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Updated: June 8, 2025
The truth rather is that it is only possible to arrive at higher knowledge when thought has been liberated from all material things, when an inner life has been developed in which images of reality do not cease when their demonstration in sense-impressions comes to an end. Augustine relates how he attained to spiritual vision. Everywhere he asked where the divine was to be found.
For these symbols are chosen in such a way that they can be looked at quite apart from their connection with outer sense reality, and their value is to be found exclusively in the power with which they work upon the soul when it turns its attention wholly away from the outer world, when it suppresses all sense-impressions and shuts out every thought to which it might be stimulated from without.
Reality of the external world lies for science and for us in combinations of form and color and touch sense-impressions as widely divergent from the thing 'at the other end of the nerve' as the sound of the telephone from the subscriber at the other end of the wire.
The "faculty divine," into which vision blends insensibly, would mean the mysterious change of these sense-impressions as they become subjected to reflection, comparison, memory, "passion recollected in tranquillity," into words possessing a peculiar life and power. The "accomplishment of verse" is easier to understand.
The Initiates of the Mysteries owed the revelation of what he had thus kept hidden, to the fact that they had developed within their souls all those faculties which man had attained since that time, beyond the degree necessary for physical sense-impressions. Thus there were revealed to them the spiritual powers lying behind the forces of nature.
It is plain that the illusoriness of a perception is in these cases determined in relation to the sense-impressions of other moments and situations, or to what are presumably better percepts than the present one. Sometimes this involves an appeal from one sense to another.
Not that the process approaches to one of hallucination; but only that the internal feelings are intuited as having a cause or origin analogous to that of sense-impressions. Thus to the uncultivated mind a sudden thought seems like an audible announcement from without.
If all external things are really inside the mind, and are only "projected" outwards, of course our own bodies, sense-organs, nerves, and brains, are really inside and are merely projected outwards. Now, do the sense-impressions of which everything is to be constructed "come flowing in" along these nerves that are really inside?
Should apperception once fail, or were it not implied in the very nature of our minds, we should, in the reception of sense-impressions, daily expend as much power as the child in its earliest years, since the perpetually changing objects of the external world would nearly always appear strange and new.
It was the first time such questions had come to me, and I was startled at them. It was as though I had only just become conscious; I doubt that I had ever been fully conscious before. I had lived till now in a paradise of vivid sense-impressions in which all thoughts came to me saturated with emotion, and in that mental state reflection is well-nigh impossible.
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