It is a
great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that
history has yet to be enacted. It is, in some sort, younger brother of
another great and often-used word, Nature, whose history also waits
unwritten. As I perceive, the tendencies of our day, in the States,
(and I entirely respect them,) are toward those vast and sweeping
movements, influences, moral and physical, of humanity, now and always
current over the planet, on the scale of the impulses of the elements.
Then it is also good to reduce the whole matter to the consideration
of a single self, a man, a woman, on permanent grounds. Even for the
treatment of the universal, in politics, metaphysics, or anything,
sooner or later we come down to one single, solitary soul.
There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises,
independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining
eternal. This is the thought of identity--yours for you, whoever you
are, as mine for me. Miracle of miracles, beyond statement, most
spiritual and vaguest of earth's dreams, yet hardest basic fact, and
only entrance to all facts. In such devout hours, in the midst of the
significant wonders of heaven and earth, (significant only because of
the Me in the centre,) creeds, conventions, fall away and become of
no account before this simple idea. Under the luminousness of real
vision, it alone takes possession, takes value. Like the shadowy dwarf
in the fable, 'once liberated and look'd upon, it expands over the
whole earth, and spreads to the roof of heaven.
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