We live out a Youth peculiarly haunted by such dreams; yet never mistaking them for dreams. As Memories we _know_ them. _During our Youth_ the distinction is too clear to deceive us even for a moment. So long as this Youth endures, the feeling _that we exist_, is the most natural of all feelings. We understand it _thoroughly_. That there was a period at which we did _not_ exist—or, that it might so have happened that we never had existed at all—are the considerations, indeed, which _during this youth_, we find difficulty in understanding. Why we should _not_ exist, is, _up to the epoch of our Manhood_, of all queries the most unanswerable. Existence—self-existence—existence from all Time and to all Eternity—seems, up to the epoch of Manhood, a normal and unquestionable condition:—_seems, because it is_. But now comes the period at which a conventional World-Reason awakens us from the truth of our dream. Doubt, Surprise and Incomprehensibility arrive at the same moment. They say:—“You live and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own; and it is only through this Intelligence you live at all.” These things we struggle to comprehend and cannot:—_cannot_, because these things, being untrue, are thus, of necessity, incomprehensible. No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists _greater than his own soul_. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought;—these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity—are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul _is_ inferior to another—that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul—that each soul is, in part, its own God—its own Creator:—in a word, that God—the material _and_ spiritual God—_now_ exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the _purely_ Spiritual and Individual God. In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice—of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more—it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a _Sorrow_ which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes—with a view—if even with a futile view—to the extension of our own _Joy_. I have spoken of _Memories_ that haunt us during our youth. They sometimes pursue us even in our Manhood:—assume gradually less and less indefinite shapes:—now and then speak to us with low voices, saying: