208 CREATIVE INVOLUTION 



tion. You read guide-books and rejoice in the ac- 

 quisition of knowledge. Gradually through the per- 

 ception of the same phantasmagoria comes an at-one- 

 ness 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 grotesque- 

 ness. " 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 rela- 

 tions 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 follow- 

 ing 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 organisation 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 sub- 



