insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer
disturbance; and the mind is fixed upon a single object,--the
one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible. Recalling our
former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality,
we shall see that we have here the two poles of consciousness.
Then, as the tension is sharpened, what happens? Under the
artificial conditions of weakened nerves, of blank surroundings,
the self-background drops. The feeling of transition disappears
with the absence of related terms; and the remaining, the
positive pole of consciousness, is an undifferentiated Unity,
with which the person must feel himself one. The feeling of
personality is gone with that on which it rests, and its loss
is joined with an overwhelming sense of union with the One, the
Absolute, God!

The object of mystic contemplation is the One indivisible. But
we can also think the One as the unity of all differences, the
Circle of the Universe. Those natures also which, like Amiel's,
are "bedazzled with the Infinite" and thirst for "totality"
attain in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy. Amiel
writes of a "night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched
at full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky
Way. Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal,
cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's
breast, to touch the stars, to possess the Infinite!" The
reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted
by Matthew Arnold, reveals the same emotion: "Vast consciousness
of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere
impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious
self-abandonment." In the coincidence of outer circumstance--