"The specialist is necessarily the loftiest expression of man--the link which connects the visible to the superior worlds. He acts, he sees, he feels through his _inner being_. The abstractive _thinks_. The instinctive simply _acts_. Hence three degrees for man. As an instinctive he is below the level; as an abstractive he attains it; as a specialist he rises above it. Specialism opens to man his true career; the Infinite dawns upon him--he catches a glimpse of his destiny." The merely sense-conscious man is the man-animal; the abstractive man is the average man and woman in the world to-day--the human who is evolving out of the mental into the spiritual consciousness. The specialist is the cosmic conscious one, the one who "catches a glimpse of his destiny." Balzac, in company with all who attain cosmic consciousness, had a great capacity for suffering; and this soul-loneliness became crystalized into spiritual wisdom, which he expressed in the words and in the manner most likely to be accepted by the world. How else can that divine union to which we are heirs and for which we are either blindly, consciously, or supra-consciously, striving, be described and exploited without danger of defilement and degeneracy, save and except by the phrase "unity with God"? All mystics have found it necessary to veil the "secret of secrets," lest the unworthy (because _unready_) defile it with his gaze, even as the sinful devotee prostrates himself hiding his face, while the priest raises the chalice containing the holy eucharist in the ceremony of the mass. CHAPTER XIV ILLUMINATION AS EXPRESSED IN THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT Poetry is the natural language of cosmic consciousness. "The music of the spheres" is a literal expression, as all who have ever _glimpsed_ the beauties of the spiritual realms will testify. "Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," said Shelley. Not that all poets are aware, in their mortal consciousness, of their divine mission, or of their spiritual glimpses. The outer mind, the mortal or carnal mind--that part of our organism whose office it is to take care of the physical body, for its preservation and its well-being, may be so dominant as, to hold in bondage the _atman_, but it can not utterly silence its voice. Thus the true poet is also a seer; a prophet; a spiritually-conscious being, for such time, or during such phases of inspiration, as he becomes imbued with the spirit of poetry. A person who writes rhymes is not necessarily a poet. So, too, there are poets who do not express their inspirations according to the rules of metre and syntax.