Here Khalid bursts in ecstasy about the higher spiritual kingdom, and chops a little logic about the I and the not-I, the Reality and the non-Reality.—“God,” says the Hermit. “Thought,” says the Idealist, “that is the only Reality.” And what is Thought, and what is God, and what is Matter, and what is Spirit? They are the mysterious vessels of Life, which are always being filled by Love and emptied by Logic. “The external world,” says the Materialist—“Does not exist,” says the Idealist. “ ’Tis immaterial if it does or not,” says the Hermit. And what if the three are wrong? The Universe, knowable and unknowable, will it be affected a whit by it? If the German Professor’s Chair of Logic and Philosophy were set up in the Hermitage, would anything be gained or lost? Let the I deny the stars, and they will nevertheless roll in silence above it. Let the not-I crush this I, this “thinking reed,” and the higher universal I, rising above the stars and flooding the sidereal heavens with light, will warm, remold, and regenerate the world.
“I can conceive of a power,” writes Khalid in that vexing Manuscript, “which can create a beautiful parti-colored sunflower of the shattered fragments of Idealism, Materialism, and my Hermit’s theology. Why not, if in the New World—” And here, of a sudden, to surprise and bewilder us, he drags in Mrs. Eddy and the Prophet Dowie yoked under the yoke of Whitman. He marks the Key to Scripture with blades from Leaves of Grass , and such fuel as he gathers from both, he lights with an ember borrowed from the chariot to Elijah. And thus, for ten whole pages, beating continually, now in the dark of Metaphysics, now in the dusk of Science; losing himself in the tangled bushes of English Materialism, and German Mysticism, and Arabic Sufism; calling now to Berkeley, now to Hackel; meeting with Spencer here, with al-Ghazali there; and endeavoring to extricate himself in the end with some such efforts as “the Natural being Negativity, the Spiritual must be the opposite of that, and