“It is the premise of every human thought, of every human act.” “--That has survived, since it fitted into the unitary scheme. But is there not something arbitrary about that, Professor Stein? Two intense single-minded peoples, the Greeks and the Hebrews, set up a scale of consciousness based on the Unit, and narrow down the multiverse to that. Everything that men did or thought must fit that scale of One, be translated into it: everything that failed was rejected, was unrecorded, hence intellectually was nonexistent. To-day, after three thousand years of this sort of selection, we have quite an array of theory, data, thought, all in the key of One: we have a whole civilization based on One, a whole set of religions tuned in One, to which our senses as well as our minds submit and finally conform. What does that prove beyond the thoroughness of the Greeks and Hebrews? of their initial will to throw out all contrary evidence, to deny all dimensions beyond it?” “Could this premise of the Unity have builded up so wholly the structure of science, æsthetic, logic ... the structure of human action, were it but an arbitrary premise that might be replaced by others at least as valid?” “The strength of the limited, Doctor Stein: the protection of exclusion.” Doctor Stein’s eyes sharpened. “Very well. Then, does not the success of this premise, which you call limiting and protective, prove that it expresses perfectly the human essence? The fact that by means of the premise of unity man is beginning to master life, does that not prove, besides, that man’s essence and the essence of being are common terms, permitting a contact after all between the subjective and objective, between the phenomenal and the absolute?” “You are assuming the success, Doctor Stein! And you are assuming that this thing which man is ‘mastering’ is life: is something more than the creation of the subjective will which started with the Unit that it finds everywhere and thereby ‘masters’ ... finding and mastering only and always itself. You are assuming that every day is not compounded of events which transcend the powers of unitary logic and unitary experience even to conceive them. How do we get out of the difficulty? From these parabola shapes that are the events, perhaps, of every day, our minds snatch down the fragmentary intersections that touch the terms of our minds. The rest is ignored. Your ‘success’ of biology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, æsthetics, mechanics, is simply your own dream, complacently rounded by your unitary will. Unchallenged, for the most part, for the simple reason that long ago man’s mind has lopped off whatever might have challenged.” “Well, then, even you will admit that the human will is unitary.”