Truly it is the world itself that is a miracle; the world of material bodies.  I looked at two of them.  Both were heavy, symmetrical, and beautiful.  One was a jasper vase with golden rim and golden handles; the other was an organism, an animal, a man.  When I had sufficiently admired their exterior, I asked my attendant genius to allow me to examine the inside of them; and I did so.  In the vase I found nothing but the force of gravity and a certain obscure desire, which took the form of chemical affinity.  But when I entered into the other—­how shall I express my astonishment at what I saw?  It is more incredible than all the fairy tales and fables that were ever conceived.  Nevertheless, I shall try to describe it, even at the risk of finding no credence for my tale.

In this second thing, or rather in the upper end of it, called the head, which on its exterior side looks like anything else—­a body in space, heavy, and so on—­I found no less an object than the whole world itself, together with the whole of the space in which all of it exists, and the whole of the time in which all of it moves, and finally everything that fills both time and space in all its variegated and infinite character; nay, strangest sight of all, I found myself walking about in it!  It was no picture that I saw; it was no peep-show, but reality itself.  This it is that is really and truly to be found in a thing which is no bigger than a cabbage, and which, on occasion, an executioner might strike off at a blow, and suddenly smother that world in darkness and night.  The world, I say, would vanish, did not heads grow like mushrooms, and were there not always plenty of them ready to snatch it up as it is sinking down into nothing, and keep it going like a ball.  This world is an idea which they all have in common, and they express the community of their thought by the word “objectivity.”

In the face of this vision I felt as if I were Ardschuna when Krishna appeared to him in his true majesty, with his hundred thousand arms and eyes and mouths.

When I see a wide landscape, and realise that it arises by the operation of the functions of my brain, that is to say, of time, space, and casuality, on certain spots which have gathered on my retina, I feel that I carry it within me.  I have an extraordinarily clear consciousness of the identity of my own being with that of the external world.

Nothing provides so vivid an illustration of this identity as a dream.  For in a dream other people appear to be totally distinct from us, and to possess the most perfect objectivity, and a nature which is quite different from ours, and which often puzzles, surprises, astonishes, or terrifies us; and yet it is all our own self.  It is even so with the will, which sustains the whole of the external world and gives it life; it is the same will that is in ourselves, and it is there alone that we are immediately conscious of it.  But it is the intellect, in ourselves and in others, which makes all these miracles possible; for it is the intellect which everywhere divides actual being into subject and object; it is a hall of phantasmagorical mystery, inexpressibly marvellous, incomparably magical.