The Great Work; The Constructive Principle of Nature in Individual Life

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. TRUTH AND LIGHT. As a natural supplement of the preceding chapter, it would seem to be both relevant and material, as well as helpful to the general purpose of this work, to consider briefly the remarkable and strangely significant analogy between Light to the physical sense and Truth to the soul of an intelligent individual. Indeed, in a purely intellectual sense, the two words are often used synonymously. The further we inquire into the subject matter and analyze the characteristics of both, in their effects upon human consciousness, the more clearly they would seem to justify such use. For illustration: Take an ordinary candle into a dark and unfamiliar room. Then light it and study the results upon your sense of vision. You will observe that no matter how faint may be the light it sheds, you are nevertheless able to obtain some slight vision of those objects that are nearest you. True, they may, perhaps, be so indistinct that you are quite uncertain as to their exact form or nature. However, you are able to satisfy yourself that certain objects are there to be seen provided sufficient light can be obtained to dispel the darkness. You therefore determine that you must have More Light. You bring in an oil lamp. You light that also. Let us suppose that it represents five times the power of your candle. You then have the combined light-producing power of both candle and lamp, representing an aggregate of six candle power. Under the resultant power of these two lights you find yourself able to distinguish clearly a number of objects near to you which were quite beyond the limits of your vision before. You are also able to discover others in the distance whose forms are still too indistinct to be determined with certainty. You must have More ...