“In the manifold unity of universal life the innumerable individualities distinguished by their variations are, nevertheless, united in such a manner that the whole is one, and that everything proceeds from unity.

“For all things depend upon unity, or develop from it, and because they appear distant from one another it is believed that they are many, whereas in their collectivity they form but one.”

Now nothing so successfully resolves this paradox of the one and the many as the concept that the things of this world are embraced and united in a dimensionally higher world in a manner analogous to that in which all conic sections are embraced and united within the cone.  A more elaborate and fanciful figure may serve to make this clearer to the mind.

Conceive of this printed page as a plane world in which every letter is a person; every word a family; phrases and sentences, larger communities and groups.  These “innumerable individualities, distinguished by their variations” must needs seem to themselves as “distant from one another,” their very differences of form and arrangement a barrier to any superior unity.  Yet all the while, solely by reason of this diversity, they are co-operating towards an end of which they cannot be aware.  The mind of the reader unites and interprets the letters into continuous thought, though they be voiceless as stones to one another.  Even so may our sad and stony identities spell out a world’s word which we know not of, by reason of our singularity and isolation.  Moreover, in the electrotype block, the solid of which the printed page constitutes a plane presentment, all the letters are actually “united in such a manner that the whole is one.”  The metal that has moulded each into its significant form amalgamates them into a higher unity.  So also the power that makes us separate is the same power that makes us one.

THE SHIP AND ITS CAPTAIN

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