One, at least, of the patient investigators of this accumulated mass of human delusion, took up the quest in the hope that he might receive scientific evidence of the continued existence of identity.  He was forced to confess that the evidence went all the other way, and that all the tales which appeared to substantiate the fact, were hopelessly discredited.  The only thing, as I have said, that the investigations seem to have substantiated, is evidence which none but a determinedly sceptical mind would disallow, that there does exist, in certain abnormal cases, a possibility of direct communication between two or more living minds.

But, as I pondered thus, the day began to darken over the rough pasture with its ruined wall, and I felt creeping upon me that old inheritance of humanity, that terror in the presence of the unseen, which sets the mind at work, distorting and exaggerating the impressions of eye and ear.  How easy, in such a mood, to grow tense and expectant—­

    “Till sight and hearing ache
     For something that may keep
     The awful inner sense
     Unroused, lest it should mark
     The life that haunts the emptiness
     And horror of the dark.”

Face to face with the impenetrable mystery, with the thought of those whom we have loved, who have slipped without a word or a sign over the dark threshold, what wonder if we beat with unavailing hands against the closed door?  It would be strange if we did not, for we too must some day enter in; well, the souls of all those who have died, alike those whom we have loved, and the spirits of those old Romans whose mortal bodies melted into smoke year after year in the little enclosure into which I look, know whatever there is to know.  That is a stern and dreadful truth; the secret is impenetrably sealed from us; but, “though the heart ache to contemplate it, it is there.”

XVII

HABITS

Walter Pater says, in his most oracular mood, in that fine manifesto of a lofty Epicureanism which is known as the Conclusion to the Renaissance essays, that to form habits is failure in life.  The difficulty in uttering oracles is that one is obliged for the sake of being forcible to reduce a statement to its simplest terms; and when one does that, there are generally a whole group of cases which appear to be covered by the statement, which contradict it.  It is nearly impossible to make any general statement both simple enough and large enough.  In the case of Pater’s pronouncement, he had fixed his mental gaze so firmly on a particular phenomenon, that he forgot that his words might prove misleading when applied to the facts of life.  What he meant, no doubt, was that one of the commonest of mental dangers is to form intellectual and moral prejudices early in life, and so to stereotype them that we are unable to look round them, or to give anything that we instinctively