pression of its reality your waking-life does no
more ; you wake to one and sleep to the other.
Which is the real and which the false, since you
assume that one is false ? " I could only ask
myself again the eternal question, " Objective or
subjective?" and the Daemon made no further
suggestion. At this instant we heard the report
of a gun from the lake, and Steve said, "The
deer is in that's the doctor's shot-gun." And we
knew that the deer was killed, as the doctor
had a double-barrelled shot-gun, and if he had
missed with the first shot would have fired the
second, and we pulled back to camp.

Arriving at the landing, we found the guides
dressing the deer and the company preparing
for dinner. The rest of the day passed in fishing,
in exploring the nooks and islands of the lake,
and my usual frame of mind returned. As the



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 243

night came on, the excitement of the evening
before returned, and I determined to stay in
camp through the evening; not that I feared
the ghostly society which had haunted me out
on the lake, for with the experience it had
become familiar, but I wanted to see if the
mental action was produced by solitude, or if it
would come in society. The company went in
part out for a row, and part sat down to cards
by candle light and the huge fire of green logs.
I retired to the shanty and threw myself down
on my blankets ; but then I felt the Daemon
sitting by me, ready to be questioned.

Then came suddenly a flash of doubt as to the
theological status of my ghostly vis-a-vis, and I
abruptly asked, "Who are you?" "Nobody,"
replied the Daemon, oracularly.

This I knew in one sense to be true, and I
replied, "But you know what I mean. Don't
trifle. Of what nature is your personality?"

"Do you think," it replied, "that personality
is necessary to existence ? We are spirit."

" But wherein, save in the having or not having
a body, do you differ from me?"

"In all the consequences of that difference."

"Very well, go on."

"Do you not see that without your circum-
stances you are only half a being? that you are
shaped by the action and reaction between your
own mind and surrounding things, and that your
mind is only the medium of this action and
reaction? Do you not see that without this



244 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

there would have been no consciousness of self,
and consequently neither individuality nor person-
ality? Remove those circumstances by removing
the body, and do you not remove personality?"

"But," said I, "you certainly have individuality,
and wherein does that differ from personality?"

" Possibly you commit two mistakes," replied
the Daemon. "As to the distinction, it is one
with a difference. You are personal to yourself,
individual to others; and we, though individual
to you, may still be impersonal. If spirit takes
form from having something to act on, the fact
that we act on you is sufficient, so far as you are
concerned, to develop individuality."

I hesitated, puzzled.

It went on : " Don't you see that the inertia
of spirit is motion, as that of matter is rest ?
Now, compare this universal spirit to a river
flowing always but tranquilly, and which in itself
gives no evidence of motion, save where it meets
with some inert point of resistance. This point
of resistance has the effect of action in itself,
and you attribute to it all the eddies and ripples
produced. You must see that your own immo-
bility is the cause of the phenomena of life which
give you your own apparent existence ; our in-
dividuality to you may be just as much the effect
of your own personality ; you find us responsive
only to your own mental state."

I was conscious of a sophistry somewhere, but
could not for the life of me detect it. I thought
of the Tempter ; I almost feared to listen to



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 245

another word ; but the Daemon seemed so fair,
so rational, responding only to my questions, and
above all so confident of truth, that I could not
entertain my fears.

" But," said I finally, " if my personality is owing
to my physical circumstances, to my body and its
inertias, what is the body itself owing to ? "

" All physical or organic existence is owing to
the antagonism between particles of matter,
fixed and resistant, and the all-pervading, ever-
flowing spirit, the different inertiae conflict; and
end by combining in an organic being, since
neither can be annihilated or transmuted. Per-
haps we may tell you after a time how this
antagonism commences; at present you would
hardly be able to comprehend it clearly."

This I felt, for I was already getting confused
with the questions that suggested themselves to
me as to the relations between spirit and matter.
I asked once more, " Have you never been
personal, as I am, for instance ? Have you not
at some time had a body and a name?"

