986. Once more, and from a different standpoint. Few men have pondered long on these problems of Past and Future without wondering whether Past or Future be in very truth more than a name - whether we may not be apprehending as a stream of sequence that which is an ocean of co-existence, and slicing our subjective years and centuries from timeless and absolute things. The precognitions dealt with here, indeed, hardly overpass the life of the individual percipient. Let us keep to that small span, and let us imagine that a whole earth-life is in reality an absolutely instantaneous although an infinitely complex phenomenon. Let us suppose that my transcendental self discerns with equal directness and immediacy every element of this phenomenon; but that my empirical self receives each element mediately and through media involving different rates of retardation; just as I receive the lightning more quickly than the thunder. May not then seventy years intervene between my perceptions of birth and death as easily as seven seconds between my perceptions of the flash and peal? And may not some inter-communication of consciousness enable the wider self to call to the narrower, the more central to the more external, "At such an hour this shock will reach you ! Listen for the nearing roar!"

And thinking thus of the Universe as no mere congeries of individual experiences, but as a plenum of infinite knowledge of which all souls form part, we come to count less and less upon having to deal exclusively with intelligences individualised like our own. Our limitations of personality may less and less apply to spirits drawing more directly upon the essential reality of things. The definite intelligences which have crystallised, so to say, out of the psychical vapour may even for us become again partly sublimated, may again be diffused for a moment amid such knowledge as our organisations cannot receive except in ecstasy and bewilderment, or retain except in vanishing symbol and obscure and earthly sign.

If then all these phenomena form part of one great effort by which man's soul is striving to know his spiritual environment, and his spiritual environment is striving to become known, how little can it matter what the special incident foretold or foreshadowed may be ! What signifies it whether this or that earthly peril be averted, or earthly benefit secured, - whether through this or that petty channel shall flow some stream of mortal things? The prime need of man is to know more fully, that he may obey more unhesitatingly, the laws of the world unseen. And how can this great end be attained save by the unfoldment from within, in whatsoever fashion it may be possible, of man's transcendental faculty; - by his recognition of himself as a cosmic being and not a planetary, as not a body but a soul? Surely even that special premonition which is sometimes spoken of as a thing of terror, - the warning or the promise of earthly death, - should to the wise man sound as a friendly summons, and as a welcome home.

Let him remember the Vision which came to Socrates in the prison-house; - then, and then only, showing in an angel's simili-vol. II. s tude the Providence which till that hour had been but as an impersonal and invisible Voice; - but now the "fair and white-robed woman," while friends offered escape from death, had already spoken of better hope than this, and had given to Achilles' words a more sacred meaning, - "On the third day hence thou comest to Phthia's fertile shore".