MY attention has been called by Professor Deutschbein to the
following passage in Ruskin, in which he recounts experiences of
his youth that repeatedly recurred. They are purely numinous
in character and well-nigh all the 'moments' which we discovered
reappear here quite spontaneously. I give the passage without
detailed comment:

'Lastly, although there was no definite religious sentiment
mingled with it, there was a continual perception of Sanctity in
the whole of nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest; an
instinctive awe, mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such
as we sometimes imagine to indicate the presence of a disembodied
spirit. I could only feel this perfectly when I was alone; and then
it would often make me shiver from head to foot with the joy and
fear of it, when after being some time away from hills I first got
to the shore of a mountain river, where the brown water circled
among the pebbles, or when I first saw the swell of distant land
against the sunset, or the first low broken wall, covered with
mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling; but I
do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language,
for I am afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain
even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it,
we should be hard put to it for words; and the joy in nature
seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the
presence of a Great and Holy Spirit. . . . These feelings remained
in their full intensity till I was eighteen or twenty, and then, as
the reflective and practical power increased, and the "cares of this
world" gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the manner
described by Wordsworth in his "Intimations of Immortality".'
( Modern Painters, Popular Edition ( George Allen), vol. iii, p. 309.)

Schleiermacher calls such an experience 'intuition and feeling
of the infinite'; we give it the name 'divination. Schleiermacher
was right in saying that even greater than all this divination in
the sphere of nature is divination in the sphere of history. ¹ Will
not a Ruskin arise to divine and reveal the non-rational and
numinous character of our own epoch?

-215-