The Law is for All

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.”