CONCEPT AND CONDUCT

A surgeon once remarked to the author that among his professional

associates he had noticed an increasing awareness of the invisible.

This he claimed was manifest in the fact that the young men educated

since the rise of bacteriological science were more punctilious in

the matter of extreme personal cleanliness and the sterilization of

their instruments than the older and often more accomplished

surgeons whose habits in these matters had been formed before the

general sense of an _invisible_ menace had become acute.

This anecdote well illustrates the unconscious reaction of new

concepts upon conduct. Preoccupation with the problems of space

hyper-dimensionality cannot fail to produce profound changes in our

ethical outlook upon life and in our attitude towards our fellow

beings. The nature of these changes it is not difficult to forecast.

Although higher-space thought makes painfully clear our limitations,

it nevertheless leads to the perception that these very limitations

are inhibited powers. In this way it supplies us with a workable

method whereby we may enter that transcendental world of which we

glimpse so many vistas. This method consists in first becoming aware

of a limitation, and then in forcing ourselves to dramatize the

experience that would be ours if the limitation did not affect us.

We then discover in ourselves a power for transcending the limitation,

and presently we come to live in the new mode as easily as in the old.

Thought, conscious of its own limitations, leads to the New Freedom.

"Become what thou art!" is the maxim engraved upon the lintel of

this new Temple of Initiation.

Four-Dimensional Vistas · 第 93 / 100 题