" Perhaps," was the reply ; " but it was so long
ago, and the trifling circumstances you call living,
with all their direct and recognisable effects,
pass away so soon, that it is impossible to recall
anything of it. There seems a kind of conscious-
ness when we have something to act against, as
against your mind at the present moment; but
as to name, and all unsubstantial distinctive-
ness, what is the use of them where there is no
possibility of confusion or mistake as regards an



246 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

identity which has not the most trivial import-
ance? We have said that we are spirit; and
when we say that matter is one and spirit one,
we have gone behind individual identity."

"But," asked I, "am I to lose my individual
existence, to become finally merged in a uni-
versal impersonality? What, then, is the object
of life?"

"You see the plants and animals all around
you growing up and passing away each entering
its little orbit, and sweeping through this sphere
of cognisance back again to the same mystery
that it emerged from ; you never ask the question
as to them, but for yourself you are anxious.
If you had not been, would creation have been
the less creation? If you cease, will it not still
be as great? Truly, though, your mistake is one
of too little, not of too much. You assume that
the animals will be annihilated; but, in fact,
nothing dies. The very crystals into which the
so-called primitive substances are formed, and
which are the first forms of organisation, have a
spirit in them. If you could decompose the
crystal, would you annihilate what made it such?
The plant decomposes and absorbs the crystal,
and it becomes a part of a higher, or more
complex organisation, equally dependent on the
originating motive; and, if it is cut down and
cast into the oven, is the organic element food
for the flames. You, the animal, do but exist
through the absorption of these vegetable and
derived substances, and why should you claim



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 247

exemption from the analogical law of absorption
and aggregation? You killed a deer to-day
the flesh you will appropriate to supply the
wants of your own material organisation; but
the life, the spirit which made that flesh a deer,
in obedience to which that shell of external
appearance is moulded you missed that. You
can trace the body in its metamorphoses ; but
for this impalpable, active, and only real part of
the being, it were folly to assume that it is more
perishable, more evanescent than the matter of
which it was the master. And why should not
you, as well as the deer, go back into the Great
Life from which you came ? As to the purpose
in creation, why should there be any other than
that which existence always shows, of creation?"
I was silent, pondering as to how I should form
my questions on a subject which seemed to me
that of Hamlet, to be or not to be, and the
Daemon, as if following my thought, said : " Do
not understand that we affirm or the contrary
as to what you consider the indispensable form
of being we only seek to put your own ideas on
the subject on the true path ; we cannot help you
to more truth than you have fitted your mind to
assimilate. You puzzle yourself uselessly on the
finer distinctions which must be drawn to make
the distinction between matter and spirit clear.
Your ideas are stereotyped in certain forms, and
that which does not find its type amongst those
you know is not recognisable by you. Is there
any distinction which you can recognise between



248 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

you and the deer you killed to-day, which justifies
you in assuming a right to immortality and future
individuality that the deer had not? Are you
who daily violate the laws of your spiritual
existence more worthy than he who never vio-
lated one?"

I had been slowly coming to the perception of
the fact that all the leading ideas of the Daemon
were put in the form of questions, as if from a
cautious non-committalism, or as if it dared not
in plain words affirm that they were the absolute
truth. I felt that there was another side to the
matter, and was confident that I should sooner
or later detect the sophistry of my Daemon; but
then I did not feel competent to carry the subject
further, and was sensible of a readiness on the
part of my interlocutor to cease. I wondered at
this, and if it implied weariness on its part, and
it was instantly replied : " We always answer to
your mind; when that ceases to act, there ceases
to be the reaction." I cried out in my mind in
utter bewilderment "Objective or subjective?"
and, longing for some diverson of my mind from
the train of thought, called on the guides to make
a "blaze," and I felt that the physical light would
be a relief to the mental obscurity. In the course
of a few minutes, the guides had piled on the fire
a huge mass of the finer branches of the trees
which had served us for fuel, and the immense
column of flames which rose, frightening the birds
from their perches, into a confused clamour,
threw into the shanty a heat which made me



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 249

drowsy, and when my companions returned from
their row I was asleep.

