Note 1 — A Note on “Towards Democracy”

I do not know any description in its way better that one attributed to Tennyson:—“All at once, as it were, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality—if so it were—seeming no extinction but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words?” Compare also his poem, “The Ancient Sage.”