This instrument of research I find to be the use, by the human
person, of all the various energies of personality concentrated into
one point; and the resultant spectacle of things or reality of things,
which this concentrated vision makes clear, I call the original
revelation of the complex vision of man.
Having analyzed in the earlier portions of the book the peculiar
nature of our organ of research and the peculiar difficulties--
amounting to a very elaborate work of art--which have to be
overcome before this _concentration_ takes place, I proceed in the
later portions of the book to make as clear as I can what kind of
reality it is that we actually do succeed in grasping, when this
concentrating process has been achieved. I indicate incidentally that
this desirable concentration of the energies of personality is so
difficult a thing that we are compelled to resort to our memory of
what we experienced in rare and fortunate moments in order to
establish its results. I suggest that it is not to our average moments
of insight that we have to appeal, but to our exceptional moments of
insight; since it is only at rare moments in our lives that we are able
to enter into what I call the _eternal vision_.
To what, then, does this conclusion amount, and what is this
resultant reality, in as far as we are able to gather it up and
articulate its nature from the vague records of our memory?
I have endeavoured to show that it amounts to the following series
of results. What we are, in the first place, assured of is the
existence within our own individual body of a real actual living thing
composed of a mysterious substance wherein what we call mind and
what we call matter are fused and intermingled. This is our real and
self-conscious soul, the thing in us which says, "I am I," of which
the physical body is only one expression, and of which all the bodily
senses are only one gateway of receptivity.
The soul within us becomes aware of its own body simultaneously
with its becoming aware of all the other bodies which fill the visible
universe. It is then by an act of faith or imagination that the soul
within us takes for granted and assumes that there must be a soul
resembling our own soul within each one of those alien bodies, of
which, simultaneously with its own, it becomes aware.
And since the living basis of our personality is this real soul within
us, it follows that all those energies of personality, whose
concentration is the supreme work of art, are the energies of this real
soul. If, therefore, we assume that all the diverse physical bodies
which fill the universe possess, each of them, an inner soul
resembling our own soul, we are led to the conclusion that just as
our own soul half-creates and half-discovers the general spectacle of
things which it names "the universe," so all the alien souls in the
world half-create and half-discover what they feel as _their_
universe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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