Above all, as she had said, he saw it; and now he was silent, seeking words that might rid him of pursuit, yet not infect her. She had stopped short before his silence. Smiling, now, on the background of mist, her eyes, her lips, her poise challenged him, incredulous, actually amused. “Don’t you think that _I_ have an identity?” she asked. He was willing at that to face her, for he saw suddenly and clearly,--it seemed to radiate from her in the smile, the look,--that he, apparently, couldn’t hurt her. She was too full of life to be in any danger from him, and perhaps the only way of ending pursuit was to fling wide the doors and, since she had said the word, show her the emptiness within. “You force me to talk cheap metaphysics to you, Eppie, but I’ll try to say what I do think,” he said. “I believe that the illusion of a separate identity, self-directing and permanent, is the deepest and most tenacious of all illusions--the illusion that makes the wheels go round, the common illusion that makes the common mirage. The abolishing of the identity, of the self, is the final word of science, and of philosophy, and of religion, too. The determinism of science, the ecstatic immediacy of the mystic consciousness, the monistic systems of the Absolutists, all tend toward the final discovery that,--now I’m going to be very glib indeed,--but one must use the technical jargon,--that under all the transitory appearance is a unity in which, for which, diversity vanishes.” Eppie no longer smiled. She had walked on while he spoke, her eyes on him, no longer amused or incredulous, with an air now of almost stern security. “Odd,” she said presently, “that such a perverse and meaningless Whole should be made up of such significant fragments.” “Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely: Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in it--discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite unconscious,--or so some people who think a great deal about it say,--we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal, and are satisfied.” “You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady voice. “What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”