en in that instant that he had never before
seen himself with closed eyes....

All in the room was extraordinarily vivid and clear-cut. It was true
that the firelight still wavered and sank again in billows of soft
color about the shadowed walls, but the changing light was no more an
interruption to the action of that steady medium through which he
perceived than the movement of summer clouds across the full sunlight.
It was at that moment that he understood that he saw no longer with
eyes, but with that faculty of perception to which sight is only
analogous--that faculty which underlies and is common to all the
senses alike.

His reasoning powers, too, at this moment, seemed to have gone from
him like a husk. He did not argue or deduce; simply he understood.
And, in a flash, simultaneous with the whole vision, he perceived that
he was behind all the slow processes of the world, by which this is
added to that, and a conclusion drawn; by which light travels, and
sounds resolve themselves and emotions run their course. He had
reached, he thought, the ultimate secret.... It was This that lay
behind everything.

Now it is impossible to set down, except progressively, all this sum
of experiences that occupied for him one interminable instant. Neither
did he remember afterwards the order in which they presented
themselves; for it seemed to him that there was no order; all was
simultaneous.

But he understood plainly by intuition that all was open to him.
Space no longer existed for him; nothing, to his perception, separated
this from that. He was able, he saw, without stirring from his
attitude to see in an instant any place or person towards which he
chose to exercise his attention. It seemed a marvelously simple point,
this--that space was little more than an illusion; that it was, after
all, nothing else but a translation into rather coarse terms of what
may be called "differences." "Here" and "There" were but relative
terms; certainly they corresponded to facts, but they were not those
facts themselves.... And since he now stood behind them he saw them on
their inner side, as a man standing in the interior of a globe may be
said to be equally present to every point upon its surface.

The fascination of the thought was enormous; and, like a child who
begins to take notice and to learn the laws of extension and distance,
so he began to learn their reverse. He saw, he thought (as he had seen
once before, only, this ti