And now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there
appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its
exercise I found a wild delight--yet a delight still physical,
inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal
frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no
artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain
_that_ of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence
even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous
pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of
_Time_. By the absolute equalization of this movement--or of such as
this--had the cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves been adjusted.
By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the mantel,
and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings came sonorously
to my ears. The slightest deviations from the true proportion--and
these deviations were omniprevalent--affected me just as violations of
abstract truth were wont on earth to affect the moral sense. Although
no two of the timepieces in the chamber struck the individual seconds
accurately together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in
mind the tones, and the respective momentary errors of each. And
this--this keen, perfect self-existing sentiment of _duration_--this
sentiment existing (as man could not possibly have conceived it to
exist) independently of any succession of events--this idea--this
sixth sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first
obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the threshold of
the temporal eternity.
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