Chapter XXII (part 20)

I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear let them hear; to me the loving sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind. "What reader of Hegel can doubt that sense of a perfected being with all its otherness soaked up in itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the Aufgabe (the problem) of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical feeling. "I have friends who believe in the anæsthetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One. 1 "Into this pervading genus," writes one of them, "we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. The one remains, the many change and pass; and each and every one of us is the One that remains. . . . This is the ultimatum. . . . As sure as being—whence is all our care—so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above."—(B. P. Blood: The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy , Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874.) Xenos Clark, a philosopher who died young (at Amherst in the '80's) was also impressed by the revelation. "In the first place," he once wrote to me, "Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional. It is, as Mr. Blood says, the one sole and sufficient insight why or not why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. . . . It is an initiation of the past . The real secret would be the formulæ by which the 'now' keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. We simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting its own tail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is already a foregone conclusion, p. 299 and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anæsthesis, then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal process just in the act of starting . The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destination (being already there)—which may occur vicariously in this life when we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upon the face of revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forever half a second too late—that's all. "You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself," it says, "if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got around to them. Why don't you manage it somehow?" In his latest phamphlet Mr.