inquiry than that of the present chapter. Perhaps there are 
better approaches along quite different lines; for example, 
consciousness is regarded as the mark of a rational being, yet 
there is nothing lineal or sequential about the total field of 
awareness that exists in any moment of consciousness. 
Consciousness is not a verbal process. Yet during all our 
centuries of phonetic literacy we have favored the chain of 
inference as the mark of logic and reason. Chinese writing, in 
contrast, invests each ideogram with a total intuition of being 
and reason that allows only a small role to visual sequence as a 
mark of mental effort and organization. In Western literate 
society it is still plausible and acceptable to say that something 
“follows” from something, as if there were some cause at work 
that makes such a sequence. It was David Hume who, in the 
eighteenth century, demonstrated that there is no causality 
indicated in any sequence, natural or logical. The sequential is