Here follows the lament of the souls awaiting incarnation:
"_Behold the sad future in store for us--to minister to the wants of
a fluctuating and dissoluble body! No more may our eyes distinguish
the souls divine! Hardly through these watery spheres shall we
perceive, with sighs, our ancestral heaven: at intervals even we
shall cease altogether to behold it. By this disastrous sentence
direct vision is denied to us; we can see only by the aid of the
outer light; these are but windows that we possess--not eyes. Nor
will our pain be less when we hear in the fraternal breathing of the
winds with which no longer can we mingle our own, since ours will
have for its dwelling, instead of the sublime and open world, the
narrow prison of the breast_!"
That the soul--the so-called subliminal self--draws from a broader,
deeper experience than the purely rational consciousness is a
commonplace of modern psychology. Hinton conceives of the soul as
_higher-dimensional_ with relation to the body, but so concerned
with the management and direction of its lower-dimensional vehicle
as to have lost, for the time being, its orientation, thinking and
moving only in those ways of which the body is capable. The analogy
he uses, of a ship and its captain, is so happy, and the whole
passage has so direct a bearing upon the Hermetic fragment quoted,
that it is given here entire.
"I adopt the hypothesis that that which thinks in us has an ample
experience, of which the intuitions we use in dealing with the world
of real objects are a part; of which experience, the intuition of
four-dimensional forms and motions is also a part. The process we
are engaged in intellectually is the reading of the obscure signals
of our nerves into a world of reality, by means of intuitions
derived from the inner experience.
"The image I form is as follows: Imagine the captain of a modern
battleship directing its course. He has his charts before him; he is
in communication with his associates and subordinates; can convey his
messages and commands to every part of the ship, and receive
information from the conning tower and the engine room. Now suppose
the captain, immersed in the problem of the navigation of his ship
over the ocean, to have so absorbed himself in the problem of the
direction of the craft over the plane surface of the sea that he
forgets himself. All that occupies his attention is the kind of
movement that his ship makes. The operations by which that movement
is produced have sunk below the threshold of his consciousness; his
own actions, by which he pushes the buttons, gives the orders, are
so familiar as to be automatic; his mind is on the motion of the
ship as a whole. In such a case we can imagine that he identifies
himself with the ship; all that enters his conscious thought is the
direction of its movement over the plane surface of the ocean.
"Such is the relation, as I imagine it, of the soul to the body. A
relation which we can imagine as existing momentarily in the case of
the captain is the normal one in the case of the soul with its craft.
As the captain is capable of a kind of movement, an amplitude of
motion, which does not enter into his thoughts with regard to the
directing of the ship over the plane surface of the ocean, so the
soul is capable of a kind of movement, has an amplitude of motion,
which is not used in its task of directing the body in the
three-dimensional region in which the body's activity lies. If for
any reason it becomes necessary for the captain to consider
three-dimensional motions with regard to his ship, it would not be
difficult for him to gain the materials for thinking about such
motions; all he has to do is to call experience into play. As far as
the navigation of the ship is concerned, however, he is not obliged
to call on such experience. The ship as a whole simply moves on a
surface. The problem of three-dimensional movement does not
ordinarily concern its steering. And thus with regard to ourselves
all those movements and activities which characterize our bodily
organs are three-dimensional; we never need to consider the ampler
movements. But we do more than use these movements of our body to
effect our aims by direct means; we have now come to the pass when
we act indirectly on nature, when we call processes into play which
lie beyond the reach of any explanation we can give by the kind of
thought which has been sufficient for the steering of our craft as a
whole.
"When we come to the problem of what goes on in the minute and apply
ourselves to the mechanism of the minute, we find our habitual
conceptions inadequate. The captain in us must wake up to his own
intimate nature, realize those functions of movement which are his
own, and in the virtue of his knowledge of them apprehend how to
deal with the problems he has come to."
_The Fourth Dimension_.
How more accurately and eloquently could "the captain in us,"
momentarily aroused, give voice to his predicament, than in the words,
"_Instead of the sublime and open world, the narrow prison of the
breast_."