And how about the other senses--touch, hearing? Did the ear hear, or the hand feel? He had always accepted the general belief that man is dependent absolutely upon the five physical senses for his knowledge of an outside world. And now a little thought showed that from these five senses man could not possibly receive anything more than a series of disconnected vibrations! And, going a step further, anything that the mind infers from these vibrations is unquestionably inferred _without a particle of outside authority_! He rose and paced the floor. A tremendous idea seemed to be knocking at the portal of his mentality. What can the mind know? Assuredly nothing but the contents of itself. But the contents of mind are thoughts, ideas, mental things. Do solid material objects enter the mind? Certainly not! Then the mind knows not things, but its _thoughts of things_. And instead of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling solid material objects, the mind sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels--what? The contents of itself! Its own thoughts and ideas! And the outer world? Is only what the mind _believes_ it to be. But surely his mind saw an outer world through the medium of his eye! No. His mind saw only its own concepts of an outer world--and these concepts, being mental, might take on whatever hue and tinge his mind decreed. In other words, instead of seeing a world of matter, he was seeing only a mental picture of a world. And that picture was in his own mind, _and formed by that mind_! The man seized his hat and hurried out into the night. He walked rapidly the full length of the town. His mind was wrestling with stupendous thoughts. An hour later he returned to his house, and seizing a pencil, wrote rapidly: Matter is mental. We do not see or feel matter, but we _think_ it. It is formed and held as a mental concept in every human mind. The material universe is but the human mind's concept of a universe, and can only be this mentality's translation to itself of infinite Mind's purely mental Creation. "And so," he commented aloud, sitting back and regarding his writing, "all my miserable life I have been seeing only my own thoughts! And I have let them use me and color my whole outlook!" He extinguished the candle and threw himself, fully dressed, upon his bed. CHAPTER 10