“The past few years have promised a culmination which has been guessed at and yearned for since the beginning of time.  It is within, and still without, the scope of metaphysics.  Those of you who have attended my lectures have heard me call myself the material idealist.  I am a mystic sensationalist.  I believe that we can derive nothing from pure contemplation.  There is mystery and wonder in the veil of the occult.  The earth, our life, is merely a vestibule of the universe.  Contemplation alone will hold us all as inapt and as impotent as the old Monks of Athos.  We have mountains of literature behind us, all contemplative, and whatever its wisdom, it has given us not one thing outside the abstract.  From Plato down to the present our philosophy has given us not one tangible proof, not one concrete fact which we can place our hands on.  We are virtually where we were originally; and we can talk, talk, talk from now until the clap of doomsday.

“What then?

“My friends, philosophy must take a step sidewise.  In this modern age young science, practical science, has grown up and far surpassed us.  We must go back to the beginning, forget our subjective musings and enter the concrete.  We are five-sensed, and in the nature of things we must bring the proof down into the concrete where we can understand it.  Can we pierce the nebulous screen that shuts us out of the occult?  We have doubted, laughed at ourselves and been laughed at; but the fact remains that always we have persisted in the believing.

“I have said that we shall never, never understand infinity while within the limitations of our five senses.  I repeat it.  But that does not imply that we shall never solve some of the mystery of life.  The occult is not only a supposition, but a fact.  We have peopled it with terror, because, like our forebears before Columbus, we have peopled it with imagination.

“And now to my statement.

“I have called myself the Material Idealist.  I have adopted an entirely new trend of philosophy.  During the past years, unknown to you and unknown to my friends, I have allied myself with practical science.  I desired something concrete.  While my colleagues and others were pounding out tomes of wonderful sophistry I have been pounding away at the screen of the occult.  This is a proud moment.  I have succeeded.  Tomorrow I shall bring to you the fact and the substance.  I have lifted up the curtain and flooded it with the light of day.  You shall have the fact for your senses.  Tomorrow I shall explain it all.  I shall deliver my greatest lecture; in which my whole Me has come to a focus.  It is not spiritualism nor sophistry.  It is concrete fact and common sense.  The subject of my lecture tomorrow will be:  ’The Blind Spot.’”

Here begins the second part of the mystery.