We could quote passages from the essays ad infinitum, showing conclusively that the cosmic conscious plane had been attained and retained by this great philosopher--one of the first of the early part of the century, which has been prophesied as the beginning of the first faint lights of the Dawn, but enough has been offered for our present purpose, that of establishing the salient points of the cosmic conscious man or woman, which points are the complete assurance of the eternal verity and indestructibility of the soul; of its ultimate and inevitable victory over _maya_ or the "wheel of causation"; and the joyousness and the sense of at-one-ness with the universe, which comes to the illumined one, bespeaking an unquenchable optimism and an utter destruction of the sense of sin--points which characterize all who have attained to this supra-conscious state of Being. These points are all expressed repeatedly in all Emerson's utterances and mark him as one of the most illumined philosophers, as he was one of the greatest intellects of the last century, or of any other century. LEO TOLSTOI: RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER A strange, lonely and wonderful figure was Tolstoi, novelist, philosopher, socialist, artist and reformer. Great souls are always lonely souls, estimated by sense-conscious humans. In the midst of the so-called pleasures and luxuries of the senses, a wise soul appears as barren of comfort as is a desert of foliage. Without the divine optimism that comes from soul-consciousness, such a one could not endure the life of the body: without the absolute assurance that comes with cosmic consciousness, men like the late Count Tolstoi must needs die of soul-loneliness. From early childhood up to the time of his Illumination Tolstoi indulged in seriousness of thought. Like Mohammed, great and overpowering desire to fathom the mystery of death took possession of him. He was ever haunted by an excessive dread of the "darkness of the grave," and in his essay, "Childhood," he describes with that wonderful realism, which characterizes all his works, the effect on a child's mind of seeing the face of his dead mother. This may be taken in a sense as biographical, although it is not probable that Tolstoi here alludes to the death of his own mother as she died when he was too young to have remembered. He describes the scene in the words of Irteniev: "I could not believe that this was her face. I began to look at it more closely, and gradually discovered in it the familiar and beloved features. I shuddered with fear when I became sure that it was indeed she, but why were the closed eyes so fallen in? Why was she so terribly pale, and why was there a blackish mark under the clear skin on one cheek?" A terror of death, and yet a haunting urge that compelled him to be forever thinking upon the mystery of it, is the dominant note in every line of Tolstoi's writings up to the time which he describes as "a change" that came over him.