orthodox mystic, or we perish of inanity! Clearly the _élan
vital_--the will to live--gives us a more hopeful starting-point in
our search for the Real. Clearly the inexhaustible variety of the
universe of sense need not be dubbed an illusion to save the
consistency of a logic which has not yet succeeded in grasping
its own first principles. No, the rippling weir and the mill-wheel
were real in their own degree, and the intuitions and emotions
they prompted were the outcome of a contact between the inner
and the outer--a _unio mystica_--a communion between the
soul of a man and the soul in the things he saw.

"But" (says the orthodox mystic) "there is a special form of
craving--the craving for the Infinite. Man cannot find rest
save in communion with a supreme Reality free from all
imperfections and limitations; and such a Reality can be found
in nothing less than the Unconditioned Absolute." Now we may
grant the existence and even the legitimacy of the craving thus
emphatically asserted while questioning the form which it is
made to assume. The man gazing at the mill-wheel longed to
know its secret. Suppose he had succeeded! We think of
Tennyson's "little flower in the crannied wall." We think of
Blake's lines:

"To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour."

Is it really necessary to forsake the finite to reach the infinite--
whatever that term may be taken to mean? Do we not often