THE PLAY OF BRAHM
Inspiration, dreams, visions at the moment of death—these things we say are irrational, and so in a sense they are. Bergson has compared the play of reason upon phenomena to the action of a cinematograph machine which reproduces the effect of motion by flashing upon the screen a correlated series of fixed images. In like manner the reason dissects the flux of life and presents it to consciousness part by part, but never as a whole. In supernormal states however we may assume that with the breakdown of some barrier life flows in like a tidal wave, paralyzing the reason, and therefore presenting itself in an irrational manner to consciousness. Were reason equal to the strain put upon it under these circumstances, in what light might the phantasmagoria of human life appear? Might it not be perceived as a representation, merely, of a supernal world, higher-dimensional in relation to our own? Just as a moving picture shows us the round and living bodies of men and women as flat images on a plane, enacting there some mimic drama, so on the three-dimensional screen