82
The Law is for All
thought flashed into my mind that after all the bag was in one 
sense a part of myself. The two ideas came together with a 
snap, and I understood the machinery of a man’s delusion 
that he is a teapot.
These two examples may give some idea to the reader of 
the light which mystical attainment throws upon the details 
of the working of the human mind.
Further developments of this vision emphasized the iden­
tity between the Universe and the mind. The search for simi­
les deepened. I had a curious impression that the thing I was 
looking for was somehow obvious and familiar. Ultimately it 
burst upon me with fulminating conviction that the simile for 
which I was seeking was the nervous system. I exclaimed: 
“The mind is the nervous system,” with all the enthusiasm of 
Archimedes, and it only dawned on me later, with a curious 
burst of laughter at my naïveté, that my great discovery 
amounted to a platitude.
From this I came to another discovery: I perceived why 
platitudes were stupid. The reason was that they represented 
the summing-up of trains of thought, each of which was 
superb in every detail at one time. A platitude was like a wife 
after a few years; she has lost none of her charms, and yet 
one prefers some perfectly worthless woman.
I now found myself able to retrace the paths of thought 
which ultimately come together in a platitude. I would start 
with some few simple ideas and develop them. Each stage in 
the process was like the joy of a young eagle soaring from 
height to height in ever-increasing sunlight as dawn breaks, 
foaming, over the purple hem of the garment of ocean, and, 
when the many-coloured rays of rose and gold and green 
gathered themselves together and melted into the orbed glory 
of the sun, with a rapture that shook the soul with unimagin­
able ecstasy, that sphere of rushing light was recognized as a 
commonplace idea, accepted unquestioningly and treated 
with drab indifference because it had so long been assimi­
lated as a natural and necessary part of the order of Nature. 
At first I was shocked and disgusted to discover that a series 
of brilliant researches should culminate in a commonplace. 
But I soon understood that what I had done was to live over 
again the triumphant career of conquering humanity; that I 
had experienced in my own person the succession of winged 
victories that had been sealed by a treaty of peace whose 
clauses might be summed up in some such trite expression as 
“Beauty depends upon form.”