ntemplative and of the more active
aspects of our higher nature. _Our form of consciousness is one of our
chief human sorrows._

By devices such as the rhythmic presentation of facts to our attention
we can do something--not very much--to enlarge our span of
consciousness. But for most purposes we can make only an _indirect,_
not a _direct,_ escape from our limitations of span. Our salvation
depends upon the winning of such {263} indirect successes. Indirectly
we escape, in so far as we use our powers of habit-forming, of memory,
and of abstraction, to prepare for us objects of momentary experience
such as have come to acquire for us a wide range of meaning, so that,
when we get before our momentary attention but a few of these objects
at once, we still are able to comprehend, after our human fashion,
ranges and connections and unities of fact which the narrow form of
our span of consciousness forbids us to grasp with directness. Thus,
the repetition of similar experiences forms habits such that each
element of some new instant of passing experience comes to us
saturated with the meaning that, as we look back upon our past life,
we suppose to have resulted from the whole course of what has
happened. And through such endlessly varied processes of
habit-forming, we come to reach stages of insight in which the
instantaneous presentation of a few facts gets for us, at a given
moment, the value of an indirect appreciation of what we never
directly grasp--that is, the value of a wide survey of life. All that
we usually call knowledge is due to such indirect grasping of what the
instant can only hint to us, although we usually feel as if this
indirect presentation were itself a direct insight. Let me exemplify:
The odour of a flower may come to us burdened with a meaning that we
regard as the total result of a whole summer of our life. The wrinkled
face of an old man reveals to us, in its momentarily presented {264}
traces, the signs of what we take to have been his lifetime's
experience and slowly won personal character. And, in very much the
same way, almost any passing experience may seem to us to speak with
the voice of years, or even of ages, of human life. To take yet
another instance: a single musical chord epitomises the result of all
our former hearings of the musical composition which it introduces.

In this way we live, despite our narrowness, _as if_ we saw widely;
and we constantly view _as if it were_ our actua