ist, may transcend such
relative views of Reality, and try to meditate on Time,
Succession, even Being itself: or again on human intercourse,
birth, growth, and death, on a flower, a river, the various
tapestries of the sky. Even your own emotional life will provide
you with the ideas of love, joy, peace, mercy, conflict, desire.
You may range, with Kant, from the stars to the moral law. If
your turn be to religion, the richest and most evocative of fields is
open to your choice: from the plaster image to the mysteries of
Faith.

But, the choice made, it must be held and defended during the
time of meditation against all invasions from without, however
insidious their encroachments, however "spiritual" their disguise.
It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again and again, as
distractions seem to snatch it from your grasp. A restless
boredom, a dreary conviction of your own incapacity, will
presently attack you. This, too, must be resisted at sword-point.
The first quarter of an hour thus spent in attempted meditation
will be, indeed, a time of warfare; which should at least convince
you how unruly, how ill-educated is your attention, how
miserably ineffective your will, how far away you are from the
captaincy of your own soul. It should convince, too, the most
common-sense of philosophers of the distinction between real
time, the true stream of duration which is life, and the sequence
of seconds so carefully measured by the clock. Never before has
the stream flowed so slowly, or fifteen minutes taken so long to
pass. Consciousness has been lifted to a longer, slower rhythm,
and is not yet adjusted to its solemn march.

But, striving for this new poise, intent on the achievement
of it, presently it will happen to you to find that you have
indeed--though how you know not--entered upon a fresh plane of
perception, altered your relation with things.

First, the subject of your meditation begins, as you surrender to
its influence, to exhibit unsuspected meaning, beauty, power. A
perpetual growth of significance keeps pace with the increase of
attention which you bring to bear on it; that attention which is the
one agent of all your apprehensions, physical and mental alike. It
ceases to be thin and abstract. You sink as it were into the deeps
of it, rest in it, "unite" with it; and learn, in this still, intent
communion, something of its depth and breadth and height, as we
learn by direct intercourse to know our fri