Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/72

56 often animated, and always beautiful, like every young and growing thing.

For I believe that it is not enough, even in the field of philosophy, to know a theory. One must live it and feel it with all one's soul, must fill one's thought with it, must make it, for the time being, the content, the coloring and the significance of one's whole life. Berkeley's principle lends itself excellently well to this integral possession of truth. When a man truly discovers the great principle—and that may be long after he has known it at second hand—he is seized by a sort of idealistic intoxication which transforms the whole world for him. Think for a moment, think intensely of the real implications of these words: "The whole world is composed of spirit." All that had seemed solid and foreign becomes fluid, becomes immediately personal; the contrast between the ego and the world is diminished; the immense and formidable mass of matter is transmuted into a moving picture within the mind; the ego is no longer a drop in the sea or a leaf in the forest, but a marvelous mirror, able to create for itself the images that appear in it. You are master of the world; you hold within yourself the whole range of future possibility.

From this idealistic exaltation one may pass easily enough into the absurdity of solipsism—and this I know, for I have gone through that