*
When we set out earlier in this book (Chapter VIII) to discover the source of Galileo's intuition, by which he had been enabled to find the theorem of the parallelogram of forces, we were led to certain experiences through which all men go in early childhood by erecting their body and learning to walk. We were thereby led to realize that man's general capacity for thinking mathematically is the outcome of early experiences of this kind. It is evident that geometrical concepts arising in man's mind in this way must be those of Euclidean geometry. For they are acquired by the will's struggle with gravity. The dynamic law discovered in this way by Galileo was therefore bound to apply to the behaviour of mechanical forces - that is, of forces acting from points outward.
In a similar way we can now seek to find the source of our capacity to form polar-Euclidean concepts. As we were formerly led to experiences of man's early life on earth, so we are now led to his embryonic and even pre-embryonic existence.
Before man's supersensible part enters into a physical body there is no means of conveying to it experiences other than those of levity, and this condition prevails right through embryonic development. For while the body floats in the mother's foetal fluid it is virtually exempt from the influence of the earth's field of gravity.
History has given us a source of information from these early periods of man's existence in Traherne's recollections of the time when his soul was still in the state of cosmic consciousness. Among his descriptions we may therefore expect to find a picture of levity-space which will confirm through immediate experience what we have arrived at along the lines of realistic mathematical reasoning. Among poems quoted earlier, his The Praeparative and My Spirit do indeed convey this picture in the clearest possible way. The following are relevant passages from these two poems.
In the first we read:
'Then was my Soul my only All to me,
A living endless Ey,
Scarce bounded with the Sky
Whose Power, and Act, and Essence was to see:
I was an inward Sphere of Light,
Or an interminable Orb of Sight,
Exceeding that which makes the Days . . .'
In the second poem the same experience is expressed in richer detail. There he says of his own soul that it -
... being Simple, like the Deity,
In its own Centre is a Sphere,
Not limited but everywhere.
It acts not from a Centre to
Its Object, as remote;
But present is, where it doth go
To view the Being it doth note ...