It was determined the next morning in council
to move; and one of the guides informing me
that there had been opened a new "carry" by
which we might cross from the Upper Tupper's
Lake, ten miles up the Bog River, directly to the
Forked Lake, and thence following the usual
route down the Raquette River and through Long
Lake, we could reach Martin's on Saranack Lakes,
where we should find our conveyances out to the
settlements, with only a short retracing of the
road we had come by, we hurriedly packed our
traps after breakfast and were off.

The boating up Bog River is hard work; there
are many shallows over which the boats must be
dragged, and "carries" round which everything
must be carried on the backs of the men, one of
these being three miles long, so that, work as we
all might, the day had drawn to a close before
we were well embarked on the upper lake, and
it was nightfall before we reached the camp, left
by a former visitor, where we intended to sleep.
I had worked hard all day, always sharing the
work of the guides, but in a dreamy state, as if
the dead-weights I carried were only the phantoms
of something, and I was a fantasy carrying them
the actual had become visionary, and my imag-
inations nudged and jostled me almost off the
ways of reason. But I had no' time for a stance
with the Daemon, and the fatigue left me too
disposed for sleep to allow of night-questionings.



250 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

The next day we had several miles of new paths
to bush out, cutting the smaller trees, for we
found the information as to the road to be in-
correct ; so that, in fact, we had two days of severe
chopping and dragging before we were again in
boating regions. All this had put me into a
healthier state of mind than I had been in for
a long time, for I had come into the woods very
much exhausted by overwork, to which was due,
probably, my wanderings of imagination ; and the
day or two following, devoted to the work of
the camp, with the necessary fishing and hunting
required to keep a large party of men with re-
newed appetites, gave me, the master of the hunt
and commissary-general, too much to do to think
of mental phenomena. But the hurry over and
repose come, the mental condition returned. Re-
commencing the migration towards home, we ran
down the lake to its outlet, and, as we turned a
point, a wide and picturesque view came into
sight a long vista, at the extreme distance of
which rose a faint, solitary peak, to which Steve
pointed, saying with a tone of emphasis, "Blue
Mountain." The effect was to attach to the
distant peak the glamour of the mental condi-
tion in which I had been: a strange and unac-
countable attraction to it came over me, as if
some fatality awaited me there, the solution of
the mysterious influences which I had been under
during the days past. I have thought of it since,
many times; and have noticed in more than one
case of insanity with which I had come into



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 251

contact, that when the diseased mind had been
prepared by some circumstance for a new delu-
sion, the slightest trifle sufficed to create it.
From that moment my mind was " suggestioned,"
to use a word much employed lately to define
what we still cannot any better explain, by the
idea of something to be seen or learned at the
Blue Mountain, of which the only notable fact
that I could learn was that it was, as I could
see, a solitary peak in the midst of a chain of
small lakes, difficult of access, and, therefore,
almost unvisited. My plans for the summer
were to see my friends through their visit to
the lakes; and when they had used up their
vacation to see them off, and return to the
most primeval forest remaining and spend the
remainder of the summer there, until the cold of
autumn drove me back. The run down the
Raquette River occupied several days of motion
and hard work, and there was no opening for
my delusions. The company once consigned to
civilisation again, I took my way back to the
upper waters, and with Steve and Carlo alone
for society, built myself a comfortable camp on
the Raquette Lake, within sight of the Blue
Mountain. Steve objected to fighting our way
up there; for, after all, we were still more or
less dependent on the half-civilisation of the
trappers and squatters who were here and there
to be found on the principal lakes, where they
carried on in winter the business of "lumbering,"
cutting and hauling the trees which form the



