Soon you weary of the heterogeneous.  The Zone of Consciousness stands revealed in all its grotesqueness.  ‘Time is,’ you cry, but to give thought its impulse, and you hasten on if perchance you may discover the direction of the life-principle.  What you had taken for reality is but its cross-section — so does this empirical realm stand to the higher world of your spirit, even as a plane to a solid.

Now you turn your attention from things to relations in the hope of getting at truth in the large.  A passage in Plato comes vividly to your mind.  ’For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason; - this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following God, when, regardless of that which we now call being, she raised her head up towards the true being.’

Henceforth the multiplicity that you seek is one of organization and has nothing to do with number.  ‘Time was,’ you proclaim, that consciousness might sift out the irrelevant.  As you pass from collection to collection individual fact becomes prolonged into general law and science dominates the field of thought.  A thousand years are as a day when subsumed by its laws.  You look at the objects of man’s creating with new eyes.  The displays are no longer contests of laborious industry but of vision, and faith.  You see that truth has made itself manifest through the long repetition of the same fundamental theme.  That which is unique and personal you are surprised to find of less value than the habit perfected by patient practice.  The routine and monotony of daily toil become glorified in the light that now falls athwart your vision.  You learn to substitute for your personal feeling the common impersonal element felt by the many.  Your concern is not as formerly to recollect, but to symbolize.  To this end you study frieze and statuary and frequent lectures.  Your sense of social solidarity grows through mutual comprehension of the same truths.

And again that ’vexing, forward reaching sense of some more noble permanence’ urges you on.  ‘Time was;’ you joyously affirm for man to come to the knowledge of an eternal self.  But that, your tradition and education have led you to believe, is still yonder, worlds away.  And you image the soul in its quest passing from life to life as you are now passing from building to building, from hall to hall.  But glad the thought — there will be courts wherein you may perhaps glimpse the plan of the whole and so gather strength and purpose for another housing.  All at once you know that death has no fear for you and you feel toward your present life as you do toward these Palaces of the Mundane — the sooner compassed the better.