budding mind, the infinite or indeterminate may have been the primary
datum. On that homogeneous sensuous background, blank at first but
secretly plastic, a spot here and a movement there may gradually have
become discernible, until the whole picture of nature and history had
shaped itself as we see it. A certain sense of that primitive datum, the
infinite or indeterminate, may always remain as it were the outstretched
canvas on which every picture is painted. And when the pictures vanish, as
in deep sleep, the ancient simplicity and quietness may be actually
recovered, in a conscious union with Brahma. So sensuous, so intimate, so
unsophisticated the "return to God" may be for the spirit, without
excluding the other avenues, intellectual and ascetic, by which this
return may be effected in waking life, though then not so much in act as
in intent only and allegiance.

I confess that formerly I had some difficulty in sharing the supreme
respect for infinite Being which animates so many saints: it seemed to me
the dazed, the empty, the deluded side of spirituality. Why rest in an
object which can be redeemed from blank negation only by a blank
intensity? But time has taught me not to despise any form of vital
imagination, any discipline which may achieve perfection after any kind.
Intuition is a broadly based activity; it engages elaborate organs and
sums up and synthesises accumulated impressions. It may therefore easily
pour the riches of its ancestry into the image or the sentiment which it
evokes, poor as this sentiment or image might seem if expressed in words.
In rapt or ecstatic moments, the vital momentum, often the moral escape,
is everything, and the achievement, apart from that blessed relief, little
or nothing. Infinite Being may profit in this way by offering a contrast
to infinite annoyance. Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure
Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be
indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all