imagination as wave-lengths, and we shall find it difficult to think clearly upon the subject without the aid of this wave-theory."[1]
In short, it is obvious that without the help of this mythologic, poetic, image-forming faculty, all our pursuit of truth were in vain. And therefore, starting from the common basis of a confession that "something is," we are more than justified, we are obeying a necessary law of our nature, in asking what that eternal substratum of existence is, and with what morphologic aid the imagination may best present it for our contemplation.
But here the pure logician may perhaps retort: "You forget that the conceptions men form of things are, at their very best, nothing more than human, and therefore relative conceptions. A fly or a fish probably sees things differently. And an inhabitant of Mercury or Saturn might form a conception of the universe bearing little resemblance to yours."[2] Quite true; but logicians there, too, would probably be heard to complain that, colored by Saturnian or Mercurian relativities, truth was sadly impure, and was, in fact, attained by no one but themselves. Nay, in those other worlds priests of Logic might be found so wrapped in superstition as to launch epithets of contempt on all who approached to puncture their inflated fallacies, and who devoutly believed that a syllogism did not contain a petitio principii[3] neatly wrapped up in its own premises, and an induction was not an application of a preëxisting general idea, but a downright discovery of absolute truth. If from such afflictions we on earth are free, it is because the common sense of mankind declares itself serenely content with the relative and the human; because, while fully aware (from our schoolboy days) that all our faculties—reason among the rest—are limited and earthly, we have faith that "all is well" in mind, as it certainly is in matter; and because we smile at the simplicity of our modern wranglers, who can only analyze down as far as "Something," when their Buddhist masters two thousand years ago had dug far deeper, viz., to Nothing:
The mind of the supreme Buddha is swift, quick, piercing, because he is infinitely "pure." Nirwana is the destruction of all the elements of existence. The being who is "purified" knows there is no Ego, no self; all the afflictions connected with existence are overcome, all the principles of existence are annihilated, and that annihilation is Nirwana.
The Churchman, therefore, holds himself so far justified in claiming
- ↑ Cooke, "The New Chemistry" (fourth edition, 1878), p. 22.
- ↑ "Physicus" (p. 143) rides this logical bobby far beyond the confines of the sublime. He demands of the theist to show that his "God is something more than a mere causal agent which is 'absolute' in the grotesquely restricted sense of being independent of one petty race of creatures with an ephemeral experience of what is going on in one tiny corner of the universe."
- ↑ Begging the question.
- ↑ Hardy, "Eastern Monachism," p. 291.
