[2] “The Interpreters,” by A. E. The characters “interpret” the “relation of the politics of Time to the politics of Eternity.” “No, no,” replies the poet. “The earth spirit does not draw us aside from life. How could that which is father and mother of us all lead us to err from the law of our being?” And, again, as I sat puzzling about the amazing horror of what was called the Civilization of the New World, and doubtless making the commonplace mistake of thinking that New York City was America:-- “Every great civilization, I think, has a Deity behind it, or a divine shepherd who guided it on some plan in the cosmic imagination. ‘Behold,’ said an ancient Oracle, ‘how the Heavens glitter with intellectual sections.’... These are archetypal images we follow dimly in our evolution.” “How do you conceive of these powers as affecting civilization?” “I believe they are incarnate in the race; more in the group than in the individual; and they tend to bring about an orchestration of the genius of the race, to make manifest in time their portion of eternal beauty....”[3] [3] _Ibid._ My conception of the universe, at any rate, in these early days was imaginative entirely; the critical function, which comes with greater knowledge, with reason, with fuller experience, lay wholly dormant. I communed with both gods and devils. New York stoked the furnace--provided the contrasts. Experience, very slowly, furnished the files and sand-paper which lay bare what may be real beneath by rubbing away the pretty gilt. Certain convictions of those far days, however, stood the test, whatever that test may be worth, and have justified themselves to me with later years as assuredly _not_ gilt. That unity of life is true, and that our normal human consciousness is but one type, and a somewhat insignificant type at that, hold unalterably real for me to-day. My other conviction, born in Bronx Park in 1892 by the teapot, tin mug, and familiar boulder which concealed these indispensable utensils during the week, is that the Mystical Experience known to many throughout the ages with invariable similarity is _not_ a pathogenic experience, but is due to a desirable, genuine and valuable expansion of consciousness which furnishes knowledge normally ahead of the race; but, since language can only describe the experience of the race, that it is incommunicable because no words exist, and that only those who have experienced it can comprehend it. The best equipped modern “intellectual” (above all the “intellectual” perhaps), the most advanced scientist, as, on the other hand, the drayman, the coster, the city clerk, must remain not only dumb before its revelation, stupid, hopelessly at sea, angry probably, but contemptuous and certainly mystified: they must also appear, if they be honest, entirely and unalterably _sceptical_. Such scepticism is their penalty; it is, equally, their judge and their confession. CHAPTER XXVI