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Traherne could bear in himself such a picture of man's infancy because, as he himself emphasizes, he was in possession of an unbroken memory of the experiences which the soul enjoys before it awakens to earthly sense-perception.
There are, of course, elementary data of sense-perception, such as color and sound. It may be that I prefer red to yellow because my eye is so constituted as to function harmoniously with a rate of vibration represented by 450 billions per second, and discordantly with a rate of vibration represented by 526 billions per second. So also with tones of a given pitch.
It is true that we cannot see the ocean of ether in which visible matter floats; but there are many other invisible things which yet we do not regard as part of the "unseen world." I do not see the air which I am now breathing within the four walls of my study, yet its existence is sufficiently a matter of sense-perception as it fills my lungs and fans my cheek.
From this fundamental principle of his system it follows, that the only part of our knowledge which has any objective reality is that which is derived from our sense-perceptions, all else being purely formal or subjective, and arising solely from the laws of our own mental nature, which determine us to conceive of things in a particular way; and that even that part of our knowledge which is derived from sense-perception is purely phenomenal, since we know nothing of any object around us beyond the bare fact that it exists, and that it appears to us to be as our senses represent it.
Of these utterances, Eddington's is at the present point of our discussion of special interest for us; for he outlines in it the precise field of sense-perception into which science has withdrawn in the course of that general retreat towards an ever more restricted questioning of nature which was noted by Heisenberg.
Neither can It be taught to you. The teacher can only show the way. You must find It for yourself." Knowledge means union between subject and object. To gain this union one must practice, theory cannot help us. The previous chapter has shown that the knowledge of Brahman is beyond sense-perception: "There the eye does not go, nor speech, nor mind."
The atoms which compose a drop of water are not only invisible, but cannot in any way be made the objects of sense-perception; yet by proper inferences from their behaviour we can single them out for measurement, so that Sir William Thomson can tell us that if the drop of water were magnified to the size of the earth, the constituent atoms would be larger than peas, but not so large as billiard-balls.
God's Universe, as it is imaged in the Divine Mind, is perfect. We see it as imperfect, because we only receive a finite sense-perception of that which is perfect and infinite, from this forming, in our minds, an image that is necessarily imperfect and finite, which we project outwards, and, not knowing any better, think is real.
Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception. In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to anticipation in general.
Both allow to the reason a knowledge-material consisting only of pictures that is, of pictures evoked in consciousness through sense-perception, and received by it from the outer world in the form of disconnected units, whilst denying it all powers, as Hume expressed it, ever 'to perceive any real connections between distinct existences'.
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