512 INTELLECTUAL SYMBOLISM. 
cognizance of the sensual ideas, are earliest called into action, and during the whole life 
they are incessantly employed. .We see and feel and hear at all times, and nearly at all 
times our thoughts are engaged with what we see or feel or hear. With the mass of 
mankind, how small a portion of mental activity is devoted to the consideration of sub- 
jects not immediately connected with the daily routine of business. Even the professed 
student cannot divest himself of any portion of his corporeal nature ;—he cannot often 
even feel that the spiritual maintains an ascendency over the physical. 
204. The animal man therefore becomes fully developed by constant exercise; the 
spiritual man is developed only by a casual and interrupted education. Sensual or animal 
ideas are therefore the most familiar, and the most perfectly understood; spiritual ideas 
are but imperfectly comprehended, and are generally wrapped in obscurity and doubt. 
205. This is an evident cause of difference in the character of simple propositions. 
Whatever is discerned by the senses, or by the perceptive faculties through the medium 
of the senses, is so familiar as to be self-evident, and as we readily see that we are the 
only possible judges of what we ourselves perceive, we never think of questioning physical 
axioms. But whatever is spiritually discerned, being somewhat obscure and strange, we 
are led to question not only the entire perception, but to scan every point that has any 
connection with it, and to seek for some authority out of ourselves, for that which hardly 
seems to be a part of ourselves. That authority, as we have already seen, is our Creator, 
but we can appeal to His authority only for that which becomes to us individually self- 
evident. Spiritual knowledge, therefore, can only be possessed by those whose spiritual 
culture approximates nearly to the ordinary physical culture of mankind, but spiritual 
belief or faith may be cultivated by every one.* 
206. It is evident to every student of mathematics, that the theorems and axioms bear 
such a relation to each other, that if the theorems be assumed true the axioms can be de- 
monstrated. We might readily conceive that beings with a higher order of intelligence 
than our own, would view the most abstruse propositions of geometry as simple axioms, and 
we might possibly imagine a mind so constituted that our ordinary theorems would be 
self-evident, while our ordinary axioms would require demonstration. 
207. These supposable cases we find actualized in the study of mind. So different is 
the constitution of different individuals, that a spiritual truth may be self-evident to one 
* «The moral sense indicates that which is above itself, and beyond itself; therefore, if it be our rule to follow 
always the course of thought, we must now go forward at this suggestion, and it leads us directly to the concep- 
tion, however vague, of aN AuTHoRITY to which we are related. This conception, under all imaginable distor- 
tions, has accompanied human nature,—invatiably it is the instinctive belief of man. . . . The idea of AUTHORITY, 
or of a relationship between two beings, each endowed with intelligence and moral feeling, supposes that the w¢d/ 
of the one who isthe more powerful of the two has been in some way declared.” Taylor: World of Mind, p. 94. 
