Chapter II (part 7)

A man easily admits his incompetency in music, dancing, or higher mathematics, but he always maintains the privilege of having an opinion and being a judge of questions relating to "first principles." It is difficult to discuss with such men. For how will you answer a man who looks at you in perplexity, knocks on the table with his fingers and says, " This is matter . I know it; feel! How can it be an abstract conception?" To answer this is as difficult as to answer the man who says: "I see that the sun rises and sets!" ______ Returning to the consideration of space, we shall under no circumstances introduce unknown quantities in the definition of it. We shall define it only in terms of those two data which we decided to accept at the very beginning. The world and consciousness are the facts which we decided to recognize as existing. By the world we mean the combination of all the causes of our sensations in general. By the material world we mean the combination of causes of a definite series of sensations : those of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, sensations of weight, and so on. Space is either a property of the world or a property of our knowledge of the world. Three-dimensional space is either a property of the material world or a property of our receptivity of the material world. Our inquiry is confined to the problem: how shall we approach the study of space? Footnotes 25:1 Italics by P. D. Ouspensky. Transl . 31:1 "The Secret Doctrine," The Theosophical Publishing Society. Third Edition, p. 271, vol. I. 32:1 This is irony which the English speaking may easily fail to understand. Some unscrupulous monks of the monastery of Athos, famous throughout Greece and Russia, made a practice, it is said, of selling "Egyptian darkness" in little vials, thus making capital out of the credulity and piety of the illiterate Russian pilgrims who were wont to visit this monastery in great numbers. Transl .