Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/23

Rh meals. Towards the close of each such period he becomes temporarily conscious of the Void; and in the perpetually recurring struggle with these repasts he may perhaps find a symbol of the eternal antithesis between the One and the Many, and of the eternal effort of the Many to merge itself in the One. The human mind, in short, instead of expanding in this transcendental company, contracts. Its emotions, at a moment when they might be expected to range the universe, assume their most egotistically personal shape; and when its intellectual and spiritual powers ought—in common decency, one might almost say—to predominate, its primitive, even its savage, instincts are supreme. Man, or, at any rate, average man, approaches as near to the condition of mechanism as, perhaps, it is possible for him to approach without actually becoming a machine. Human life is reduced to its purely animal processes, and the great facts and forces of Nature exist for the sole