Robert T. Browne

“ The warp and the woof are the realism of the kosmos; the vertical threads are the roots and stem of the phenomenal world; the design is our sensible world as it appears to the intellect. The life of the intellect has been spent in contemplating this design; while of the hands which wove the carpet, of the mind which directed the hands and of the spirit which vitalized all, it knows nothing nor indeed can it know anything. Where shall we say are those hands, that mind and that spirit which made the carpet possible and an actuality? ”

“ The intuition, long held in abeyance until the intellect should be fully crowned and reach the zenith of its powers, is now coming to the front. It will be many centuries perhaps before it shall have grown to such proportions as those already attained by the intellect; perhaps a few thousand years may pass before the intuition shall have evolved to that point where it may labor as coadjutor to the intellect; but undoubtedly the time will come when it, too, shall reward the Thinker's labors with that which shall be more precious than the crown of gold which the intellect has won. ”

“ Here the great mystery of mysteries is revealed as the citadel of the universal and the ultimate real. In this citadel, the plane of kosmic consciousness, space loses its spaciousness and time its timeliness, diversity its multiplicity and oneness alone reigns supreme. ”

“ It is not out and beyond that we shall find the end of space; it is not by counting tens of thousands of light-years that the supposed limits of space shall be attained. The path of search must project in an opposite direction—not star-ward but Thinker-ward, toward the subtle habitation of the consciousness itself. We err greatly when we think that by measuring distances we shall encompass space; for that which we measure and determine is but the clouds caused by the vapor of reality. ”

“ Life, reality and all the eternal verities pass on and assume countless postures, attitudes, moods, tenses and nuances. The intellect is content to occupy itself with a single tense or mood. Indeed, it has no aptitude or power to consider more than one at a single time. It thus misses the continuity, the ceaselessness, of life. What is more, every singularity, every attitude, mood or tense which the intellect grasps for consideration is immediately remade so as to fit its own moods and tenses. ”

“ Already we know of stars so distant that, though light traverses in the brief space of an hour six hundred million miles, they might have ceased to shine before the pyramids were built and yet be visible to us in the skies. If the human eye were as sensitive as the spectroscope many thousand tints and shades might be added to the world of color; if they possessed the magnifying powers of the microscope we should live in constant terror and awe of the monstrous entities that teem in the water which we drink and in the air which we breathe ”

“ It cannot be believed, however, that metageometricians are really in earnest in what they suggest of hyperspace and n-dimensionality; it cannot be believed that they are entirely satisfied with what they have found of the so-called hyperspatial, and yet, some of them are fanatically patriotic over the new-found domain; some are even intolerant. But there are others who look upon the fabric of metageometry as a stepping stone to space-realities, a mile-post on the path to the realization of a higher consciousness, the consciousness of the space-mind or kosmic consciousness. ”

“ Life, in its passage through the universum of spatiality, carefully diacriticizes between the realm of facts and the domain of truth, marking each off from the other by unmistakable signs and barriers. Truth is perceived as an axiomatic, self-evident principle and no amount of logic could prove or establish its verity. Facts are intellectual creatures; truth is intuitional, vital. The intellect conceives the consistence of facts while the intuition recognizes truth—is truth, and therefore, follows in the wake of life as consciousness. ”

“ That is to say—in the physical life of the universe is confined the essence of all the series of grades of life in the kosmos. In man's physical body are wrapped up all the glories attainable in his long, almost unending pilgrimage of evolution; in it are stored all the possibilities of the spirit; all powers, all qualities, all characteristics, ever intended for man's attainment are in the physical. But they must be evolved, they must be unfolded and expressed. The physical must be glorified, spiritualized, deified. ”

“ It is not so with our conception of time. Time is merely an aspect of consciousness in its limitation and does not inhere in the mind in the same manner that does space. In fact, it is not a part of the mind's nature as it has been shown that space is. It would, therefore, seem to be a grave mistake so to coördinate the two notions. Space is the progenitor of mind and is continually identified with mind. Time is the child of consciousness. That is, it is one of the illusions of consciousness which the ego will shed as his consciousness expands. Duration alone is a coördinate of space. ”

“ Mathematics is the biometer of intellectual evolution. Hence, the determination of the status quo of the intellect at any time can be accomplished most satisfactorily by applying to it the rigorous measure of the mathematical method. The intellect has but one true divining rod and that is mathematics. By day and by night it points the way unerringly, so long as it leads through materiality; but, falteringly, blindly, fatally, when that way veers into the territory of vitality and spirituality. ”

“ Life is like that. It cuts out the designs in materiality, fashions the form, molds the material, and passes on to other forms. The intellect fits into these designs gracefully. But what it finds is not life itself, only the design which life has made. Hence, as there is neither an empirical spatiality nor materiality in conformity with which the artificial geometry of the analyst may be said to exist, and as it may not be said to conform to the path which life has made in passing through either of these, it is absurd to predicate it upon the same basis as the natural geometry. ”

