In all the learned pother incident to the mastery of the phenomenal, the furniture of the world of the senses, it is as if the self in man, the Thinker, sat secluded in a six-walled tenement, and hence six times removed from the subject of his study, and endeavored to interpret that which appeared to his vision. And thus, thinking that what he sees is the only reality, he remains in inglorious nescience of the reality of that upon which he himself stands, unconscious that the tunnel-shaped aperture through which he peers leads not outward, but backward and within to the habitation of the real of which he himself is a part. Men are deeply and well-nigh hopelessly concerned with appearances, with static views of life, with instantaneous exposures. Life, reality and all the eternal verities pass on and assume countless postures, attitudes, moods, tenses and nuances. The intellect is content to occupy itself with a single tense or mood. Indeed, it has no aptitude or power to consider more than one at a single time. It thus misses the continuity, the ceaselessness, of life. What is more, every singularity, every attitude, mood or tense which the intellect grasps for consideration is immediately remade so as to fit its own moods and tenses. And upon each and every nuance the intellect immediately imposes its own form—actually and literally rehabilitates them with its own habiliments. Unfortunately, this peculiarity occludes the intellect from any approach to the true nature of that phase which it can grasp.
Hyperspace is one of the illusions of the phenomenal; it is the dress which the intellect has superimposed upon a single nuance; it is a mask which is an exact replica of the mood of the intellect. Yet through this mask the intellect grandly hopes to approach reality. The period through which the mind is now passing is a repetition of the evil days of scholasticism when men set out to determine the exact number of celestial beings that could be perched upon the extremity of a needle point. It is a time when men's minds easily assume grotesque and hideous shapes and their thoughts become the embodiment of fantastic entities. The exclusive occupation of such minds becomes the fabrication of mathetic monstrosities which rapidly deliquesce upon the first approach of the real or the appearance of the first ray of intuition which may escape through the dim and misty condition of the intellectual over-hangings. It will not be ever thus; for the Thinker will one day pass from a study of the arrangement of phenomena in space and by well-ordered steps come once again to himself. And then through the maze of it all set out upon the true path——the tridimensionality of space following which he will inevitably approach the citadel of the real, the kosmic space-mind.
[CHAPTER VII]
The Genesis and Nature of Space
Symbology of Mathematical Knowledge—Manifestation and Non-manifestation Defined—The Pyknon and Pyknosis—The Kosmic Engenderment of Space—On the Consubstantiality of Spatiality, Intellectuality, Materiality, Vitality and Kosmic Geometrism—Chaos-Theos-Kosmos—Chaogeny and Chaomorphogeny—N. Malebranche On God and the World—The Space-Mind—Space and Mind Are One—The Kosmic Pentoglyph.
Geometry is concerned primarily with a study of the measurement of magnitudes in space. Three coördinates are necessary and sufficient for all of its determinations. Metageometry comprehends the study of the measurement of magnitudes in conceptual space. For its purposes four or n-coördinates are necessary and sufficient. Perceptual space is that form of extension in which the physical universe is recognized to have been created and in which it now exists. Conceptual space is an idealized conception belonging to the domain of mathesis and has no actual, physical existence outside of the mind. Mathematical space represents the idealism of perceptual space.
Geometrical magnitudes may be defined as symbols of physical objects and geometry as a treatise on the symbology of forms in space. In fact, all cognitive processes are simply efforts at interpreting the symbolism of sense-deliveries; and the difference between mere knowledge and wisdom, which is the essence of all knowledge, is the difference between the understanding of a symbol and the comprehension of the essential nature of the thing symbolized. So long as knowledge of space is limited to the understanding of a symbol or symbols by which it is presented to the consciousness so long will it fall short of the comprehension of the essential nature of space. In vain have we sought in times past to understand space by studying relations, positions and the characteristics of forms in space; in vain have we based our conclusions as to its real nature upon the fragmentary evidences which our senses present to our consciousnesses. It is as if one had busied himself with one of the meshes in a great net and confined his entire attention to what he found there, meanwhile remaining in complete ignorance of the nature of the net, how it came to be there, of what it is made and how great its extent may be.
There is ever a marked difference between a symbol and the thing which it symbolizes. Words are the symbols of ideas; ideas, as they exist in the mind, are the symbols of eternal verities as they exist in the consciousness of the Logos of the universe. There may be a wide diversity of symbolic forms which represent one single idea; as, for instance, the variety of word forms which represent the idea of deity in the various languages. Likewise there may be a multiplicity of ideas which represent a single verity. But neither is the idea nor the word the real thing in itself. That quality of a life-aspect which we call its thingness has an essential nature which cannot become the object of consciousness except by virtue of its representation through ideas and their symbolisms, and even then, the thing which we conceive is not the nature of a quality of the life-aspect but an idea of it—a symbol which stands for that idea. In order, therefore, for the mind to arrive at an understanding of an eternal verity, such as space, it must first be able to synthesize all of the representative ideas and then abstract from their compositeness a notion of its essential nature. But this can be done only by identifying the consciousness with the essential being of the object considered. In other words, the consciousness and the intrinsic being of forms, principles, forces and processes must embrace each other in the intimacies of direct cognition; the life which is consciousness and that life which is essential being, being coeval, coördinate and mutually responsive, must in so close a contact as here intimated reach an understanding of the realism shared by both. That is, the human consciousness, following in the wake of life and consisting of a specialized aspect of life itself, will, by such an intimate approach to the life-principle of forms, readily understand; for it has only to recognize a replica of itself in rendering its judgment. But it is not claimed that such a state of recognition by the consciousness of life itself can be attained at all by ordinary means, neither is it believed that it is the next stage in conscious evolution. However, it is not doubted but that such an exaltation of the consciousness is possible, yea practical; but the difficulties which beset the path of attainment in this direction are so great that it may as well be considered unattainable. The mere fact of these difficulties, however, only re-emphasizes the insufficiency of the intellectual method. The identification of consciousness with essential being is a procedure which cannot be accomplished by an act of will directly and immediately. Because it is a process, a series of unfoldments, an adjustment of the focus of consciousness to the kosmic essentialities which constitute the substructure of the manifested universe. In the very nature of things, a kosmic essentiality cannot be viewed as being in manifestation especially in the same degree as ordinary physical objects are manifest. The former is a state, a potentiality, a dynamic force, an existence which should be thought of as an extra-kosmic affair dwelling on the plane of unity or kosmic origins; while the latter are the exact opposite of this. The one can be seen, felt and sensed while the other is the roots which are not seen but lie buried deeply in the heart of the universal plasm of being and beyond the ken of sensuous apperception. The term manifestation is both relative and flexible in its use. It is relative because it will apply equally to all stages of cognition. A thing is in manifestation when it is presentable to the ordinary means of cognition belonging to any stage of conscious functioning; it is not in manifestation when it is beyond the scope of the Thinker's schematism of cognitive powers. Its flexibility is seen in its ready yieldance to the entire range of implications inhering in the process of cognition, fitting the simplest as well as the highest and most complex.