Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
At the time these two visions meant little more to me, if I can remember
my feeling at the time, than a proof of the supremacy of imagination, of
the power of many minds to become one, overpowering one another by spoken
words and by unspoken thought till they have become a single intense,
unhesitating energy. One mind was doubtless the master, I thought, but all
the minds gave a little, creating or revealing for a moment what I must
call a supernatural artist.
IV
Some years afterwards I was staying with some friends in Paris. I had got
up before breakfast and gone out to buy a newspaper. I had noticed the
servant, a girl who had come from the country some years before, laying
the table for breakfast. As I had passed her I had been telling myself one
of those long foolish tales which one tells only to oneself. If something
had happened that had not happened, I would have hurt my arm, I thought. I
saw myself with my arm in a sling in the middle of some childish
adventures. I returned with the newspaper and met my host and hostess in
the door. The moment they saw me they cried out, 'Why, the _bonne_ has
just told us you had your arm in a sling. We thought something must have
happened to you last night, that you had been run over maybe'--or some
such words. I had been dining out at the other end of Paris, and had come
in after everybody had gone to bed. I had cast my imagination so strongly
upon the servant that she had seen it, and with what had appeared to be
more than the mind's eye.
One afternoon, about the same time, I was thinking very intently of a
certain fellow-student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about
writing. In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of
miles away where that student was. On the afternoon when I had been
thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people
in a hotel and as seeming solid as if in the flesh. My fellow-student had
seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people
had gone. I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night
and given the message. I myself had no knowledge of casting an
imagination upon one so far away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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