"How different," said Harrington, "are the experiences of mankind!
You well described those internal oracles, if there are indeed such,
as whispering their responses; if they utter them at all, it is to
me in a whisper so low that I cannot distinctly catch them. Strange
paradoxes! the soul speaks, and the soul listens, and the soul cannot
tell what the soul says. That is, the soul speaks to itself, and says,
'What have I said?' I assure you that the ear of my soul (if I may so
speak) has often ached with intense effort to listen to what the tongue
of the soul mutters, and yet I cannot catch it. You tell me I have
only to look down into the depths within. Well, I have. I assure you
that I have endeavoured to do so, as far as I know, honestly; and,
so far from seeing clear and bright those splendors which you speak
of, I can only see as in the depths of a cavern occasional gleams of
a tremulous flickering light, which distinctly shows me nothing, and
which, I half suspect, comes from without into these recesses: or I
feel as if gazing down an abyss, the bottom of which is filled with
water; the light--and that, too, for aught I know, reflected from
without--only throws a transient glimpse of my own image on the
surface of the dark water; that image itself broken and renewed as
the water boils up from its hidden fountain. Or, if I may recur to
your own metaphor, instead of hearing in those deep caverns the
clear oracles of which you boast, I can distinguish nothing but
a scarcely audible murmur; I know not whether it be any thing more
than the lingering echoes of what I heard in my childhood: or,
rather, my soul speaks to me on all these momentous subjects much
as one in sleep often does; the lips move, but no sound issues
from them. I retire from these attempts, as those of old from the
cave of Trophonius, pale, terrified, and dejected. In short," he
continued, "I feel much as Descartes says he did when he had denuded