A Rock Pile Ceases to Be a Rock Pile

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man

contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. This
phrase, whether sensible or not, hints at the ability of human beings to
turn anything, or even nothing at all, into something else completely. In
this case, cathedrals themselves are little more than piles of rock laid in
an orderly fashion, so this is saying that a man is either looking at a
literal pile of rock and relating it to the fact that cathedrals are also made
of rock, and imagining that, or this man is looking at what we would call
a cathedral, which as I've already said is just a pile of rocks laid in an
orderly fashion, and giving it a holy connotation. This can also be applied
to other religious items, for example, a book of questionable stories or
even another human being. The fact that they are holy is purely in the
mind of the individual.
This, then, brings up the idea that technically nothing is what we
think it is. Everything is made up of matter, of atoms.