Let the consciousness, therefore, be turned not outward, but inward where is situated the temple of divine life; let there be taken away the outward sheaths which enshrine the pure intelligence of the Thinker; let him grow and expand his sphere of awareness; let there be an exploration of the abysmal deeps of mind, of life and consciousness; for buried deeply in man's own inner nature is the answer to all queries which may vex his impuissant intellectuality.
[CHAPTER IX]
Metageometrical Near-Truths
Realism is Psychological and Vital—The Impermanence of Facts—On the Tendency of the Intellect to Fragmentate—The Intellect and Logic—The Passage of Space, the Kosmometer and Zoometer, Instruments for the Measurement of the Passage of Space and the Flow of Life—The Disposal of Life and the Power to Create—Space a Dynamic, Creative Process—Numbers and Kosmogony—The Kosmic Significance of the Circle and the Pi-Proportion—Mechanical Tendence of the Intellect and its Inaptitude for the Understanding of Life—The Criterion of Truth.
Kosmic truth has many facets. The rays of light which we see darting from its surface do not always come from the core. Often they are reflections of rays whose light stops short at the superfice; and these, in turn, are reflections of deeper realities. Thus the reflected light may be traced to its source by following the lead of external reflections. It is now known that moonlight, and perhaps, in many cases, starlight, are reflections of sunlight, if not of our sun, some other in the universe. But it is only at certain times and under certain conditions that we can see the sun which is the source of the other kinds of light. The stars which owe their light to suns are so many facets of sunlight. The moon is a facet of sunlight also. Facts are facets of truth. They are so many faces of eternal truth. They represent the many ways reality exhibits itself, or rather its effects, to the consciousness. When we, therefore, become aware of facts we have not in virtue thereof become aware of the reality which produces the facts. We have come to know only something of the termini of realism while the complexities and internal ramifications which lie between realism itself and these termini altogether elude our cognition.
Let us examine briefly an icosahedron, for instance. An icosahedron is a figure comprehended under twenty equal sides. These various sides are so many faces by means of which the figure presents itself to the consciousness. These faces, however, are not the real object. The figure may be examined by viewing it from any one of its sides; yet, by simply examining a single face, or any number of faces, less the total number, we arrive at no satisfactory knowledge of the magnitude or its substance. We must first become conscious of all the faces, holding them in mind as a composite picture, before we can even begin to have anything like a complete notion of the icosahedron. Then by continuing the examination we may find that the magnitude is composed of wood fiber or stone or metal, as the case may be. In this way we might carry the examination to indefinite limits and finally arrive at a very comprehensive knowledge of the icosahedron and yet be unaware altogether of the forces which have been at work in the production of the magnitude or of the reality which lies back of it.
Realism is psychological and vital. In essence it is mind, spirit, life. Yet these three are one. Mind is the outward vehicle of life; spirit is the form or the interior vehicle which life assumes in order to express itself. Realism, then, is life. Is the logician dealing with reality when he collects and coördinates the various modes of interpretation by which we learn to understand the symbolism of life? Obviously not. The data of logic are simply a collection of rules for interpreting concepts. It is a compendium of indices for the Book of Life. It is no more the book itself than a table of contents is a book. But logic occupies about the same category as does an index to a volume. A book, however, is more than its conventional contents. It is the thought that is symbolized therein. The book of life, accordingly, is the sum total of life's expressions; but it is not life itself. That is the subtle, evasive something which the contents of the book of life symbolize. Nature, both in her palpable and impalpable aspects, may be said to be the book of life wherein are recorded the movements, the expressions, and the diacritics of life. The whole is a magnitude of many facets (little faces). We shall have to know all the faces before we can say that we have a comprehensive knowledge of nature. For so long as we have only a fragmentary knowledge of the whole, so long even as we have merely a superficial knowledge of any aspect of nature, just so long will our knowledge be in vain. Just as it frequently happens that, on account of the partial view of things, we are led to make incorrect judgments concerning them, so when we come to make assertions about life or nature in general, we are apt to fall into the error of rendering judgments upon insufficient data. And it is not at all likely that judgments thus arrived at can possess true validity because it may happen, and undoubtedly does always so happen under the present limitations of human knowledge, that the very elements which are ignored or neglected in forming a judgment possess enough of virtue to alter the intrinsic value of determinations based upon otherwise insufficient data. Hence it develops not infrequently that our judgments repeatedly have to be changed in proportion as our data are made more and more comprehensive. Men searching eagerly for the truth sometimes allow themselves to be carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment which arises upon the discovery of a new facet of truth; but if all searchers were to bear in mind the fact that reality presents itself to consciousness in myriad ways and that there are innumerable facets all leading eventually back to the source of all they not so easily would be induced to jump to the conclusion that they had covered the entire ground. For when we have discovered a million facts, or many millions of them, about nature we may say that we have only merely begun and that what we have found is not to be compared with the totality even of the directly observable phases of nature.
Logic, therefore, deals with the symbolism existing between and among facets of truth, and not directly with truth itself, although the conclusions reached by the logicians may be true enough from an intrinsic standpoint. Logic is not truth, however; it is merely the consistence of relations and inter-relations between facts and among groups of facts. Truth is not established by logic; it stands in no need of the light of logic for its revelation; indeed, more apt than not is logic to obscure truth. Truth is its own proof; it is self-evident. Logic is a mere modeler of facts; it is static, immobile, fixed. All truly logical processes need a starting point, a foundation, a premise, a base. Truth, being eternal, mobile, dynamic, vital, needs no starting point; needs no foundation because it is itself fundamental; it requires no premise because no premise is comprehensive enough to encompass it. There is only one way of arriving at truth and that is not to arrive at all—just to recognize it without procedure. The fact that facts are, and the fact of their relations and inter-relations, their sequence and implications, can be arrived at only by logical processes. Life, in its passage through the universum of spatiality, carefully diacriticizes between the realm of facts and the domain of truth, marking each off from the other by unmistakable signs and barriers. Truth is perceived as an axiomatic, self-evident principle and no amount of logic could prove or establish its verity. Facts are intellectual creatures; truth is intuitional, vital. The intellect conceives the consistence of facts while the intuition recognizes truth—is truth, and therefore, follows in the wake of life as consciousness.