and number is therefore not reality itself, but only its
inadequate manifestation to our limited capacity for understanding.

But enough of this. The puzzles in the doctrines of the simple and the
complex, of the causeless and the caused, into which this world of ours
forces us, should teach us further to recognise it for what it
is--insufficient and pointing beyond itself,--to its own transcendent
depths. So, too, the problems that arise when we penetrate farther and
farther into the ever more and more minute, and the indefiniteness of our
thought-horizons in general should have the same effect.

Intuitions of Reality.

(5.) There are other evidences of this depth and hidden nature of things,
towards which an examination of our knowledge points. For "in feeling and
intuition appearance points beyond itself to real being." So ran our fifth
proposition. This subject indeed is delicate, and can only be treated of
in the hearing of willing ears. But all apologetic counts upon willing
ears; it is not conversion of doubters that is aimed at, it is religion
which seeks to reassure itself. Our proposition does not speak of dreams
but of facts, which are not the less facts because they are more subtle
than others. What we are speaking of are the deep impressions, which
cannot properly be made commensurable at all, which may spring up directly
out of an inward experience, an apprehension of nature, the world and
history, in the depths of the spirit. They call forth in us an
"anamnesis," a "reminiscence" in Plato's sense, awakening within us moods
and intuitions in which something of the essence and meaning of being is
directly experienced, although it remains in the form of feeling, and
cannot easily, if at all, find expression in definable ideas or clear
statements. Fries, in his book, "Wissen, Glaube, und Ahnung," unhappily
too much forgotten, takes account of this fact, for he places this region
of spiritual experience beside the certainties of faith and knowledge, and
regards these as "animated" by it. He has in mind especially the
impressions of the beautiful and the sublime which far transcend our
knowledge of nature, and to which knowledge and its concepts can never do
adequate justice, facts though they undoubtedly are. In them we experience
directly, in intuitive feeling, that the reality is greater than our power
of understanding, and we feel something of its true nature and meaning.
The utterances of Schleier