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All the ancient dissimilarities, conflicts and antagonisms were solely due to the fragmentary fashion in which people had been content, until then, to study the universe. When all these divergent rays of thought had found their common focal point in the four-dimensional synthesis, natural variations were no longer anything but harmonic manifestations of a single common thought. And from matter, formerly judged inert, to the noblest speculations of the human mind, the world was now no more than a single soul, living the same life, an emanation of a single diverse thought that was named, in memory of the naΓ―ve beliefs of old, the Golden Eagle.
This union of minds, of the same time and all times, by the direct path of the fourth dimensionβby the subconscious, as one would once have put itβhad nothing blissful or passive about it, though, although no one had believed otherwise in the times when humankind still dreamed of naΓ―ve celestial sentimentality and eternal paradisal adoration. More than ever, contradiction engendered an intense intellectual life in which opposition alone, as in all the mindβs operations, was able to motivate thought.
What ensured that all effort became useful and positive, however, was that each individual action of intelligence concurred with the same continuous wholeβjust as, in a statue, all the lines, because they are opposed, unite to perfect a single masterpieceβand that love had replaced hatred since the language of the four-dimensional soul had been substituted for the fragmentary hypocrisies of three-dimensional modes of expression: hypocrisies contained in the concrete words of language as in the relative formulas of science.
After overturning all human traditions and mores, sincerity, imposed by the direct reading of thoughts, had engendered love and created, in the spiritual domain, a sort of state of nature, this time transcendental, that marked the definitive liberation of the human mind.
Every man understood, in the Age of the Golden Eagle, that he was but one fragment of a single statueβwhether an eye, nose or finger did not matterβthat he was only one act of the same intelligence, and that he desired the beauty of the whole with all his heart, his duty was to devote all his strength to make the part that was confided to him as beautiful as possible. That detail of the whole, his personality, immortal as the whole outside time, was the art-work signed with his name for all eternity within the universal art-work; it was the βIβ marking his place in the universal continuum. It was not important whether the act was one of intelligence, faith, revolt or kindness, provided it was worthy of the whole; on the contrary, woe betide the man if his βIβ was nothing but a defect, a lack or a fault, forever.
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