the hills of Judea nor seen the heavenly vision;
but millions have listened to that spiritual message through many ages.

Our blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities. Of us it
is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is
always entered through the imagination. If you wish to be something that
you are not,--something fine, noble, good,--you shut your eyes, and for
one dreamy moment you are that which you long to be.

INWARD VISIONS

IX

INWARD VISIONS

ACCORDING to all art, all nature, all coherent human thought, we know
that order, proportion, form, are essential elements of beauty. Now
order, proportion, and form, are palpable to the touch. But beauty and
rhythm are deeper than sense. They are like love and faith. They spring
out of a spiritual process only slightly dependent upon sensations.
Order, proportion, form, cannot generate in the mind the abstract idea
of beauty, unless there is already a soul intelligence to breathe life
into the elements. Many persons, having perfect eyes, are blind in
their perceptions. Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally
deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision
of those who, lacking a sense or two, have will, soul, passion,
imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may
construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the
material world. And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a
child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all
worlds.

There is a consonance of all things, a blending of all that we know
about the material world and the spiritual. It consists for me of all
the impressions, vibrations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the
sensations which these convey to the mind, infinitely combined,
interwoven with associated ideas and acquired knowledge. No thoughtful
person will believe that what I said about the meaning of footsteps is
strictly true of mere jolts and jars. It is an array of the spiritual in
certain natural elements, tactual beats, and an acquired knowledge of
physical habits and moral traits of highly organized human beings. What
would odours signify if they were not associated with the time of the
year, the place I live in, and the people I know?

The result of such a blending is sometimes a discordant trying of
strings far removed from a melody, very far from a symphony. (For the
benefit of those wh