118 AN INTRODUCTION TO SUFI DOCTRINE

away from the Intellect, which transcends the terrestrial
plane, it can only have a destructive character, like that
of a corrosive acid, which destroys the organic unity of
beings and of things. We have only to look at the
modern world with its artificial character devoid of
beauty and its inhumanly abstract and quantitative
structure in order to know the character of thought when
given over to its own resources. Man, the “thinking
animal,” must necessarily be either the divine crown of
nature or its adversary,! and this is so because in the
mind “to be” becomes dissociated from *to know’’ and
in the process of man’s degeneration this leads to all
other ruptures and separations.

This double property of thought corresponds to the
principle which Sufis symbolise by the barzakh, the
“ jsthmus” between two oceans. The barzakh is both a
barrier and a point of junction between two degrees of
reality. As an intermediate agent it reverses the pencil
of rays of the light it transmits in the same manner as
does a lens. In the structure of thought this inversion
appears as abstraction. Thought is only capable of
synthesis by stripping itself of the immediate aspect of
things ; the more nearly it approaches the universal the
more it is reduced as it were to a point. Thought thus
imitates on the level of form—and hence imperfectly—

1. In animals there does not exist, as in man, a refraction of the intellect
which is at the same time subjective and active, a refraction which would stand
between the intellectual essence immanent in the form of the species and the
individuel psychic organism. For this reason animals are more passive than
man in relation to the cosmic surroundings. At the same time they more direct-
ly express their intellectual essence. The beauty of a sacred art—an art divinely
inspired—heightens that of virgin nature, while the creations of a civilisition
that is profane-and practically atheistical, such as modern civilisation, are
always hostile to natural harmony.