Lying there, separated from the world, cut off within the circle of a symbolised death by the light of the universal agent,[6] Zoroaster dreamed dreams and saw visions.

[Footnote 6:  The term “universal agent” has been used in the mysticism of ages, to designate that subtle and all-pervading fluid, of which the phenomena of light, heat, electricity and vitality are considered to be but the grosser and more palpable manifestations.]

His mind was first opened to the understanding of those broader conceptions of space and time of which he had read in the books of Daniel, his master.  He had understood the principles then, but he had not realised their truth.  He was too intimately connected with the life around him, to be able to see in the clearer light which penetrates with universal truth all the base forms of perishable matter.

Daniel had taught him the first great principles.  All men, in their ignorance, speak of the infinities of space and time as being those ideas which man cannot of himself grasp or understand.  Man, they say, is limited in capacity; he can, therefore, not comprehend the infinite.  A greater fault than this could not be committed by a thinking being.  For infinity being unending, it is incapable of being limited; it rejects definition, which belongs, by its nature, to finite things.  For definition means the placing of bounds, and that which is infinite can have no bounds.  The man, therefore, who seeks to bound what has no bounds, endeavours to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses, is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language, and asserts boldly that the human mind is too limited in its nature to conceive of infinite space, or of infinite time.

Not only is the untrammelled mind of man capable of these bolder conceptions, but even the wretched fool who sees in the material world the whole of what man can know, could never get so far as to think even of the delusive objects on which he pins his foolish faith, unless the very mind which he insults and misunderstands, had by its nature that infinite capacity of comprehension which, he says, exists not.  For otherwise, if the mind be limited, there must be a definite limit to its comprehensive faculty, and it is easy to conceive that such a limit would soon become apparent to every student; as apparent as it is that a being, confined within three dimensions of space, cannot, without altering his nature, escape from these three dimensions, nor from the laws which govern matter having length, breadth and thickness alone, without the external fourth dimension, with its interchangeability of exterior and interior angles.