I mark’d, where, on a little promontory¹, it stood, isolated²;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth³ filament⁴, filament, filament, out of itself;

Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

“And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing⁵, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;

Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile⁶ anchor hold;

Till the gossamer⁷ thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.”—Walt Whitman.

There are many forms of experience which in the primary, unanalyzed, unreflective stage appear to bring us into[165] immediate¹⁰ contact with self-transcending¹² reality. We seem to be nearer the heart of things, more imbedded in life and in reality itself when consciousness is fused and unified¹³ in an undifferentiated whole of experience than in the later stage of reflection and description. This later stage necessarily involves reduction because it involves abstraction. We cannot bring any object or any experience to exact description without stripping it of its life and its mystery and without reducing it to the abstract qualities which are unvarying and repeatable.

There can be no doubt that our experiences of beauty, for instance, have a physical and describable aspect. The sunset which thrills us is for descriptive purposes an

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