THE influence of the planets, of deities good and bad, of spells and incantations—of fatal or beneficial forces suddenly unlocked and, as it were, let loose upon innocent men—as though one had walked into a trap—all these myths and symbols were invented in past ages, by discerning, deep-seeing men to express the impotence which they saw about them, to express the fact that all men are walking in their dreams and their dreams control them. What we see is illusion: what we say is illusion. The reality is behind all; and we neither see it, nor say it, but only feel it.
So also of those mysterious planes of identity which lie between soul and soul, forming a continuous country and habitable world, between men apparently sundered from one another by every human condition—sundered by age, sex, epoch, language, occupation, religion—and yet undergoing the same experience, valuing the same idea, twinned by the fact that across time and space something in them is identical. Some wheel in each of them is being turned by the same power at the same rate, and makes these creatures cognate. They are one thing; they are portions of a continuous, indestructible reality which conditions them both.
The experience comes to almost everyone at some time or moment in his life, that he is nothing in himself, but only a part of something else. It is a consciousness of the process of life, a consciousness of what is happening. Whether through the touch of sickness or through intense concentration, or through absolute abstraction, most men have felt the prick of this thought, though the leisure and the impulse to record it have been denied to them.
When European cattle are taken to Egypt, their forms begin to change in one or two generations. Their backs and horns seem to be imitating the cattle in the bas-reliefs of the rock tombs, which were carved twenty-five centuries before Christ. So too, when American parents settle in Rome, their children resemble Romans. It is not merely in the expression of the face, or in the cut of the hair. It is in the bones of the forehead and in the way the hair grows out of the skin that these youngsters resemble the modern inhabitants of ancient Rome. Professor Boaz has found by measurement that the skulls of children born in America to foreign parents assume the American type. There is something in the air here, or under the earth, that is at work upon the immigrant child even before it is born. On the ship they are remodeled, and in the womb they are shaped by the power that fashions the skull to such dimensions as it is provided we shall wear to-day in America. If you should steer the ship toward New Zealand or Japan, the form of the infant’s cranium would vary and be modified accordingly. The force that accompanied the ship would arrive with you, and be present at your landing. The child would grow up in some sort of unthinkable relation to the continent or island on which it landed. It would be as one of the children of that land—nearer to them perhaps than to its parents. We may call this influence climate, but if we do so we must be sure to remember that perhaps the influence is really due to soil, to electrical, magnetic, or even to sidereal influences. As the influence is impalpable and tremendous, so it is unknown and perhaps cannot be known.
I see the immigrant land and toil and push his fortunes. I see the professor, with his calipers and his microscope, measuring the immigrant’s brain. And above the professor, bending over him as he looks into his microscope, I see the formative power modeling the professor’s skull as he measures the skull of the immigrant—assigning him what he shall see in it, apportioning to him what he shall believe and tell other men about it—leading him on, yes, leading him as a child is led by a butterfly. And all this vision of mine ranks itself as a thing that has happened long ago, and is always happening. It is a part of universal experience. I that suffer it am but feeling what man has always felt, and shall feel forever—the power of God behind his own illusion, modeling his thoughts—letting its influence be shut off by his opacity, or else flash through him to its own ends in directions which he cannot comprehend.