The World and the Individual, First Series/Lecture 4

by Josiah Royce

LECTURE IV

THE UNITY OF BEING, AND THE MYSTICAL INTERPRETATION

Of the four historical conceptions of Being we have now expounded in a general way, and with reference to their history, two conceptions, that of Realism, and that of Mysticism; and of these two we have critically examined one, namely, the realistic conception. If any one remarks that the sole result of our foregoing discussion was a mere negation, a mere rejection of an extreme form of realistic dualism, and that such a result is not yet positively enlightening, then I myself so far agree with the observation. It is true that we ended the last lecture with an assertion of the unity of Being. But if it be here further objected that the mere fact of unity is of small importance unless one comes to learn of what nature the unity is, and how it bears itself towards the varieties of our wealthy life, towards the vast phenomenal diversities of physical facts, towards the contrasts and tragedies of existence, towards that relative independence of moral individuals upon whose recognition all modern civilization depends, — then I fully admit the force of this objection. In fact, the explicit outcome of our examination of Realism, at the last time, merely so far opposed one abstraction by another, and we ended, for the moment, in a denial of dualism, with a hint added of a coming theory of the genuine unity of Being. Before we proceed, however, to a closer study of the first historical rival of Realism, namely, to the Mystical definition of the ontological predicate, something is still needed by way of a reminder of our precise present position.

 

I

The genuine essence of Realism consists, as we saw, in defining any being as real precisely in so far as in essence it is wholly independent of ideas that, while other than itself, refer to it. We insisted, at the last time, that this thesis implies an absolute dualism within the world of real being, since an idea also is an existent fact, and is as independently real as is the supposed independent object. No realist can consistently reduce the world to one independently real Being, however complex and wealthy in inner structure this One Being might be permitted to become. At least two mutually independent Beings, such that either of them, by its changing or by its vanishing, would imply no correspondent change in the other, remain in the realist’s world. Moreover, these two beings, once defined and real, would forbid us to speak afterwards of their having any real tie, or real fashion of cooperation, unless this so-called tie is really a new fact, independent of both the beings that are to be linked. Such a tie, however, is a tie only in name. If beings are, like the objects of our ordinary experience, already interdependent, they can indeed consistently assume new ties, as young people who are already members of the same social order or of the same human family can marry. But in the supposed, and distinctly not empirical realm, to which the consistent realist finds himself driven, the two independent beings of which his world, if reduced to its lowest terms, consists, have no ties, and can never get any. For a similar reason, they have no common characters, and can never get any. The inevitable result is that the very presupposition of the entire doctrine is contradicted by its outcome. For if idea and object have no ties and no common characters whatever, they simply cannot be related as idea and object. The consequence is that both the realistic definition, and the totally independent beings, prove to be contradictory, and vanish together, leaving us, as our result so far, the thesis that, if the Other which our finite thinking, in its disquietude, seeks to attain, is to be defined at all, it cannot be totally independent of the thought which defines it, or remain unchanged if that thought essentially alters or vanishes. The ultimate dualism of the realistic view is false and must be abandoned. This, so far, is all that we have definitely made out concerning the conditions of a consistent definition of real Being.

But hereupon we are brought face to face with that ancient rival of the realistic definition. And this is Mysticism. If the dualism is to be abandoned, must we instead define Being as an absolute and simple unity? Must we say, the phrase “to be real” means something that cannot be asserted of any object whatever, so long as this object is defined through ideas that refer to it, or so long as the ideas themselves, with their endless search for the Other, trouble our consciousness, emphasize differences, and by their very striving after something beyond, keep our knowledge from its true goal? Must we insist that only such an object as quenches thought through the presence of a single and absolutely immediate truth is an object whereof we can say: It is?

 

II

Just such a view is of the essence of philosophical, or of the truly significant historical Mysticism. By this term I now mean, as you know from our second lecture, not a vaguely applied name for superstition in general, or for beliefs in spirits, in special revelations, and in magic, but a perfectly recognizable speculative tendency, observable in very various ages and nations, and essentially characterized by the meaning that it gives to the ontological predicate.

