futile, and life itself a mockery. Yet the idea, when dwelt
upon, assumes an aspect of strange familiarity; it is an old
friend, after all. Can we deny that all our sweetest hours are
those of self-forgetfulness? The language of emotion, religious,
aesthetic, intellectually creative, testifies clearly to the
fading of the consciousness of self as feeling nears the white
heat. Not only in the speechless, stark immobility of the
pathological "case," but in all the stages of religious ecstasy,
aesthetic pleasure, and creative inspiration, is to be traced
what we know as the loss of the feeling of self. Bernard of
Clairvaux dwells on "that ecstasy of deification in which the
individual disappears in the eternal essence as the drop of
water in a cask of wine." Says Meister Eckhart, "Thou shalt
sink away from they selfhood, though shalt flow into His self-
possession, the very thought of Thine shall melt into His Mine;"
and St. Teresa, "The soul, in thus searching for its God,
feels with a very lively and very sweet pleasure that is is
fainting almost quiet away."

Still more striking is the language of aesthetic emotion.
Philosopher and poet have but one expression for the universal
experience. Says Keats in the "Ode to a Nightingale:"--

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethewards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness."