Art cannot dispense with symbolism; as the letters on this page convey thoughts to the mind, so do the things of this world, organized into a language of symbols, speak to the soul through art.  But in the building of our towers of Babel, again mankind is stricken with a confusion of tongues.  Art has no common language; its symbols are no longer valid, or are no longer understood.  This is a condition for which materialism has no remedy, for the reason that materialism sees always the pattern but never that which the pattern represents.  We must become spiritually illumined before we can read nature truly, and re-create, from such a reading, fresh and universal symbols for art.  This is a task beyond the power of our sad generation, enchained by negative thinking, overshadowed by war, but we can at least glimpse the nature of the reaction between the mystic consciousness and the things of this world which will produce a new language of symbols.  The mystic consciousness looks upon nature as an arras embroidered over with symbols of the things it conceals from view.  We are ourselves symbols, dwelling in a world of symbols—­a world many times removed from that ultimate reality to which all things bear figurative witness; the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning, and ugliness and vulgarity exist only in the unillumined mind.

What mystic meaning, it may be asked, is contained in such things as a brick, a house, a hat, a pair of shoes?  A brick is the ultimate atom of a building; a house is the larger body which man makes for his uses, just as the Self has built its habitation of flesh and bones; hat and shoes are felt and leather insulators with which we seek to cut ourselves off from the currents which flow through earth and air from God.  It may be objected that these answers only substitute for the lesser symbol a greater, but this is inevitable:  if for the greater symbol were named one still more abstract and inclusive, the ultimate verity would be as far from affirmation as before.  There is nothing of which the human mind can conceive that is not a symbol of something greater and higher than itself.

The dictionary defines a symbol as “something that stands for something else and serves to represent it, or to bring to mind one or more of its qualities.”  Now this world is a reflection of a higher world, and that of a higher world still, and so on.  Accordingly, everything is a symbol of something higher, since by reflecting, it “stands for, and serves to represent it,” and the thing symbolized, being itself a reflection, is, by the same token, itself a symbol.  By reiterated repetitions of this reflecting process throughout the numberless planes and sub-planes of nature, each thing becomes a symbol, not of one thing only, but of many things, all intimately correlated, and this gives rise to those underlying analogies, those “secret subterranean passages between matter and soul” which have ever been the especial preoccupation of the poet and the mystic, but which may one day become the subject of serious examination by scientific men.