Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

Dedication from the first edition

MAURICE ANDREWS BUCKE

22 November, 1868—8 December, 1899

8 December, 1900

Dear Maurice:—

A year ago to-day, in the prime of youth, of health and of strength, in an instant, by a terrible and fatal accident, you were removed forever from this world in which your mother and I still live. Of all young men I have known you were the most pure, the most noble, the most honourable, the most tender-hearted. In the business of life you were industrious, honest, faithful, intelligent and entirely trustworthy. How at the time we felt your loss—how we still feel it—I would not set down even if I could. I desire to speak here of my confident hope, not of my pain. I will say that through the experiences which underlie this volume I have been taught, that in spite of death and the grave, although you are beyond the range of our sight and hearing, notwithstanding that the universe of sense testifies to your absence, you are not dead and not really absent, but alive and well and not far from me this moment. If I have been permitted—no, not to enter, but—through the narrow aperture of a scarcely opened door, to glance one instant into that other divine world, it was surely that I might thereby be enabled to live through the receipt of those lightning-flashed words from Montana which time burns only deeper and deeper into my brain.