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Once more let us recognise that we are dependent for knowledge of surroundings upon our perception of movements, and that as our conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, our thoughts are limited by Time and Space and can only deal with finite subjects.
The task which I put before them in a number of variations was this: I used lists of words of which half, or one more or less than half, belonged to one single conceptional group. There were names of flowers, or cities, or poets, or parts of the body, or wild animals, and so on. The remaining words of the list, on the other hand, were without inner connection and without similarity.
All our difficulties of understanding the true meaning of these and other phenomena around us are, as I have already pointed out, caused by our inability to recognise that vibration or motion has no reality, it is a pseudo-conception arising from the fact that our senses are entirely dependent upon the two modes or limitations, Time and Space, for their very action, and that, as conceptional knowledge is based upon perceptional knowledge, our very consciousness of living is also dependent upon these same limitations.
Australian usage suggested the coöperative theory, and Australia and Melanesia the conceptional theory. The identification of totemism with ancestor-worship comes from South Africa; its connection with the belief in transmigration is due to Indonesia; its derivation from the individual guardian is based on a North American institution; and North America probably suggested the badge theory also.
As conceptional knowledge is based on perceptional knowledge, and we can only perceive about six times per second, and as the principal forms of knowledge are gained through the eye, we are conceiving progress in phenomena under a very restricted outlook; we cannot recognise such slow motions as, for instance, the hour-hand of a watch, the growth of a tree, or rise of the tide, except by noting the change that has occurred after a long interval; there is therefore a whole world of events which we cannot see.
Since this is so, why is it that under certain given conditions, such as sitting with hands linked that thus sitting, and while the electric fluid, drawn out by the contact of our hands, forms a powerful medium between the inner and the outward being why is it, I say, that these strong emotions I have mentioned should not take advantage of this strange river flowing to and fro between the conceptional and the visual to float before us for a time, and give us an opportunity of seeing and touching them, who influence our every action in life?
Obversely, however, the charm of the Platonic mode of thought, which was an ARISTOCRATIC mode, consisted precisely in RESISTANCE to obvious sense-evidence perhaps among men who enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses than our contemporaries, but who knew how to find a higher triumph in remaining masters of them: and this by means of pale, cold, grey conceptional networks which they threw over the motley whirl of the senses the mob of the senses, as Plato said.
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