for you
will see them with innocent, attentive, disinterested eyes, feel
them as infinitely significant and adorable parts of the
Transcendent Whole in which you also are immersed.

This discovery of your fraternal link with all living things, this
down-sinking of your arrogant personality into the great generous
stream of life, marks an important stage in your apprehension of
that Science of Love which contemplation is to teach. You are
not to confuse it with pretty fancies about nature, such as all
imaginative persons enjoy; still less, with a self-conscious and
deliberate humanitarianism. It is a veritable condition of
awareness; a direct perception, not an opinion or an idea. For
those who attain it, the span of the senses is extended. These live
in a world which is lit with an intenser light; has, as George Fox
insisted, "another smell than before." They hear all about them
the delicate music of growth, and see the "new colour" of which
the mystics speak.

Further, you will observe that this act, and the attitude which is
proper to it, differs in a very important way even from that
special attentiveness which characterised the stage of meditation,
and which seems at first sight to resemble it in many respects.
Then, it was an idea or image from amongst the common stock--
one of those conceptual labels with which the human paste-brush
has decorated the surface of the universe--which you were
encouraged to hold before your mind. Now, turning away from
the label, you shall surrender yourself to the direct message
poured out towards you by the _thing_. Then, you considered:
now, you are to absorb. This experience will be, in the very
highest sense, the experience of sensation without thought: the
essential sensation, the "savouring" to which some of the mystics
invite us, of which our fragmentary bodily senses offer us a
transient sacrament. So here at last, in this intimate communion,
this "simple seeing," this total surrender of you to the impress of
things, you are using to the full the sacred powers of sense: and
so using them, because you are concentrating upon them,
accepting their reports in simplicity. You have, in this
contemplative outlook, carried the peculiar methods of artistic
apprehension to their highest stage: with the result that the
sense-world has become for you, as Erigena said that all creatures
were, "a theophany, or appearance of God." Not, you observe, a
symbol, but a showing: a very diffe