WHAT IS CERTAINTY? 
213 
notes; that of the Party of the Second Part, hereinafter 
referred to as-not a Heretic, an Atheist, a Bolshie, a 
Die-hard, a Schismatic, an Anarchist, a Black Magician, a 
Friend of Aleister Crowley, or whatever may be the current 
term of abuse-Mr. A, Lord B, the Duke of C, Mrs. X, or 
whatever he or she may chance to be called-into five. The 
Structure called of-alI-Truth in neither of us is affected in the 
least, any more than in the reading of a Thermometer with 
Fahrenheit on one side and Centigrade on the other. 
You naturally object that this answer is little better than 
an evasion, that it automatically pushes the Gamut question 
outside the Charmed of-alI-Truth Circle. 
No, it doesn't really; for if you were able to put up a 
Projection of those two minds, there would be, firstly, some 
sort of compensation elsewhere than in the musical section; 
and secondly, some Truth of a yet higher order which is 
common to both. 
Not una ware am I that these conceptions 
are at 
first exceedingly difficult to formulate clearly. I wouldn't go so 
far as to say that one would have to be a Master of the 
Temple to understand them; but it is really very necessary to 
have grasped firmly the doctrine that "a thing is only true 
insofar as it contains its contradiction in itself." (A good way 
to realize this is by keeping up a merry dance of paradoxes, 
such as infest Logic and Mathematics. The repeated butting 
of the head against a brick wall is bound in the long run to 
shake up the little grey cells [as Poirot might say] , teach you 
to distrust any train of argument , however apparently 
impeccable the syllogisms, and to seek ever more eagerly the 
dawn of that Neschamic consciousness where all these things 
are clearly understood, although impossible to express in 
rational language.) 
The prime function of intellect is differentiation; it deals 
with marks, with limits, with the relations of what is not 
identical ; in Neschamah all this work has been carried out so 
perfectly that the "rough working" has passed clean out of 
mind; just so, you say "I" as if it were an indivisible Unity,