Page:Medicine and the church.djvu/291

 'Transcendental feeling I would explain genetically as an effect produced within consciousness by the persistence in us of that primeval condition from which we are sprung, when life was still as sound asleep as death, and there was no time yet. That we should fall for a while, now and then, from our waking, time-marking life, into the timeless slumber of this primeval life is easy to understand; for the principle solely operative in that primeval life is indeed the fundamental principle of our nature, being that "vegetative part of the soul" which made from the first, and still silently makes, the assumption on which our rational life of conduct and science rests—the assumption that life is worth living. When to the "vegetative" the "sensitive" soul is first added, the Imperative (Live thy Life) is obeyed by creatures which, experiencing only isolated feelings, and retaining no traces of them in memory, still live a timeless life, without sense of past or future, and consequently without sense of selfhood. Then, with memory, there comes, in the higher animals, some dim sense of a self dating back and prospecting forward. Time begins to be.'

This, then, is our starting point; that besides the single, supreme, rational activity, which we call intellect, there exist in us other