252 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

value of the mountain region, too remote from
all communication with the ways of commerce to
be useful for cultivation, and too barren when
the forest is cleared away. The occasional log-
cabins, which form the headquarters for the
lumbermen in the winter, generally furnish sup-
plies for the hunters and fishermen for the part
of the year when sporting is possible, and from
them we were obliged to draw our flour, salt
pork, etc. etc., which, with the game and fish
which we caught, formed our subsistence. On
the Blue Lakes there was not a settler, and for
many miles from it, measured as the distances
are there measured, through labyrinths of forest
and meandering streams, which are often the
only way by which, with great labour, one can
force his way through, no human habitation
existed. Steve had not my motive for getting
there, and knew the hardships too well to be
willing to put himself in the way of them use-
lessly : his wood-craft was older than mine, and
so I submitted to his judgment and we camped
on Raquette Lake. In all the operations of
settling for some weeks, finding subjects for my
sketching and making the camp comfortable, my
mind was healthily occupied, and I heard nothing
of my ghostly friend; till, one evening when
I had paddled out on the lake to enjoy the
night and the multitude of its stars, which
never elsewhere seemed so great as in that pure
air, I felt it beside me without warning.
"Well," I said, "you have come back."



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 253

" Come back ! " it said. " Will you never get
rid of your miserable notions of space, and learn
that there is no separation but that of feeling,
no nearness but that of sympathy? If you had
cared enough to be near us, we should have been
with you constantly."

I was anxious to get to the subject of latent
interest, and did not care to discuss a point which
in one and the highest sense I was agreed with
the Daemon on. "What," I asked, "was that
impulse which urges me to go to the Blue Moun-
tain? Shall I find there anything supernatural?"

" Anything supernatural ? What is there above
nature or outside of it?"

"But nothing is without cause; and, for an
emotion so strong as I experienced on the sight of
that mountain, there must have been one." I was,
without knowing it, already under the control of
the influence, be it delusion, be it mystery, which
had possessed me, and I no longer resisted the
impression of its reality. I began to feel it as a re-
sponsible being, something beyond and above me.

" Very likely ! If you go after the cause you will
find it ! Did you expect to find some beautiful
enchantress keeping her court on the mountain-
top with a suite of fairies?"

I winced ; for, absurd as it may seem, that very
idea, half-formed, undeveloped from the latent
self-ridicule involved in it, had appeared to my
consciousness though I had hardly recognised it.
I replied, at a loss for a reply, " And are there no
such things possible ? "



254 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

"All things are possible to the imagination."

"To create?"

" Most certainly ! Is not creation the act
of bringing into existence? and does not your
Hamlet exist as immortally and really as your
Shakespeare? The only true existence, is it not
that of the idea? Have you not seen the pines
transfigured ? "

" And if I imagined a race of fairies inhabiting
the Blue Mountain, should I find them?"

" If you imagined them, yes ! But the imagina-
tion is not voluntary; it works to supply a
necessity ; its function is creation, and creation is
needed only to fill a vacuum. The wild Arab,
feeling his own insignificance, and comprehending
the necessity of a Creating Power, finds between
himself and that Power, which to him, as to you
the other day, assumes a personality, an immense
distance, and fills the space with an intermediate
race, half-divine, half-human. It was the mental
necessity for the fairy which created the fairy.
You do not feel the same distance between your-
self and the Creator, and so you do not call into
existence a creative race of the same character
the attempts of an enlightened race to write new
fairy stories, not believing in fairies, shows the in-
compatibility ; but has not your own imagination
furnished you with images to which you may give
your reverence? It may be that you diminish
that distance by degrading the Great First Cause
to an image of your own personality, and so you
are not as wise as the Arab, who at once admits it



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 255

to be incomprehensible and therefore beyond his
thought. Each man shapes that which he looks
up to by his fears or his desires, and these in their
turn are the results of his development and the
measure of its degree."

" But God the Father, is He not the Great First
Cause, the Supreme Creator ? "

"Is it not as we said, that you measure the
Supreme by yourself? Can you not comprehend
a supreme law, an order which controls all
things?" This touched on a theme which I had
a dread of opening to myself, having once already
had an experience of scepticism which left painful
memories, and I did not think a distinct reply.
The Daemon, after a pause, went on: "You seem
always to depend on a form for your recognitions ;
is not a form the result of some action, and how
can the result be the finality ? Every form is the
form of something; of what is your conception
of Deity the form of?"

