which before was regarded as real becomes unreal, and that which was regarded as unreal becomes real.*

This transition into the absolute state of consciousness is "UNION WITH DIVINITY," "VISION OF GOD," EXPERIENCING THE "KINGDOM OF HEAVEN," "ENTERING NIRVANA." All these expressions of mystical religions represent the psychological fact of the expansion of consciousness, such an expansion that the consciousness absorbs itelf in the all.

C. W. Leadbeater, in an essay, Some Notes on the Higher Planes. Nirvana (The Theosophist. July, 1910.) writes:

Sir Edwin Arnold wrote of that beatific condition, that "the dewdrop slips into the shining sea."

Those who have passed through that most marvelous of experiences know that, paradoxical as it may seem, the sensation is exactly the reverse, and that a far closer description would be that THE OCEAN HAD SOMEHOW BEEN POURED INTO THE DROP!

The consciousness, wide as the sea, with "its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere," is a great and glorious fact; but when a man attains it, it seems to him that his consciousness has widened to take in all that, not that he is merged into something else.

This pouring of the ocean into the drop occurs because the consciousness never loses itself, i. e., does not disappear, does not become extinguished. When it seems to us that consciousness is extinguished, in reality it is only changing its form, it ceases to be analogical to ours, and we lose the means of convincing ourselves of its existence.

We have no exact data at all to think that it is dissipated. In order to escape from the field possible to our observation, it is sufficient for consciousness TO CHANGE ONLY A LITTLE.

In the objective world, indeed, this "slipping of the dewdrop into the sea" leads to the annihilation of the drop, to the absorption of it by the sea. We have never observed another order of things in the objective world and therefore cannot imagine it. But in the real, i. e., the subjective world, of course another order must exist and operate. The DROP OF CONSCIOUSNESS merging with the SEA

*The conceptions of the subjective and of the objective should undergo a change. The usual terminology will be incorrect for an exact understanding. Everything phenomenal will become subjective; and the truly objective will be that which under ordinary conditions is regarded as subjective or non-existent.

PLOTINUS' THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 241 OF CONSCIOUSNESS knows it, but does not itself cease to exist because of that. Therefore undoubtedly, the sea is absorbed by the drop.

In the Letters to Flaccus of Plotinus, we find a wonderful description of a psychology and theory of knowledge founded exactly upon the idea of the expansion of receptivity.

External objects present us only with appearances. Concerning them, therefore, we may be said to possess opinion rather than knowledge. The distinctions in the actual world of appearance are of import only to ordinary and practical men. Our question lies with the ideal reality that exists behind appearance. How does the mind perceive these ideas? Are they without us, and is the reason, like sensation, occupied with objects external to itself? What certainty would we then have what assurance that our perception was infallible? The object perceived would be a something different from the mind perceiving it. We should have then an image instead of reality. It would be monstrous to believe for a moment that the mind was unable to perceive ideal truth as it is, and that we had not certainty and real knowledge concerning the world of intelligence. It fol lows, therefore, that this region of truth is not to be investigated as a thing external to us, and so only imperfectly known. It is within us. Here the objects we contemplate and that which contemplates are identical—both are thought. The subject cannot surely know an object different from itself. The world of ideas lies within our intelligence. Truth, therefore, is not the agreement of our apprehension of an external object with the object itself. It is the agreement of the mind with itself. Consciousness, therefore, is the sole basis of certainty. The mind is its own witness. Reason sees in itself that which is above itself and its source; and again, that which is below itself as still itself once more.

Knowledge has three degrees opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense; of the second dialectic; of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the identity of the mind knowing with the object known. There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external emanation from the ineffable One. There is again a returning impulse, drawing all upward and inward toward the centre from whence all came. The wise man recognizes the idea of the good within him. This he develops by withdrawal into the holy place of his own soul. He who does not understand how the soul contains the beautiful within itself, seeks to realize beauty without by laborious production. His aim should rather be to concentrate and simplify, and so to expand his being; instead of going out into the manifold, to forsake it for the One, and to float up

wards toward the divine fount of being whose stream flows within him. You ask, how can we know the Infinite? I answer, not by reason. It is the office of reason to distinguish and define. The infinite, therefore, cannot be ranked among its objects. You can only apprehend the infinite by a faculty superior to reason, by entering into a state in which you are your finite self no longer—in which the divine essence is communicated to you. This is ecstasy. It is the liberation of your mind from its finite consciousness. Like can only apprehend like; when you thus cease to be finite, you become one with the infinite. In the reduction of your soul to its simplest self, its divine essence, you realize this union—this identity.

