“For fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as nature’s self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again,— The grand Perhaps!”
What we find at once, even without a resort to a subliminal self, or to “uprushes,” is that our normal, personal self-consciousness is a unique, living, self-active, creative center of energies, dealing not only with space and time and tangible things, but dealing as well with realities which are space- and time-transcending. “The things that are not” prove to be immense factors in our lives and constantly “bring to naught the things that are.” The greatest events of history have not been due to physical forces; they have been due to plans and ideals which were real only in the viewless minds of men. What _was not yet_ brought about what was to be. Alexander the Great with his physical forces, sweeping across the ancient world like a cataclysm of nature, was certainly no more truly a world-builder than was Jesus, who had no armies, who used no tangible forces, but merely put into operation those “things that were not,” i.e., his ideas of what ought to be and his conviction that love is stronger than Roman legions. The simplest and humblest of us, like the Psalmist, find the Meshech where we sojourn too straitened and narrow for us. We have all cried, “Woe is me that I sojourn in Meshech!” The reason that we discover the limits and bounds of our poor Meshech is that we are all the time going beyond the hampering Meshech that tries to contain and imprison us.
The thing which spoils all our finite camping places is our unstilled consciousness that we are made for something more than we have yet realized or attained. Our ideals are an unmistakable intimation of our time-transcending nature. We can no more stop with _that which is_ than Niagara can stop at the fringe of the fall. All consciousness of the higher rational type is continually carried forward toward the larger whole that would complete and fulfill its present experience. We are aware of the limit only because we are already beyond it. The present is a pledge of more; the little arc which we have gives us a ground of faith in the full circle which we seek. A study of man’s life which does not deal with this inherent idealizing tendency is like _Hamlet_ with Hamlet left out. Martineau declared: