cious life. That is why I
call it a defect in the "form" of our conscious life. It is not a
defect limited to the use of any one of our senses. It is not a
failure of eyes or of ears to furnish to us a sufficient variety of
facts to observe. On the contrary, both our eyes and our ears almost
constantly rain in upon us, especially during our more desultory
waking life, an overwealth of impressions. If we want to know facts,
and to attain clearness, we have to pick out a few of these
impressions, from instant to instant, for more careful direct
inspection. In any case, then, this limitation is not due to the
defects of our senses. It is our whole conscious make-up, our
characteristic way of becoming aware of things, which is expressed by
this limitation of our conscious span. On this plan our human
consciousness is formed. Thus our type of awareness is constituted. In
this way we are all doomed to live. It is our human fate to grasp
clearly only a few facts or ideas at any one instant. And so, being
what we are, we have to make the best of our human nature.

Meanwhile, it is of our very essence as reasonable beings that we are
always contending with the consequences of this our natural narrowness
of span. We are always actively rebelling at our own form of
consciousness, so long as we are trying to know or to do anything
significant. We want to grasp {262} many things at once, not merely a
few. We want to survey life in long stretches, not merely in
instantaneous glimpses. We are always like beings who have to see our
universe through the cracks that our successive instants open before
us, and as quickly close again. And we want to see things, not through
these instantaneous cracks, but without intervening walls, with wide
outlook, and in all their true variety and unity. Nor is this
rebellion of ours against the mere form of consciousness any merely
idle curiosity or peevish seeking for a barren wealth of varieties.
Salvation itself is at stake in this struggle for a wider clearness of
outlook. The wisest souls, as we have throughout seen, agree with
common-sense prudence in the desire to see at any one instant greater
varieties of ideas and of objects than our form of consciousness
permits us to grasp. To escape from the limitations imposed upon us by
the natural narrowness of our span of consciousness--by the form of
consciousness in which we live--this is the common interest of science
and of religion, of the more co