when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was reduced to a comatose state.  Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me, demanding explanation I was incompetent to give.  I studied the obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, insanity.  Into the darkness shot a ray of light—­A.P.  Sinnett’s “Occult World,” with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to conceive.  I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately, finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation of them incredible.  The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience, thought-reading, were found to be real.  Under all the rush of the outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind, their answers were being diligently sought.  I read a variety of books, but could find little in them that satisfied me.  I experimented in various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.  I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all hazards what I sought.  At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near.  A fortnight passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes.  “Can you review these?  My young men all fight shy of them, but you are quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them.”  I took the books; they were the two volumes of “The Secret Doctrine,” written by H.P.  Blavatsky.

Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read.  As I turned over page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible.  I was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear.  The effect was partially illusory in one sense, in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as truth.  But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.