He was so distressed that one day he talked about it to me alone for some time.
“Wilkins,” he said, “insists on Facts. It is difficult to argue with him on that basis. You see, I don’t intend Hallery’s view to be an induction from facts. It’s a conviction, an intuition. It is not the sort of thing one perceives after reading the newspaper placards or looking at the bookshelves in the British Museum. It’s something one knows for certain in the middle of the night. There is the Mind of the Race, I mean. It is something General; it is a refuge from the Particular and it is in the nature of God. That’s plain, isn’t it? And through it there is Communion. These phases, these irruptions are incidents. If all the world went frantic; if presently some horrible thing, some monstrous war smashed all books and thinking and civilization, still the mind would be there. It would immediately go on again and presently it would pick up all that had been done before—just as a philosopher would presently go on reading again after the servant-girl had fallen downstairs with the crockery…. It keeps on anyhow….
“Oh! I don’t know how, my dear fellow. I can’t explain. I’m not telling you of something I’ve reasoned out and discovered; I’m telling you of something I know. It’s faith if you like. It keeps on and I know it keeps on—although I can’t for the life of me tell how….”
He stopped. He flushed.
“That, you see, is Hallery’s point of view,” he said awkwardly.
“But Wilkins perhaps wouldn’t contradict that. His point is merely that to be exact about words, that God-Mind, that General Mind of yours, isn’t exactly to be called the Mind of the Race.”
“But it is the Mind of the Race,” said Boon. “It is the Mind of the Race. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of the Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd. That does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. It matters because Literature, the clearing of minds, the release of minds, the food and guidance of minds, is the way, Literature is illumination, the salvation of ourselves and of every one from isolations….”
“Might be,” I suggested.
“Must be,” he said. “Oh! I know I’ve lived behind Miss Bathwick…. But I’m breaking out…. One of these days I will begin to dictate to her—and not mind what she does…. I’m a successful nobody—superficially—and it’s only through my private thoughts and private jeering that I’ve come to see these things….”