bosom of his fellow.

"I am the scent of roses," were the words Condillac put in the mouth of his
statue; and these words translate the immediate truth exactly, as soon as
observation becomes naive and simple enough to attain pure fact. In a
passing breath I breathe my childhood; in the rustle of leaves, in a ray of
moonlight, I find an infinite series of reflections and dreams. A thought,
a feeling, an act, may reveal a complete soul. My ideas, my sensations,
are like me. How would such facts be possible, if the multiple unity of
the ego did not present the essential characteristic of vibrating in its
entirety in the depths of each of the parts descried or rather determined
in it by analysis? All physical determinations envelop and imply each
other reciprocally. And the fact that the soul is thus present in its
entirety in each of its acts, its feelings, for example, or its ideas in
its sensations, its recollections in its percepts, its inclinations in its
obvious states, is the justifying principle of metaphors, the source of all
poetry, the truth which modern philosophy proclaims with more force every
day under the name of immanence of thought, the fact which explains our
moral responsibility with regard to our affections and our beliefs
themselves; and finally, it is the best of us, since it is this which
ensures our being able to surrender ourselves, genuinely and unreservedly,
and this which constitutes the real unity of our person.

Let us push still further into the hidden retreat of the soul. Here we are
in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego takes shape, where
the spring within us gushes up, in the warm secrecy of the darkness which
ushers our trembling being into birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are
useless now. We hear the wells of consciousness at their mysterious task
like an invisible shiver of running water through the mossy shadow of the
caves. I dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight