ly what he had
gathered in his hours of leisure, and had laid aside for life. I have
never seen him face to face, do not know the colour of his eyes, hardly
even whether he was old or young. He was a man, but he may be even that no
longer. Everything that in our common view constitutes a man, his body,
his speech, his experience, is gone. We did not bring these things with us
into the world and probably shall not take them away with us. What the
body is, we see with our eyes, especially if we attend a cremation, or if
in ancient graves we look into the urns which contain the grayish black
ashes, whilst near by there sleeps in cold marble, as in the Museo
Nazionale in Rome, the lovely head of the young Roman maiden, to whom two
thousand years ago belonged these ashes, as well as the beautiful mansion
that has been excavated from the earth and rebuilt round about her. And
the language, the language in which all our experience here on earth lies
stored, will this be everlasting? Shall we in another life speak English
or Sanscrit? The philologist knows too well of what material speech is
made, how much of the temporal and accidental it has adopted in its
eternal forms, to cherish such a hope, and to think that the Logos can be
eternally bound to the regular or irregular declensions or conjugations of
the Greek, the German, or even the Hottentot languages. What then remains?
Not the person, or the so-called ego--that had a beginning, a continuation,
and an end. Everything that had a beginning, once was not, and what once
was not, has in itself, from its very beginning, the germ of its end. What
remains is only the eternal One, the eternal Self, that lives in us all
without beginning and without end, in which each one has his true
existence, in which we live, move, and have our being. Each temporal ego
is only one of the million phenomena of this eternal Self, and such a
phenomenon was the Horseherd to me. It is only what we recognise in all
men as the eternal, or as the divine, that we can love and retain.
Everything else comes and goes, as the day comes in the morning and goes
at night, but the light of the sun remains forever. Now it may be said:
This Self, that is and abides, is after all next to nothing. It _is_,
however, and that "_is_" is more than everything else. Light is not much
either, probably only vibration, but what would the world be without it?
Did we not begin this life simply with this Self, continue it with t