“ Perhaps the time may come, never quite fully, when there will be no longer any necessity to provide against the external exigencies of life; perhaps, the time will never be when the mind shall no more be bound by the law of self-preservation, not even when it has attained unto the immortality of absolute knowledge; yet, it is intuitively felt that it must come to pass that the mind shall be vastly freer than it is to-day. And with this new freedom must come liberation from the necessities of the elementary problems of mere physical existence. ”

“ So long as knowledge of space is limited to the understanding of a symbol or symbols by which it is presented to the consciousness so long will it fall short of the comprehension of the essential nature of space. In vain have we sought in times past to understand space by studying relations, positions and the characteristics of forms in space; in vain have we based our conclusions as to its real nature upon the fragmentary evidences which our senses present to our consciousnesses. ”

“ Space is an intuitional concept; time is an intellectual concept. Time belongs to phenomena. Space is the root and source of phenomena. Time is the leaves of a tree while space is the life of the tree.
Space-consciousness, in its relation to the present status of mind-development, is itself an illusion; for despite the fact that the Thinker's apperception of it as a state is simple, direct and fundamental, it is only so because of the inability to realize to itself the unity of the seeming two. ”

“ Hyperspaces which are not spaces at all should not be confounded with real space. But they constitute the substance of non-Euclidean geometry; they are its blood and sinews. Their study is interesting, because of the possibilities of speculation which it offers. No mind that has thought deeply upon the intricacies of the fourth dimension, or hyperspace, remains the same after the process. It is bound to experience a certain sense of humility, and yet some pride born of a knowledge that it has been in the presence of a great mystery and has delved into the fearful deeps of kosmic mind. ”

“ In this respect, it serves well its function in the economy of intellectual evolution. It is a mysterious aspect of the original and eternal desire to live which is the kosmic urge present in all organized being and has its roots hidden in the divine purpose of creation.
Idealized constructions, then, are like Arabian feasts conjured up by a famishing mentality. They are like the dreams of a starving man in which he actualizes in phantom-stuff the choicest viands in abundant supply for his imaginary delectation. The mind that is satisfied never idealizes, never makes an idealized construction. ”

“ Life has so many ways of exhibiting its remains to the intellect; and these remains have so many facets or viewpoints from which they may be studied, that nothing short of a panoramic view of all the modes of exhibition and of all the facets and angles of appearances will suffice to present a trustworthy and comprehensive view of the whole. Then, life itself is so illusive, so unseizable by the intellect that the testimony of all investigators are required to summarize its modes of appearance. ”

“ Nevertheless the outlying frontiers of man's consciousness gradually are being pushed farther and farther without. Every new idea gained, each new emotion indulged, each new conception conquered, and every mental foray which the Thinker makes into the realm of the conceptual, every exploration into the abysmal labyrinth of man's inner nature are the self's expeditionary forces which are gradually annihilating the frontier barriers of consciousness and thus approaching more closely upon the Ultima Thule of man's spiritual possibilities.
Space is in manifestation. ”

“ It is not because reality is itself a hidden, inscrutable quantity nor that its modus vivendi is "unknowable"; but because we being multiformly limited, "cabined, cribbed and confined" are resultantly lacking in the power to discern that which otherwise would be most obvious to us. It may well be set down as axiomatic that when, in the process of our thinking, we arrive at the inscrutable, the unknowable and the infinite, it is evident that our thought processes are dealing with a form of realism which is higher and beyond the possibilities of our loftiest thought-reaches. ”

“ The pure mathematician has a hankering after the logically consistent in all his pursuits; to him it is the "Holy Grail" of his highest aspirations. He seeks it as the devotee seeks immortality. It is to him a philosopher's stone, the elixir of perpetual youth, the eternal criterion of all knowledge. ”

“ It is the kosmic order which life establishes by means of its outgoings and incomings. When we look out into space we perceive that which is a dynamic appearance of life itself, and not a pure form. Nothing that is a pure form can exist in nature and in as much as space is not only indissoluble from nature but partakes of its very essence it cannot be said to be a pure form. The intellect, however, prone to follow the grooves laid out by pure logic, never fails to seek to make everything that it contacts conform to these logical necessities. ”

“ Life, that ineluctable agent of creation, which is incessantly pushing outward the confines of the intellect's scope of motility, never wearying, never tiring nor sleeping, has long ago, in the dim and distant past of man's evolution, laid the foundations; and in fact, with one stroke of its creative hand, has molded the organs which are to become the active media of these new faculties. ”

“ It is the supreme task of mental evolution to break through the clouds of phenomena in the search for the eternal substratum of reality which runs through the sensible universe of things.
The first view of conditions that the mind takes upon awakening to consciousness in any new sphere of cognition is necessarily hazy and inchoate. There is more or less of astonishment, wonder and bewilderment upon first becoming aware of a new scope of realism. ”