body! No more may our eyes distinguish
the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we
perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we
shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence
direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the
outer light; these are but windows that we possess--not eyes. Nor
will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the
winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will
have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the
narrow prison of the breast_!"

That the soul--the so-called subliminal self--draws from a broader,
deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is a
commonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as
_higher-dimensional_ with relation to the body, but so concerned
with the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicle
as to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking and
moving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogy
he uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the whole
passage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted,
that it is given here entire.

"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ample
experience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the world
of real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition of
four-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process we
are engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signals
of our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitions
derived from the inner experience.

"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modern
battleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he is
in communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey his
messages and commands to every part of the ship, and receive
information from the conning tower and the engine room. Now suppose
the captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his ship
over the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of the
direction of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that he
forgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind of
movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement
is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his
own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the or