of the spirit within him.

In this peculiar and privileged hour, his bodily frame, as he could
recognise, although just then, in the whole sum of its capacities, so
entirely possessed by him--Nay! actually his very self--was yet
determined by a far-reaching system of material forces external to
it, a thousand combining currents from earth and sky. Its seemingly
active powers of apprehension were, in fact, but susceptibilities to
influence. The perfection of its capacity might be said to depend on
its passive surrender, as of a leaf on the wind, to the motions of
the great stream of physical energy without it. And might not the
intellectual frame also, still [69] more intimately himself as in
truth it was, after the analogy of the bodily life, be a moment only,
an impulse or series of impulses, a single process, in an
intellectual or spiritual system external to it, diffused through all
time and place--that great stream of spiritual energy, of which his
own imperfect thoughts, yesterday or to-day, would be but the remote,
and therefore imperfect pulsations? It was the hypothesis (boldest,
though in reality the most conceivable of all hypotheses) which had
dawned on the contemplations of the two opposed great masters of the
old Greek thought, alike:--the "World of Ideas," existent only
because, and in so far as, they are known, as Plato conceived; the
"creative, incorruptible, informing mind," supposed by Aristotle, so
sober-minded, yet as regards this matter left something of a mystic
after all. Might not this entire material world, the very scene
around him, the immemorial rocks, the firm marble, the olive-gardens,
the falling water, be themselves but reflections in, or a creation
of, that one indefectible mind, wherein he too became conscious, for
an hour, a day, for so many years? Upon what other hypothesis could
he so well understand the persistency of all these things for his own