had taken
for the flauntings of festivity are become the heralds of hyperspace.
As you wend your way down the Avenue of Time you feel an inexpressive
lightness, a sensation of being lifted out of yourself. The moment seems
unique. Things are unrelated. There is no concern of proportion. The
place is one of immediacy. You wander from the ephemeral to the
ephemeral. 'Time is,' you say, in childish glee. And you hasten to
assemble images as many and as disparate as possible, believing that you
are drinking life at its fountain head. 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.'
Henceforth the multiplicity that you seek is one of organization and has
nothing to do with number. 'Time was,' you proclaim, that consciousness
might sift out the irrelevant. As you pass from collection to collection
individual fact becomes prolonged into general law and science dominates
the field of thought. A thousand years are as a day when subsumed by its
laws. You look at the objects of man's creating with new eyes. The
displays are no longer contests of laborious industry but of vision, and
faith. You see that truth has made itself manifest through the long
repetition of the same fundamental theme. That which is unique and
personal you are surprised to find of less value than the habit
perfected by patient practice. The routine
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