Chapter XXII (part 23)

An artistic description of epileptic states we find in Dostoyevsky's, The Idiot . He remembered among other things that he always had one minute just before the epileptic fit (if it came on while he was awake) when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light on his brain and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the consciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these p. 302 moments which passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded with extraordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his anxieties were relieved at once; they were all merged in a lofty calm, full of serene, harmonious joy and hope. Thinking of that moment later, when he was all right again, he often said to himself that all these gleams and flashes of the highest sensation of life and self-consciousness, and therefore also of the highest form of existence, were nothing but disease, the interruption of the normal condition. . . . And yet he came at last to an extremely paradoxical conclusion. What if it is disease? he decided, if the result, if the minute of sensation, remembered and analyzed afterwards in health, turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in the highest synthesis of life? These vague expressions seemed to him very comprehensible, though too weak. That it was "beauty and worship," that it really was the "highest synthesis of life" he could not doubt, and could not admit the possibility of doubt. . . . He was quite capable of judging of that when the attack was over. These moments were only an extraordinary quickening of self-consciousness—if the condition was to be expressed in one word—and at the same time of the direct sensation of existence in the most intense degree. Since at that second, that is at the very last conscious moment before the fit, he had time to say to himself clearly and consciously, "Yet for this moment one might give ones whole life!" then without doubt that moment was really worth the whole of life. . . . For the very thing had happened; he actually had said to himself at that second, that, for the infinite happiness he had felt in it, that second really might well be worth the whole of life. At that moment," as he told Rogozhin one day in Moscow . . . "at that moment I seemed somehow to understand the extraordinary saying that there shall be time no longer . Probably," he added, smiling, "this is the very second which was not long enough for the water to be spilt out of Mohammed's pitcher, though the epileptic prophet had time to gaze at all the habitations of Allah. 1 Narcosis or epilepsy are not at all necessary conditions to induce mystical states in ordinary men. "Certain aspects of nature appear to have the peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods," says James. It would be more correct to say that in all conditions of encompassing nature this power lies concealed. The change of the seasons—the first snow, the awakening of spring, the summer days, p. 303 rainy and warm, the aroma of autumn—awakes in us strange "moods" which we ourselves do not understand. Sometimes these moods intensify, and become the sensation of a complete oneness with nature. In the life of every man there are moments which act upon him more powerfully than others. Upon one a thunderstorm acts mystically, upon another, sunrise, a third the sea, the forest, rocks, fire . The voice of sex embraces much of that same mystical sense of nature . In the sex impulse man puts himself in the most personal relation with nature.