The only
absolute truth was the sub-conscious chaos below. which every one
could feel when he sought it.
Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little
to the student who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in
studying his own mind. On him, the effect was surprising. He woke
up with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his
bicycle. If his mind were really this sort of magnet,
mechanically dispersing its lines of force when it went to sleep,
and mechanically orienting them when it woke up -- which was
normal, the dispersion or orientation? The mind, like the body,
kept its unity unless it happened to lose balance, but the
professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and hurt himself,
knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down, though he did
know -- what the idiot could hardly do -- that his normal
condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity was
unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep,
dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different
thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance
was acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back,
crossing a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly breaking his neck.
By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead --
nothing but a dissolving mind -- and the historian felt himself
driven back on thought as one continuous Force, without Race,
Sex, School, Country, or Church.
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