And
if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the
solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions unstable,
flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our
consciousness of them, it contracts still further; the whole scope of
observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual mind.
Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round
for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no
real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we
can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the
impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a
solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. Analysis goes a step farther
still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to
which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual
flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is
infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that
is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it,
of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than
that it is.
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