Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/162

and conventions as ultimate. They benumb the soul, and make it a part of a dead mechanism, when it should be a part of the living force which moulds the world. You should be an active instead of a passive agent in that process; you must be, in his phrase, 'self-reliant'; you must develop your own powers and obey your instincts, without submitting to any external rule. You then become a 'ripple of the stream of tendency.' 'Beware,' he says, 'when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.' The new thought represents a 'new influx of divinity into the mind.' The doctrine is sometimes expressed in language learnt from the mystics. The beautiful state of the soul is measured by its capacity for 'ecstasy.' Every man is capable of divine illumination, and can be elevated by intercourse with the spiritual world. The 'ecstasy' corresponds to the 'inner light' of the Quakers. It recalls, as he says, 'the trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Fox, Bunyan, Pascal, Guion, and Swedenborg.' The 'rapt saint,' he declares, is the only logician; not exhortation, not argument, becomes our lips, but 'pæans of joy and praise.' He speaks of the ecstatic state with a kind of awe in the essay on Self-reliance as something which cannot be fully