and itself
together and as one. . . . So, in coming out of the anaesthetic
exhilaration . . . we want to tell something; but the effort instantly
proves that something will stay back and do the telling--one must utter
one's own throat, one must eat one's own teeth, to express the being
that possesses one. The result is ludicrous and astounding at
once--astounding in the clear perception that this is the ultimate
mystery of life, and is given you as the old Adamic secret, which you
then feel that all intelligence must sometime know or have known; yet
ludicrous in its familiar simplicity, as somewhat that any man should
always perceive at his best, if his head were only level, but which in
our ordinary thinking has grown into a thousand creeds and theories
dignified as religion and philosophy."

[4] Elsewhere Mr. Blood writes of the "force of the negative"
thus:--"As when a faded lock of woman's hair shall cause a man to cut
his throat in a bedroom at five o'clock in the morning; or when Albany
resounds with legislation, but a little henpecked judge in a dusty
office at Herkimer or Johnstown sadly writes across the page the word
'unconstitutional'--the glory of the Capitol has faded."

[5] Elsewhere Blood writes:--"But what then, in the name of common
sense, _is_ the external world? If a dead man could answer he would
say Nothing, or as Macbeth said of the air-drawn dagger, 'there is no
such thing.' But a live man's answer might be in this way: What is the
multiplication table when it is not written down? It is a necessity of
thought; it was not created, it cannot but be; every intelligence which
goes to it, and thinks, must think in that form or think falsely. So
the universe is the static necessity of reason; it is not an object for
any intelligence to find, but it is half object and half subject; it
never cost anything as a whole; it never _was_ made, but always _is_
made, in the Logos, or expression of reason--the Word; and slowly but
surely it will be understood and uttered in every intelligence, until
he is one with God or reason itself. As a man, for all he knows, or
has known, stands at any given instant the realization of only one
thought, while all the rest of him is invisibly linked to that in the
necessary form and concatenation of reason, so the man as a whole of
exploited thoughts is a moment in the front of the concatenated reason
of the universal whole; and this whole is personal only as it is
per