I was asked to believe that giants, armour, hillside and sunny distance so appeared in my brain because I had seen men who might be enlarged to giants, pictures of armour with which they could be clothed by fancy, brass with which the armour could be coloured. Any rocks might be multiplied and enlarged from memory by imagination to form a hillside, and any sky of sunny blue would make my distance. Haw plausible for a second! How unthinkable after a momentary consideration! I know I could hardly, if you gave me a hundred thousand pictures of heads, by cutting them up and pasting them together, make a fresh face which would appear authentic in its tints and shadows, and it would be a work of infinite labour. But these faces of vision are not still. They move. They have life and expression. The sunlight casts authentic moving shadows on the ground. What is it combines with such miraculous skill the things seen, taking a tint here, a fragment of form there, which uses the colours and forms of memory as a palette to paint such masterpieces? It has been said, "Every man is a Shakespeare in his dreams." The dreamer of landscape is more than a Turner, because he makes his trees to bend before the wind and his clouds to fleet across the sky. The waking brain does not do this. It is unconscious of creation. To say we refashion memories is to surmise in the subconscious nature a marvellous artist, to whom all that we have ever seen with the physical eyes is present at once, and as clay in the hands of a divine potter, and it is such swift creation too that it rivals the works of the Lord. Well, I am not one of those who deny that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us or that the King is also in His Heaven. We need not deny that and yet hold that vision comes otherwise. Nor can be it denied that vision is often so radiant and precise, for experience affirms that it is, and hundreds of artists, and indeed people who are not artists at all, will tell you how clearly they see in their dreams. But for those who hold that visions such as I and many others have had are only the refashioning of memory, and there is nothing mysterious about them, I say try to think out tint by tint, form by form, how these could be recombined, and, for whatever marvel I would have you believe, you will have substituted something just as marvellous but not so credible. Not that it is incredible to think that the spirit in man is Creator, for all the prophets and seers of the world have told us that, but the common psychological explanation is not acceptable, because we know that forms can appear in the brain which were transferred by will from one person to another. When we know that, when we know this inner eye can see the form in another's mind, we must regard it as indicating an immense possibility of vision on that plane. We then ask ourselves concerning all these strange cities and landscapes of dream, all these impish faces which flout at us when we are drowsy, all these visions living and moving in our minds, whether they too came, not by way of the physical senses transformed in memory, but came like the image thought transferred, or by obscure ways reflected from spheres above us, from the lives of others and the visions of others. If we brood on this we will come to think the old explanation is untenable and will address ourselves with wonder and hope to the exploration of this strange country within ourselves, and will try to find out its limits, and wether from image or vision long pondered over we may not reach to their original being.
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