, see--everything, everything through
the eye, in one mode of objective curiosity. There is nothing inside
us, we stare endlessly at the outside. So our eyes begin to fail; to
retaliate on us. We go short-sighted, almost in self-protection.

Hearing the last, and perhaps the deepest of the senses. And here
there is no choice. In every other faculty we have the power of
rejection. We have a choice of vision. We can, if we choose, see in
the terms of the wonderful beyond, the world of light into which we go
forth in joy to lose ourselves in it. Or we can see, as the Egyptians
saw, in the terms of their own dark souls: seeing the strangeness of
the creature outside, the gulf between it and them, but finally, its
existence in terms of themselves. They saw according to their own
unchangeable idea, subjectively, they did not go forth from themselves
to seek the wonder outside.

Those are the two chief ways of sympathetic vision. We call our way
the objective, the Egyptian the subjective. But objective and
subjective are words that depend absolutely on your starting point.
Spiritual and sensual are much more descriptive terms.

But there are, of course, also the two ways of volitional vision. We
can see with the endless modern critical sight, analytic, and at last
deliberately ugly. Or we can see as the hawk sees the one concentrated
spot where beats the life-heart of our prey.

In the four modes of sight we have some choice. We have some choice to
refuse tastes or smells or touch. In hearing we have the minimum of
choice. Sound acts direct upon the great affective centers. We may
voluntarily quicken our hearing, or make it dull. But we have really
no choice of what we hear. Our will is eliminated. Sound acts direct,
almost automatically, upon the affective centers. And we have no power
of going forth from the ear. We are always and only recipient.

Nevertheless, sound acts upon us in various ways, according to the
four primary poles of consciousness. The singing of birds acts almost
entirely upon the centers of the breast. Birds, which live by flight,
impelled from the strong conscious-activity of the breast and
shoulders, have become for us symbols of the spirit, the upper mode of
consciousness. Their legs have become idle, almost insentient twigs.
Only the tail flirts from the center of the sensual will.

But their singing acts direct upon the upper, or spiritual centers in
us. So does almost all our music, which is a