Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' Gleams that untravel'd world whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. The idea of immortality is one of the phases of the thought of infinitude. It is the removal of limits which at first seemed final. It is the assertion that our own lives are infinitely greater than we had thought; that there is something beyond the familiar boundaries of Time. Now, how do we ever come to a sense of the infinite ? It is not by way of abstraction. Having discovered a finite reality, we do not turn away from it, and, in a spirit of wilful contradiction, assert the existence of the infinite. No! We follow a finite thing. We seek to grasp it, to understand it in all its relations and antecedents. We follow it till suddenly we get beyond our depth. To come to that experience, we have only to follow anything far enough. This experience of the unfathomable depths of being may be long delayed. Those who take care to keep well within bounds are not likely to be disturbed by the senseof the boundless. The average man does not live habitually in the awed consciousness that he is in an infinite universe. He is dealing, as he thinks, with finite realities. He prides himself on his ability to see all around a subject and to exhaust its possibilities. He talks glibly of the beginning and the end of things. He has the ability so to concentrate his mind upon a single phase of the actual as to shut out all else. His mind is preoccupied by a multitude of petty cares. And yet, for all that, he does live in the presence of infinite reality; and now and then the fogs are brushed aside, and he becomes conscious of where he is. He had used his mind merely as an instrument for private gain. He had sharpened his ...