There is the utmost unanimity in the testimony of the mystics that
the world without and the world within are but different aspects of
the same reality--"_The eye with which I see God is the same eye with
which He sees me_." They never weary of the telling of the
solidarity and invisible continuity of life, the inclusion not only
of the minute in the vast, but of the vast in the minute. We may
accept this form of perception as characteristic of consciousness in
its free state. Its instrument is the _intuition_, which divines
relations between diverse things through a perception of unity. The
instrument of the purely mundane consciousness, on the other hand,
is the _reason_, which dissevers and dissects phenomena, divining
unity through correlation. Now if physical phenomena, in all their
manifoldness, are lower-dimensional projections, upon a
lower-dimensional space, of a higher unity, then reason and
intuition are seen to be two modes of one intelligence, engaged in
apprehending life from below (by means of the reason) through its
diversity, and from above (by means of intuition) through its unity.
Those who recognize in the intuition a valid organ of knowledge, are
disposed to exalt it above the reason, but at our present state of
evolution, and given our environment, it would seem that the reason
is the more generally useful faculty of the two. In that unfolding,
that manifesting of the higher in the lower--which is the idea the
four-dimensionalist has of the world--the painstaking, minute,
methodical action of the reasoning mind applied to phenomena
achieves results impossible to Pisgah-sighted intuition. The power,
peculiar to the reason, of isolating part after part from the whole
to which it belongs, and considering them thus isolated, makes
possible in the end a synthesis in which the whole is not merely
glimpsed, but known to the last detail.
The method of the reason is symbolized in so trifling a thing as the
dealing out one by one of a pack of cards and their reassembling.
The pack has been made to show forth its content by a process of
disruption--of slicing. Similarly, if a scientist wants to gain a
thorough comprehension of a complicated organism, he dissects it, or
submits it to a process of slicing, studying each slice separately
under the microscope while keeping constantly in mind the relation
of one slice to another. This amounts to nothing less than reducing
a thing from three dimensions to two, in order to know it thoroughly.
Now the flux of things corresponds to the four-dimensional aspect of
the world, and with this the reason finds it impossible to deal. As
Bergson has so well shown, the reason cuts life into countless
cross-sections: a thing must be dead before it can be dissected.
This is why the higher-dimensional aspect of life, divined by the
intuition, escapes rational analysis.