Page:Personality (Lectures delivered in America).djvu/62

46 acting in a different plane of time, not only from ours, but also from their own in other spheres of life. As if the mathematical part of their minds were living in a comet, while the other parts were the inhabitants of this earth. Therefore the process through which their minds rush to their results is not only invisible to us, it is not even seen by themselves.

It is a well-known fact that our dreams often flow in a measure of time different from that of our waking consciousness. The fifty minutes of our sundial of dreamland may be represented by five minutes of our clock. If from the vantage of our wakeful time we could watch these dreams, they would rush past us like an express train. Or if from the window of our swift-flying dreams we could watch the slower world of our waking consciousness, it would seem receding away from us at a great speed. In fact if the thoughts that move in other minds than our own were open to us, our perception of them would be different from theirs, owing to our difference of mental time. If we could adjust our focus of time according to our whims, we should see the waterfall standing still and the pine forest running fast like the waterfall of a green Niagara.