The peace that thus blesses one is not, I think, a merely subjective mood, an imagined thing.  It is, I believe, a real and actual thing which is there.  One’s consciousness does not create its impressions, one does not make for oneself the moral and artistic ideas that visit one; one perceives them.  Education is not a process of invention—­it is a process of discovery; a process of learning the names given to things that are all present in one’s own mind.  One knows things long before one knows the names for them, by instinct and by intuition; and one’s own mind is simply a part of a large and immortal life, which for a time is fenced by a little barrier of identity, just as a tiny pool of sea-water on a sea-beach is for a few hours separated from the great tide to which it belongs.  All our regrets, remorses, anxieties, troubles arise from our not realising that we are but a part of this greater and wider life, from our delusion that we are alone and apart instead of, as is the case, one with the great ocean of life and joy.

Sometimes, I know not why and how, we are for a moment or two in touch with the larger life—­to some it comes in religion, to some in love, to some in art.  Perhaps a wave of the onward sweeping tide beats for an instant into the little pool we call our own, stirring the fringing weed, bubbling sharply and freshly upon the sleeping sand,

The sad mistake we make is, when such a moment comes, to feel as though it were only the stirring of our own feeble imagination.  What we ought rather to do is by every effort we can make to welcome and comprehend this dawning of the larger life upon us; not to sink back peevishly into our own limits and timidly to deplore them, but resolutely to open the door again and again—­for the door can be opened—­to the light of the great sun that lies so broadly about us.  Every now and then we have some startling experience which reveals to us our essential union with other individuals.  We have many of us had experiences which seem to indicate that there is at times a direct communication with other minds, independent of speech or writing; and even if we have not had such experiences, it has been scientifically demonstrated that such things can occur.  Telepathy, as it is clumsily called, which is nothing more than this direct communication of mind, is a thing which has been demonstrated in a way which no reasonable person can reject.  We may call it abnormal if we like, and it is true that we do not as yet know under what conditions it exists; but it is as much there as electrical communication, and just as the electrician does not create the viewless ripples which his delicate instruments can catch and record, but merely makes it a matter of mechanics to detect them, so the ripple of human intercommunication is undoubtedly there; and when we have discovered what its laws are, we shall probably find that it underlies many things, such as enthusiasms, movements, the spirit of a community, patriotism, martial ardour, which now appear to us to be isolated and mysterious phenomena.