Our vicious habit of seeking the explanation of everything--even
thought and emotion--in materiality, has betrayed us into the error
of attributing to organic and environic changes the very power by
which they are produced. We are wont to think of feeling, the form
in which Being manifests to consciousness, as an effect instead of
as a cause. When Sweet Sixteen becomes suddenly and mysteriously
interesting to the growing boy, it is not because sex has awakened
in his body, but because the dread time has come for him to
contemplate the Idea of Woman in his soul. If you are sleepy, it is
not because the blood has begun to flow away from your brain, but
because your body has begun to bore you. Night has brought back the
Idea of Freedom, and consciousness chloroforms the thing that
clutches it. If you are ill, you grow cold or your temperature rises:
it is the signal by which you know that your consciousness is
turning toward the Idea of Pain.
Just as a savage looks for a man behind a mirror, we foolishly seek
in materiality for that which is not there. The soul determines
circumstance: the soul contains the event which shall befall. The
organic and environic rearrangements incident to obscure rotations
in higher space are like the changes a mirror-image undergoes as an
object draws near and then recedes from its plane. This is only a
figure of speech, but it is susceptible of almost literal application.
Ideas, emerging from the subconscious, appproach, intersect, recede
from, and re-approach the stream of conscious experience; taking the
forms of aversions and desires, they register themselves in action,
and by reason of time curvature, everything that occurs, recurs.