The outer world presents itself
to your consciousness in the form of facts in juxtaposition. You read
guide-books and rejoice in the acquisition of knowledge. Gradually
through the perception of the same phantasmagoria comes an at-oneness
with your fellows. You are caught up in the swirl of a larger self.
Soon you weary of the heterogeneous. The Zone of Consciousness stands
revealed in all its grotesqueness. 'Time is,' you cry, but to give
thought its impulse, and you hasten on if perchance you may discover the
direction of the life-principle. What you had taken for reality is but
its cross-section - so does this empirical realm stand to the higher
world of your spirit, even as a plane to a solid.
Now you turn your attention from things to relations in the hope of
getting at truth in the large. A passage in Plato comes vividly to your
mind. 'For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to
proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;
- this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while
following God, when, regardless of that which we now call being, she
raised her head up towards the true being.
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