hind, on one side as other.
Inasmuch, that whoso had a true desire for to be at heaven, then
that same time he were in heaven ghostly. For the high and the
next way thither is run by desires, and not by paces of feet." None
therefore is condemned, save by his own pride, sloth, or
perversity, to the horrors of that which Blake called "single
vision"--perpetual and undivided attention to the continuous
cinematograph performance, which the mind has conspired with
the senses to interpose between ourselves and the living world.

CHAPTER II

THE WORLD OF REALITY

The practical man may justly observe at this point that the world
of single vision is the only world he knows: that it appears to him
to be real, solid, and self-consistent: and that until the existence--
at least, the probability--of other planes of reality is made clear to
him, all talk of uniting with them is mere moonshine, which
confirms his opinion of mysticism as a game fit only for idle
women and inferior poets. Plainly, then, it is the first business of
the missionary to create, if he can, some feeling of dissatisfaction
with the world within which the practical man has always lived
and acted; to suggest something of its fragmentary and subjective
character. We turn back therefore to a further examination
of the truism--so obvious to those who are philosophers, so
exasperating to those who are not--that man dwells, under normal
conditions, in a world of imagination rather than a world of facts;
that the universe in which he lives and at which he looks is but a
construction which the mind has made from some few amongst
the wealth of materials at its disposal.

The relation of this universe to the world of fact is not unlike the
relation between a tapestry picture and the scene which it
imitates. You, practical man, are obliged to weave your image of
the outer world upon the hard warp of your own mentality; which
perpetually imposes its own convention, and checks the free
representation of life. As a tapestry picture, however various and
full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the
world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of
static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle
curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery
cannot represent. It leaves them out. From the countless
suggestions, the tangle of many-coloured wools which the real
world presents to you, you snatch one here and