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Poincare, 'the greatest of moderns,' is a new table of distribution;
that is, a breaking up of old associations of ideas and the forming of
new relations - a simple matter were it not for our mental inertia.
Lester Ward speculates that life remained aquatic for the vast periods
that paleontology would indicate; Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian,
Carboniferous - a duration greater than all subsequent time - for the
reason that the creature had not progressed beyond the stage when it
could move otherwise than in a straight line when actuated by desire for
food or mate. Life was not able to maintain itself on land until it had
overcome this one-dimensional limitation. A venturesome Pterodactyl was
he who first essayed to make his way among the many obstructions to be
found ashore! By what intuition was he impelled?

It is a matter of common observation that the growth of the higher
perceptive faculty is strangely concomitant with adversity. The
intuitive person is a person who has suffered. When conditions press
sufficiently hard, a new table of distribution may be the only means for
survival. Thus we proceed to make a virtue of necessity and so come to
the recognition of other values which we denominate spiritual because we
have not as yet spatialized them. The caterpillar has to mount the twig
to find the tender green that is his food, but, he solaces himself for
the journey by thinking himself a creature of the light. Mr. Carpenter,
in an interesting study of what he calls Intermediate Types, shows that
the seers and spiritually-minded come to be such because they found
themselves differing in some wise from their fellows, and dwelling on
that difference had their minds turned inward. Progress in thought and
imagination naturally followed, with the result that these were lifted
above the majority and came thereby to larger vision. Failure may well
be the measure of extension in a new dimension.

The significance of the much fumbling and groping of earth's creatures
is the desire for a larger outlook. Man has to feel his way out of a
three-fold world even as the worm out of his hole. That we are hearing
much of the principle of relativity is perhaps the best indication we
have that the collective human consciousness is about to enter a higher
dimension. So long as man knew only an absolute good was his world a
definitely determined world. Now that the question of relative values
obtrudes itself on every side the range of c