THE STREAM OF LIFE

nesses become transparent as if by reason of a light shining through from behind, how difierently we understand them, feel about fhem, judge them! This way of looking at individuals is the true way ; we corne to a right knowledge of them when we see them in the médium of Equality. It is possible sometimes to stand on the kerb in a thronged and busy street and, becoming partially detached from the mtdtitudinous visible détails, to see, as if it were with some more inward organ of vision, not a jostling many-itemed crowd but one continuons stream of life in which the individuals appear to be as figured pattems and shapes on the surface. The millionaire is there, and the gamin, the idler and the worker, the judge and the criminal, the hunter and the hunted, the oppressor and his victim ; but the one stream of life flowing through and beneath and around them strangdy imites thenL So it is possible to gain, for a moment or two, a somewhat aloof, devated standpoint — always more inward to the Self — from which, as from a mountain-top, society, and ail the kingdoms of the world, are spread ont below there ; to see the whole in continuity ; to see it not as a superficial multiform structure, fuU of dividing Unes and inequalities (as if thèse were the real and ultimate things), but as the mutable, imparf ect» and progressive manifestation in out* ward forms of an immutable and perfect love* kingdomever ascendingi ever creating, destroying.