In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my
senses, to know whether the impressions on me correspond with outlying
objects, what difference does it make whether Orion is up there in
heaven or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" On
the other hand, our evidence of the existence, of God and of our own
souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are immediate, and are
independent of the senses. We are in direct communication with the
"Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. "The soul in man is the background
of our being--an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed."
"From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation
is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the
individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life." In
moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of nature, this
contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. "All mean
egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am
part and particle of God." The existence and attributes of God are not
deducible from history or from natural theology, but are thus directly
given us in consciousness. In his essay on the _Transcendentalist_
Emerson says: "His experience inclines him to behold the procession of
facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an
invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of him and of
them, and necessitating him to regard all things as having a subjective
or relative existence--relative to that aforesaid Unknown Center of
him. There is no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect,
ceases, and God, the cause, begins. We lie open on one side to the
deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God."

Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of philosophy, is