“What, then, is our neighbor?  Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine.  Thou hast said, ’A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.’  He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires....  So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind.  Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all.  Have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth.  Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee.  In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor’s power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart.  Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]

     [E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
     (abridged).

* * * * *

This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history.  As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.  The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one’s later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things.  I take this passage from ‘Obermann,’ a French novel that had some vogue in its day:  “Paris, March 7.—­It was dark and rather cold.  I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do.  I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall.  A jonquil in bloom was there.  It is the strongest expression of desire:  it was the first perfume of the year.  I felt all the happiness destined for man.  This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete.  I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous.  I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty....  I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]

    [F] De Senancour:  Obermann, Lettre XXX.