“A noiseless, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself; Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them. “And you, O my Soul, where you stand, Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them; Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold; Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul.” —WALT WHITMAN. There are many forms of experience which in the primary, unanalyzed, unreflective stage appear to bring us into immediate contact with self-transcending reality. We seem to be nearer the heart of things, more imbedded in life and in reality itself when consciousness is fused and unified in an undifferentiated whole of experience than in the later stage of reflection and description. This later stage necessarily involves reduction because it involves abstraction. We cannot bring any object or any experience to exact description without stripping it of its life and its mystery and without reducing it to the abstract qualities which are unvarying and repeatable. There can be no doubt that our experiences of beauty, for instance, have a physical and describable aspect. The sunset which thrills us is for descriptive purposes an aggregation of minute water-drops which set ether waves vibrating at different velocities, and, as a result, we receive certain nerve shocks that are pleasurable. These nerve shocks modify brain cells and affect arterial and visceral vibrations, all of which might conceivably be accurately described. But no complete account of these minute cloud particles, or of these ether vibrations; no catalogue of these nerve shocks, cell changes, or arterial throbs can catch or present to us what we get in the naïve and palpitating experience of beauty itself. Something there in the field of perception has suddenly fused our consciousness into an undifferentiated whole in which sensuous elements, intellectual and ideal elements, emotional and conative elements are indissolubly merged into a vital _system_ which baffles all analysis. Something got through perception puts all the powers of the inner self into play and into harmony, overcomes all dualisms of self and other, annuls all contradictions that may later be discovered, lifts the mind to the apprehension of objects of a higher order than that of sense, and liberates and vitalizes the soul with a consciousness of possession and joy and freedom.