consciousness that animates the world? There is but one entity, seen now inwardly as mind, now outwardly as matter, but in reality an inextricable mixture and unity of both. Eternal order ... that betokens the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things, and constituting the essence of the world. Substance is insubstantial, that it is form and not matter, that it had nothing to do with that mongrel and neuter composite of matter. Bruno said: All reality is one in substance, one in cause, one in origin; mind and matter are one. Descartes' conception of a homogeneous "substance" underlying all forms of matter intrigued him for a time, and he wrestled mentally with the classic quotation, I think, therefore I am. Berkeley wrote: A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions--i.e., classified and interpreted sensations. Hegel: The Absolute, transcending the individual limitations and purposes, and catching, underneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of all things. Reason is the substance of the universe. Leibniz: Although the whole of this life were said to be nothing but a dream, and the visible world nothing but a phantasm, I should call this dream or phantasm real enough, if, using reason well, we were never deceived by it.For a time Buckmaster left the philosophers and read poetry. He found germs of what he sought in some of them, as Goethe's, _The force which draws the lover, and the force which draws the planets are one._ He found it beautifully in a stanza of Wordsworth's.  

_Something
Whose dwelling is the light of the setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and the mind of man;--
A motion and a spirit, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things._  

In the main, however, he found in the poets that the grains of wheat were too few amidst the chaff and returned to philosophy. Most of these excerpts, he felt, were clues to the enigma of himself. He knew that these great minds had touched on the very mystery that puzzled him. Once again he felt on the verge of _understanding_. Did he have all the pieces? Could he fit them into the pattern, if he but knew how? Or must he need to learn more?  

Suddenly he found the explanation in a book of essays by, the incongruity of it struck him as ironical, an anonymous writer. He read:  

_For a time, during the middle ages, the theory that all the world, and even the universe, were figments of one giant imagination, swayed the thinkers of the world. The intellect in which this imagination centered was focused in one man, and one man only, in the whole of 

 Prev. P 20/27 next