AE

“ There may be a figure sitting down and I think it would compose better if it was turned in another direction, and that figure will obey my suggestion, not always, but at times it will; and again and again when I who paint almost entirely from what is called imagination, and who never use models, watch a figure in my vision it will change its motions as I will it. ”

“ If there were such a medium, acting as a mirror to nature or life, and retaining the impression, it must be universal as the supposed æther of the scientist; and how could impressions on this medium intelligible to us be focussed as the vibrations of light are through the needlepoint of the eye to record a single view-point?
In our visions of the memory of nature we see undistorted figures.
If we could imagine the whole body to be sensitive to light, as is that single point in the brain on which the optic nerves converge, what kind of vision would we have? ”

“ But the dream figure or the figure of imagination will walk about with authentic motions and undistorted anatomies.
Does not the effort to imagine such recombinations even by the mightiest conscious intellect involve incredibilities?
At least it is so with the artist who watches form with a critical eye.
How much greater the incredibility if we suppose there was no conscious artist, but that all this authentic imagery of imagination or dream came together without an intelligence to guide it? ”

“ How could we imagine even the mightiest conscious artistic intelligence, with seership into all the memories of a life, taking the vibrations which constituted this hand, and adjusting them to the vibrations which made that other arm, or even taking the vibrations which registered a complete figure and amending these so that the figure moved with different gestures from the first gestures recorded as memory? ”

“ The hypothesis that everything in nature, every living being, is a continuous fountain of phantasmal effigies of itself would explain the way in which ruins build up their antique life to the eye of the seer, so that he sees the people of a thousand years ago in their cities which are now desolate, and the dark-skinned merchants unrolling their bales in the market, and this is why they appear as some one has said, "thinking the thought and performing the deed." ”

“ The feet would see from one angle, the hands from another, back and front would confuse us; so I cannot imagine the recording power in nature as reflecting like a mirror, and retaining and recording the impressions. ”

“ I think there is no half-way house between the spiritual and the material where the intellect can dwell; and if we find we have our being in a universal life we must alter our values, change all our ideas until they depend upon and are in harmony with that sole cause of all that is. ”

“ And if we suppose that a deeper being of ours has wider vision than the waking consciousness, and can use the memories, not only of this plane of being, but of the forms peculiar to mid-world and heaven-world, this might help to solve some of the perplexities aroused in those who are intent and vigilant observers of their own dreams and imaginations. ”

“ My brain does not by any swift action foresee in detail the pictorial consequences involved by the lifting of arms, but yet by a single wish, a simple mental suggestion, the intricate changes are made in the figures of imagination as they would be if real Arabs stood before me and raised their hands at my call. ”

“ That is why I suggest that the memory of nature may be by way of emanation or shadow of life and form, and why when we see such images they are not the monstrous complexities they would be if they were reflections on some universal æther spread everywhere taking colour from everything at every possible angle and remaining two dimensional. ”

“ But I might recall that an eminent thinker in science, Balfour Stewart, supposed of the æther that there was a continual transference of energy to it from the visible universe, and that this stored-up energy might form the basis of an immortal memory for man and nature. ”

“ There is nothing incredible in the assumption that every cell in the body is wrapped about with myriad memories.
He who attributes least mystery to matter is furthest from truth, and he nighest who conjectures the Absolute to be present in fullness of being in the atom. ”