point of his life of
thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at
understanding, or believing, that anything exists _greater than his own
soul_. The utter impossibility of any one's soul feeling itself inferior
to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at
the thought;--these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection,
are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards
the original Unity--are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far
surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul _is_ inferior
to another--that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul--that
each soul is, in part, its own God--its own Creator:--in a word, that
God--the material _and_ spiritual God--_now_ exists solely in the diffused
Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this
diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the
_purely_ Spiritual and Individual God.

In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of
Divine Injustice--of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of
Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more--it becomes
endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a _Sorrow_ which we ourselves
have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes--with a
view--if even with a futile view--to the extension of our own _Joy_.

I have spoken of _Memories_ that haunt us during our youth. They
sometimes pursue us even in our Manhood:--assume gradually less and less
indefinite shapes:--now and then speak to us with low voices, saying:

"There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being
existed--one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that
people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite
space.[16] It was not and is not in the power of this Being--any more
than it is in your own--to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his
Existence; but just as it _is_ in your power to expand or to concentrate
your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the
same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine
Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of
Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The
Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life
through an infinity of imperfect pleasures--the partial and
pain-intertangled pleasu