In two amazing sonnets which he called _Redemption_, the tragic Portuguese poet, Antero de Quental, embodied his dream of a spirit imprisoned, not in atoms or ions or crystals, but--as is natural in a poet--in the sea, in trees, in the forest, in the mountains, in the wind, in all material individualities and forms; and he imagines that a day may come when all these captive souls, as yet in the limbo of existence, will awaken to consciousness, and, emerging as pure thought from the forms that imprisoned them, they will see these forms, the creatures of illusion, fall away and dissolve like a baseless vision. It is a magnificent dream of the penetration of everything by consciousness. May it not be that the Universe, our Universe--who knows if there are others?--began with a zero of spirit--and zero is not the same as nothing--and an infinite of matter, and that its goal is to end with an infinite of spirit and a zero of matter? Dreams! May it be that everything has a soul and that this soul begs to be freed? _Oh tierras de Alvargonzález, en el corazón de España, tierras pobres, tierras tristes, tan tristes que tienen alma!_ sings our poet Antonio Machado in his _Campos de Castilla_.[50] Is the sadness of the field in the fields themselves or in us who look upon them? Do they not suffer? But what can an individual soul in a world of matter actually be? Is it the rock or the mountain that is the individual? Is it the tree? And nevertheless the fact always remains that spirit and matter are at strife. This is the thought that Espronceda expressed when he wrote: _Aquí, para vivir en santa calma, o sobra la materia, o sobra el alma._[51] And is there not in the history of thought, or of human imagination if you prefer it, something that corresponds to this process of the reduction of matter, in the sense of a reduction of everything to consciousness? Yes, there is, and its author is the first Christian mystic, St. Paul of Tarsus, the Apostle of the Gentiles, he who because he had never with his bodily eyes looked upon the face of the fleshly and mortal Christ, the ethical Christ, created within himself an immortal and religious Christ--he who was caught up into the third heaven and there beheld secret and unspeakable things (2 Cor. xii.). And this first Christian mystic dreamed also of a final triumph of spirit, of consciousness, and this is what in theology is technically called the apocatastasis or restitution.