one increasing purpose runs"--the more
intimately you have merged your individual will in what Mr. Wells
would call the will of the Invisible King--the less do you relish the
thought that you can never see that will worked out. The intenser your
interest in the play, the greater your disinclination to leave the
theatre just as the plot is thickening. Nor does it afford much
consolation to know that the Producer is just (as it were) getting
into his stride, and that, if the house should become too cold for
comfort, arrangements will be made for the transference of the
production to another theatre, with a better heating-apparatus.

Is there any real escape from the fact that for each of us the one
thing that actually exists is our individual consciousness? It is our
universe; and if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular
universe is no more. If its limits of "individuation" are
irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell us that the flame is
absorbed into the light of the world or the dayspring on high? Is it
possible to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the Atlantic
thrills with a great rapture as its molecules disperse in the moment
of coalescence, because it is now part of an infinite and immortal
entity? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing that its "chagrins
of egotism," as an individual drop, are now over; in fact, this is
precisely the sort of thing that some poets love to imagine; but has
it any real relevance to our sublunary lot? Can it minister any
substantial comfort or fortification to the normal man in the moment
of peril or agony? I ask; I do not answer. Can Mr. Wells put in the
witness-box any flight-lieutenant who will swear that in his reeling
aeroplane, as death seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt
uncertain whether it was God or he that was about to die, and
gloriously certain that in any case he was about to "step straight
into the immortal being of God"? And even if, in the excitement of
violent action, such hallucinations do mean something to a peculiar
type of mind, has any one dying of pneumonia or Bright's disease been
known to declare that, though his mortal spark was on the point of
extinction, he felt that "by the incorporation of the motives of his
life into an undying purpose" he had triumphed over death and the
grave? The simple soul who says "We shall meet in Heaven" no doubt
enjoys such a triumph--and even if he fails to keep the appointment,
no one is