Not wishing to carry this subject further, for
I felt my incompetence to completely master it,
and the recurrence in this mysterious manner of
the question which had forced itself on me at
other times and in other ways, I shrank from
this discussion, and, as the hiatus must be filled,
I turned the inquiry on my interlocutor.

"Tell me," I said; "do you not take cognisance
of my personality? Do you read my past and
future?"

"Your past and your future are contained in
your present. Who can analyse what you are,



256 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

can see the things which made you such; for
effect contains its cause to see the future it needs
only to know the laws which govern all things.
It is a simple problem : you being given, with the
inevitable tendencies to which you are subject,
the result is your future; the flight of one of
your rifle balls cannot be calculated with greater
certainty."

" But how shall we learn those laws ? " I asked.

"You contain them all, for you are the result
of them; and they are always the same, not one
for your beginning and another for your continu-
ance. Man is the complete embodiment of all
the laws thus far developed, and you have only
to know yourself to know the history of creation."

This I could not deny to be true in one sense;
but, wearied and perplexed, I declined to ask any-
thing further. I returned to camp and went to
sleep. Several days passed without any progress
in my knowledge of this strange influence, or
what it might be, though I was more constantly
sensible to its pressure every day; and, at the
same time, the incomprehensible sympathy with
nature, for I know not what else to call it, seemed
growing stronger as the time went on and more
startling in the effects it produced on the land-
scape. The influence was no longer confined to
twilight, but made noonday mystical ; and I began
to hear strange sounds and words spoken by
disembodied voices, as had once before happened
at the beginning, but now continually. They
were not accompanied by that feeling of a per-



THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT 257

sonal presence as when the Daemon was present.
It seemed as if the vibrations in the air shaped
themselves into words, some of them of the
strangest and most unexpected significance. I
heard my name called, and on one occasion
actually crossed the lake to ferry over what I
supposed to be a friend come to see me ; and heard
wild laughing at night. I asked the Daemon what
it meant, and only received a guarded answer,
"You would be wiser not knowing too much."

Ere many days of this solitary life had passed,
alone mentally, for with Steve I never conversed
but of the material want of our condition, I found
my whole existence taken up with these fantasies.
I determined to make my excursion to the Blue
Mountain; and sending Steve down to the post-
office, a three days' trip, I took my boat, with
Carlo and my rifle and two days' food, and pushed
off. The outlet of the Blue Mountain lakes, like
those of all the Adirondack lakes, is narrow, dark,
and shut in by forest, which scarcely permits
landing anywhere. Now and then a log fallen
into the stream compels the voyager to get out
and lift his boat over; then a shallow rapid must
be dragged over; and when the stream is clear
of obstructions, it is too narrow for any mode
of propulsion but poling or paddling. I worked
along in these various ways till long past mid-
day, and then I came out on a wide stretch of
marshy land, through which the stream filtered
with scarcely a visible or navigable channel, and

beyond which lay the lake, and beyond the lake

B



258 THE SUBJECTIVE OF IT

the Blue Mountain, the foreground being occupied
with fir scrub a few feet high, and partly shutting
out of view the lake itself, along the shore of
which was the usual line of forest trees, amongst
them occasional tall white pines, like those which
had at first bewildered me. Of these, two stood
at the exit of the stream from the lake, and
already the weird feeling of the earlier days
seized me. They seemed to forbid my entrance.
I drew up my boat on the boggy shore and
climbed into the tallest tamarack that grew there,
high enough to look over the low wood and see
the farther shore of the lake itself.

Never shall I forget what I saw from that
swaying lookout. Before me was the mountain,
clothed in forest to within a few hundred feet
from the summit, which showed bare rock with
firs clinging in the clefts and on the tables, and
which was crowned by what seemed to me a
walled city, the parapets of whose walls cut
with a sharp, straight line against the sky, and
beyond showed spire and turret and the tops of
tall trees. The walls must have been, to my