Yet these, perhaps, instead of
being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright
at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity.
For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast
hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock,
was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again.
The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him;
and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind,
which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent,
it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the
frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it
must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts
and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer
inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind
of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly
live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined,
fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what
seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing,
a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure,
but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself.
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