BELIEFS
should be sacrificed to such entities as *the nation/ 'the
state/ "the party/ "the destiny of the race' and so on. The
truth is that there are many different levels of abstraction
from reality. The entities with which political theory deals
belong to a higher order of abstraction than do the separate,
individual existents of common sense—are more remote,
that is to say/from concrete reality, which consists of the
interdependent parts of a totality. The monstrous evils
which arise when remote abstractions, like * nation* and
* state* are regarded as realities more concrete and of greater
significance than human beings may be remedied, in some
measure, by the insistence on the relative concreteness of
individual men and women. But this last doctrine is itself
the source of very great evils, which cannot be remedied
until we recognize, and choose to act upon, the truth that
the * individual' is also an abstraction from reality. Separate,
individual existents are illusions of common sense. Scien-
tific investigation reveals (and these findings, as we shall
see later on, are confirmed by the direct intuition of the
trained mystic and contemplative) that concrete reality con-
sists of the interdependent parts of a totality and that
independent existents are merely abstractions from that
reality.
Recent scientific investigations have made it clear that
the world of sense experience and of common sense is only
a small part of the world as a whole. It is small for two
reasons: first, because we are confined to.a particular point
in space and have scarcely any knowledge by direct acquain-
tance and little knowledge even by inference of the con-
ditions prevailing in distant parts of the universe; second,
because the organs by means of which we establish direct
communication with the outside world are incapable of
apprehending the whole of reality. This second limitation
is of more significance than the first. Even if we were able
to make voyages of exploration through interstellar space,