_In the religious systems of mankind, I sought thee, O God, in vain; in their machine-made dogmas and theologies, I sought thee in vain; in their churches and temples and mosques, I sought thee long, and long in vain; but in the Sacred Books of the World, what have I found? A letter of thy name, O God, I have deciphered in the Vedas, another in the Zend-Avesta, another in the Bible, another in the Korân. Ay, even in the Book of the Royal Society and in the Records of the Society for Psychical Research, have I found the diacritical signs which the infant races of this Planet Earth have not yet learned to apply to the consonants of thy name. The lisping infant races of this Earth, when will they learn to pronounce thy name entire? Who shall supply the Vowels which shall unite the Gutturals of the Sacred Books? Who shall point out the dashes which compound the opposite loadstars in the various regions of thy Heaven? On the veil of the eternal mystery are palimpsests of which every race has deciphered a consonant. And through the diacritical marks which the seers and paleologists of the future shall furnish, the various dissonances in thy name shall be reduced, for the sake of the infant races of the Earth, to perfect harmony._--KHALID. ----- [1] Arabic Symbol. CHAPTER I THE DISENTANGLEMENT OF THE ME "Why this exaggerated sense of thine importance," Khalid asks himself in the K. L. MS., "when a little ptomaine in thy cheese can poison the source of thy lofty contemplations? Why this inflated conception of thy Me, when an infusion of poppy seeds might lull it to sleep, even to stupefaction? What avails thy logic when a little of the Mandragora can melt the material universe into golden, unfolding infinities of dreams? Why take thyself so seriously when a leaf of henbane, taken by mistake in thy salad, can destroy thee? But the soul is not dependent on health or disease. The soul is the source of both health and disease. And life, therefore, is either a healthy or a diseased state of the soul.