cept it as having some amount of evidential weight. I felt unable to
do either with a good conscience until I met with Mr. Blood. His
mysticism, which may, if one likes, be understood as monistic in this
earlier utterance, develops in the later ones a sort of "left-wing"
voice of defiance, and breaks into what to my ear has a radically
pluralistic sound. I confess that the existence of this novel brand of
mysticism has made my cowering mood depart. I feel now as if my own
pluralism were not without the kind of support which mystical
corroboration may confer. Morrison can no longer claim to be the only
beneficiary of whatever right mysticism may possess to lend _prestige_.

This is my philosophic, as distinguished from my literary, interest, in
introducing Mr. Blood to this more fashionable audience: his
philosophy, however mystical, is in the last resort not dissimilar from
my own. I must treat him by "extracting" him, and simplify--certainly
all too violently--as I extract. He is not consecutive as a writer,
aphoristic and oracular rather; and being moreover sometimes dialectic,
sometimes poetic, and sometimes mystic in his manner; sometimes
monistic and sometimes pluralistic in his matter, I have to run my own
risk in making him orate _pro domo mea_, and I am not quite unprepared
to hear him say, in case he ever reads these pages, that I have
entirely missed his point. No matter; I will proceed.

I

I will separate his diverse phases and take him first as a pure
dialectician. Dialectic thought of the Hegelian type is a whirlpool
into which some persons are sucked out of the stream which the
straightforward understanding follows. Once in the eddy, nothing but
rotary motion can go on. All who have been in it know the feel of its
swirl--they know thenceforward that thinking unreturning on itself is
but one part of reason, and that rectilinear mentality, in philosophy
at any rate, will never do. Though each one may report in different
words of his rotational experience, the experience itself is almost
childishly simple, and whosoever has been there instantly recognizes
other authentic reports. To have been in that eddy is a freemasonry of
which the common password is a "fie" on all the operations of the
simple popular understanding.

In Hegel's mind the vortex was at its liveliest, and any one who has
dipped into Hegel will recognize Mr. Blood to be of the same tribe.
"That Hegel was pervaded by the gre