X VISION

BY

JOHN COWPER POWYS

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1920

DEDICATED
TO
LITTLETON ALFRED

PROLOGUE

What I am anxious to attempt in this anticipatory summary of the
contents of this book is a simple estimate of its final conclusions, in
such a form as shall eliminate all technical terms and reduce the
matter to a plain statement, intelligible as far as such a thing can be
made intelligible, to the apprehension of such persons as have not
had the luck, or the ill-luck, of a plunge into the ocean of
metaphysic.

A large portion of the book deals with what might be called our
_instrument of research_; in other words, with the problem of what
particular powers of insight the human mind must use, if its vision
of reality is to be of any deeper or more permanent value than the
"passing on the wing," so to speak, of individual fancies and
speculations.

This instrument of research I find to be the use, by the human
person, of all the various energies of personality concentrated into
one point; and the resultant spectacle of things or reality of things,
which this concentrated vision makes clear, I call the original
revelation of the complex vision of man.

Having analyzed in the earlier portions of the book the peculiar
nature of our organ of research and the peculiar difficulties--
amounting to a very elaborate work of art--which have to be
overcome before this _concentration_ takes place, I proceed in the
later portions of the book to make as clear as I can what kind of
reality it is that we actually do succeed in grasping, when this
concentrating process has been achieved. I indicate incidentally that
this desirable concentration of the energies of personality is so
difficult a thing that we are compelled to resort to our memory of
what we experienced in rare and fortunate moments in order to
establish its results. I suggest that it is not to our average moments
of insight that we have to appeal, but to our exceptional moments of
insight; since it is only at rare moments in our lives that we are able
to enter into what I call the _eternal vision_.

To what, then, does this conclusion amount, and what is this
resultant reality, in as far as we are able to gather it up and
articulate its nature from the vague records of our memory?

I have endeavoured to show that it amounts to the following series
of results. What we are, in the first place, assured of is the
existence within our