But this sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only now and then that we can enjoy this elevation above the limits of the body and the world. I myself have realized it but three times as yet, and Porphyry hitherto not once.

All that tends to purify and elevate the mind will assist you in this attainment, and facilitate the approach and the recurrence of these happy intervals. There are, then, different roads by which this end may be reached. The love of beauty which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science which makes the ambition of the philosopher, and that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection—these are the great highways conducting to the height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the depths of the soul.

In another place in his works, Plotinus defines the ecstatic knowledge more exactly, presenting such properties of it as to reveal to us quite clearly that the infinite expansion of subjective knowledge is there meant.

When we see God (says Plotinus] we see him not by reason, but by something that is higher than reason. It is impossible however to say about him who sees that he sees, because he does not behold and discern two different things (the seer and the thing seen). He changes completely, ceases to be himself, preserves nothing of his I. Immersed in God, he constitutes one whole with Him; like the centre of a circle, which coincides with the centre of another circle.

CHAPTER XX

The sense of infinity. The Neophyte's first ordeal. An intolerable sadness. The loss of everything real. What would an animal feel on becoming a man? The transition to the new logic. Our logic as founded on the observation of the laws of the phenomenal world. Its invalidity for the study of the world of noumena. The necessity for another logic. Analogy between the axioms of logic and of mathematics. TWO MATHEMATICS. The mathematics of real magnitudes (infinite and variable): and the mathematics of unreal, imaginary magnitudes (finite and constant). Transfinite numbers— numbers lying beyond INFINITY. The possibility of different infinities.

T

HERE is in existence an idea which a man should always call to mind when too much subjugated by the illusions of the reality of the unreal, visible world in which everything has a beginning and an end. It is the idea of infinity, the fact of infinity.

In the book A New Era of Thought—concerning which I have had already much to say—in the chapter "Space the Scientific Basis of Altruism and Religion," Hinton says:

When we come upon infinity in any mode of our thought, it is a sign that that mode of thought is dealing with a higher reality than it is adapted for, and in struggling to represent it, can only do so by an infinite ncmber of terms (of realities of a higher order).

Truly what is infinity, as the ordinary mind represents it to itself? It is the only reality and at the same time it is the abyss, the bottomless pit into which the mind falls, after having risen to heights to which it is not native.

Let us imagine for a moment that a man begins to feel infinity in everything: every thought, every idea leads him to the realization of infinity.

This will inevitably happen to a man approaching an understanding of a higher order of reality.

But what will he feel under such circumstances?

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He will sense a precipice, an abyss everywhere, no matter where he looks; and experience indeed an incredible horror, fear and sadness, until this fear and sadness shall transform themselves into the joy of the sensing of a new reality.

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An intolerable sadness is the very first experience of the Neophyte in occultism. . . says the author of Light on the

Path.

We have already examined into the manner in which a two-dimensional being might approach to a comprehension of the third dimension. But we have never asked ourselves the question: what would it feel, beginning to sense the third dimension, beginning to be conscious of "a new world" environing it?

First of all, it would feel astonishment and fright—fright approaching horror; because in order to find the new world it must lose the old one.

Let us imagine the predicament of an animal in which flashes of human understanding have begun to appear.

What will it sense first of all? First of all, that its old world, the world of the animal, its comfortable, habitual world, the one in which it was born, to which it has become accustomed, and which it imagines to be the only real one, is crumbling away and falling all around it. Everything that before seemed real, becomes false, delusive, fantastic, unreal. The impression of the unreality of all its environment will be very strong.

Until such a being shall learn to comprehend the reality of another, higher order, until it shall understand that behind the crumbling old world one infinitely more beautiful and new is opening up, considerable time will necessarily pass. And during all this time, a being in whom this new consciousness is in process of unfoldment must pass from one abyss of despair to another, from one negation to another. It must repudiate everything around itself. Only by the repudiation of everything will the possibility of entering into a new life be realized.

With the beginning of the gradual loss of the old world, the logic of the two-dimensional being—or that which stood for it for logic—will suffer continual violation, and its strongest impression