Opening Remarks
After the physical and vital mind there emerges reason into the human play. It brings with it measure and rule.
The last and the greatest
Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.
The last of this series of little mind and its powers is reason. Beyond it are other layers of the mind that are not uyet fully manifested in human beings. Even reason is yet to emerge fully in many. Yet some kind of rational thinking is in some degree a common endowment of humanity now.
The squat godhead artisan
Arriving late from a far plane of thought
Into a packed irrational world of Chance
Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,
Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.
Reason comes last entering the human brain from a high and far off plane. It begins to create order in a world of chance where all is driven blindly without conscious thought. It is imaged a man squatting on a ridge in Time with high brows and a brooding forehead. It is the builder of forms of thought and speech.
Strongest and the wisest of the three
Adept of clear contrivance and design,
A pensive face and close and peering eyes,
She took her firm and irremovable seat,
The strongest, wisest of the troll-like Three.
A master at building devices and planning and executing things it holds a pensive face and eyes that try to see deeper. Though it is not the ultimate possibility of the mind it is still the wisest and strongest among the three.
Measure and probe
Armed with her lens and measuring-rod and probe,
She looked upon an object universe
And the multitudes that in it live and die
And the body of Space and the fleeing soul of Time,
And took the earth and stars into her hands
To try what she could make of these strange things.
Reason relies on the data it receives through the external senses. Then it sifts the data, categorises and labels things breaking each element into a number of parts. It then measures what it observes and places the object in the context of time and space. Thus it goes about exploring earth and the stars and further beyond and deeper within the material universe.
Purposeful laborious mind
In her strong purposeful laborious mind,
Inventing her scheme-lines of reality
And the geometric curves of her time-plan,
She multiplied her slow half-cuts at Truth:
Impatient of enigma and the unknown,
Intolerant of the lawless and the unique,
Imposing reflection on the march of Force,
Imposing clarity on the unfathomable,
She strove to reduce to rules the mystic world.
Thus it labours with great patience poring over details and marking out lines that define the separate object in terms of Space and units of Time within which it is observed. Thus it proceeds from the half known to the unknown as if to unravel all mysteries through this laborious process. Thus it hopes to bring clarity by reducing all movements and objects to rules and norm while the mystic side of the world remains ungrasped.
Nothing she knew
Nothing she knew but all things hoped to know.
Yet all her knowledge was based on a fallacious and incomplete data of the outer senses. She thought she knows it all but the depths remained sealed to her search and hence her knowledge also incomplete.
Closing Remarks
Reason is the last of the three powers of the little mind but is only a step for the mind to climb beyond reason to still greater and higher powers that would emerge into the human play through the evolutionary process.
