INVOLUTION 417 



again. The horizon is wider, the light intenser, 

 the air colder, the top nearer ; the nether world 

 recedes from view. At six thousand feet, if we 

 may accentuate the illustration till it contains more 

 of the emphasis of the reality, he enters the region 

 of snow. Here is a change brought about by a 

 small and perfectly natural rise which yet amounts 

 to a revolution. Another thousand feet and there 

 is another revolution — he is ushered into the domain 

 of mist. Still another thousand, and the climax 

 of change has come. He stands at the top, and, 

 behold, the Sun. None of the things he has en- 

 countered in his progress toward the top are new 

 things. They are the normal phenomena of alti- 

 tude — the scenes, the energies, the correspondences, 

 natural to the higher slopes. He did not create any 

 of these things as he rose ; they were not created 

 as he rose ; they did not lie potentially in the plains 

 or in the mountain foot. What has happened is 

 simply that in rising he has encountered them — 

 some for the first time, which are therefore wholly 

 new to him ; others which, though known before, 

 now flow into his being in such fuller measure, or 

 enter into such fresh relations among themselves, 

 or with the changed being which at every step he 

 has become, as to be also practically new. 



Man, in his long pilgrimage upwards from the 

 2 D 



