The influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and incantations--of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as it were, let loose upon innocent men--as though one had walked into a trap--all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we say is illusion. The reality is behind all; and we neither see it, nor say it, but only feel it. So also of those mysterious planes of identity which lie between soul and soul, forming a continuous country and habitable world, between men apparently sundered from one another by every human condition--sundered by age, sex, epoch, language, occupation, religion--and yet undergoing the same experience, valuing the same idea, twinned by the fact that across time and space something in them is identical. Some wheel in each of them is being turned by the same power at the same rate, and makes these creatures cognate. They are one thing; they are portions of a continuous, indestructible reality which conditions them both. The experience comes to almost everyone at some time or moment in his life, that he is nothing in himself, but only a part of something else. It is a consciousness of the process of life, a consciousness of what is happening. Whether through the touch of sickness or through intense concentration, or through absolute abstraction, most men have felt the prick of this thought, though the leisure and the impulse to record it have been denied to them.