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