mounting, for the first time, a long series of ladders in
darkness. Reaching the light at last, I caught a sudden new vision of
things,--a momentary perception of the illusion of surfaces,--and from
that time the world never again appeared to me quite the same as it
had appeared before.

* * * * *

--This memory of more than twenty years ago, and the extraordinary
thrill of the moment, were recently revived for me by the reading of
the essay "Ultimate Questions," in the last and not least precious
volume bequeathed us by the world's greatest thinker. The essay
contains his final utterance about the riddle of life and death,
as that riddle presented itself to his vast mind in the dusk of a
lifetime of intellectual toil. Certainly the substance of what he had
to tell us might have been inferred from the Synthetic Philosophy;
but the particular interest of this last essay is made by the writer's
expression of personal sentiment regarding the problem that troubles
all deep thinkers. Perhaps few of us could have remained satisfied
with his purely scientific position. Even while fully accepting his
declaration of the identity of the power that "wells up in us under
the form of consciousness" with that Power Unknowable which shapes
all things, most disciples of the master must have longed for some
chance to ask him directly, "But how do _you_ feel in regard to
the prospect of personal dissolution?" And this merely emotional
question he has answered as frankly and as fully as any of us could
have desired,--perhaps even more frankly. "Old people," he remarks
apologetically, "must have many reflections in common. Doubtless
one which I have now in mind is very familiar. For years past, when
watching the unfolding buds in the