For the mystic, according to the genuinely historical definition of what constitutes speculative Mysticism, to be real means to be in such wise Immediate that, in the presence of this immediacy, all thought and all ideas, absolutely satisfied, are quenched, so that the finite search ceases, and the Other is no longer another, but is absolutely found. The object which fulfils this definition, and which is therefore worthy to be called real, is of necessity in itself One and only One; since variety, when consciously faced, calls forth thought, and arouses demands for characterization and explanation. In countless ways, however, this One real object of the mystic’s quest may be approached, by those finite thinkers who, in their ignorance, still seek their Other, — in countless ways, whose only common character is that, the nearer you come to the goal, the less the varieties and oppositions of the world of ordinary thinking distract you, and the more you are in possession of something that is present, given, satisfying, peaceful. If a realist, viewing your progress from without, observes hereupon that you are simply ignoring the manifold realities of the finite world, you reply that those so-called realities, just because they are many, and because they pretend to be independent beings, are illusory, and that in forsaking such a world, you simply spare yourself errors. As, in the world of the supposed independent beings, nothing is real, you care nothing for that world. If the realist, hearing that you seek something called Unity, reminds you that realists also may undertake to be monistic in their view of reality, you reply that, for reasons now sufficiently set forth in our own discussion, what is One can never be independent of the insight that knows it, and that therefore the only place to look for unity is within, at the heart of experience, not without and beyond where the realist looks for Being. If a worldly critic, wondering at your pretensions, asks you how you dare to assert that just you, in your loneliness, can ever win an immediate relation to the final truth of all the universe, can ever find God within your poor self, you reply that just in so far as you have approached the goal most nearly, you, the supposed finite thinker, the private individual, have simply ceased to be known, even to yourself, so that not your private self, but the Absolute, alone, will remain when the goal is reached. For your very discovery of that which is, would involve the forgetting of your finite personality as an illusion, an error, an evil dream.

If now a Protagorean sceptic, asserting that Man is the measure of all things, hereupon observes that indeed Realism was false, and that nothing is, except what is felt, at the moment when it is felt; and if such a sceptic, also talking of the real as the present, now insists that, for this very reason, your own search for the Mystic One is idle, since what empirically is felt, — now here and now there, — is not one, but many, and since, as such a Protagorean sceptic will assert, whoever feels anything whatever, has merely his own little share or case of immediate Being present to himself, — then even this apparently dangerous foe of the mystical faith meets with an easy answer, if once you have won the genuinely mystical spirit. For you in reply ask this critic whence he gets the assurance of the being of his various men, of his diverse experiences, of his many human feelings and points of view. Has he himself experienced immediately, or felt at any one moment what the supposed other real men and women feel? Has he himself ever felt anything purely immediate that involved two or more separate points of view? Is his direct experience that of many men? If he replies that common sense knows the many men with many minds, the countless feelings and points of view, to be real facts; then he has forsaken his own form of scepticism, even by his very appeal to commonly accepted truth. He returns to his illusions; you let him alone. If he declares that the many points of view are independently real facts of being, he is a realist, and is now already refuted. If he merely says that he is a sceptic because he feels that his feeling, although present, is not absolute, and that it is to him just now as if there were other points of view than his own, you reply, as a Mystic, that in thus confessing his scepticism to be identical with his dissatisfaction regarding his own present state, he confesses also that he is not lost in the presence of a satisfying immediate fact. But a fact not satisfying, is not a pure fact. For, as you will here maintain, a fact not wholly immediate, — by reason of the very dissatisfaction mingled with it, — sends you elsewhere for a presentation that you do not possess, and thus declares itself not yet the real. In none of these ways, then, will you allow yourself to be distracted from your goal by the objectors.

And finally, if your critic asks, why then, since you believe in no variety of experiences or points of view as genuinely real, you still argue with your critics as if they were real, disagree with other points of view as if they existed, thoughtfully maintain your own case as if thoughts were valuable aids, and confess your own experiences as if you, too, the private finite self, were a fact in a genuine world, then for this objection also you are prepared. For you will now insist that while you know what true Being in general is, you have not yet won the presence of it, so that, like any other imperfect finite thinker, you are struggling with illusions. You yourself, as finite person, your critic as another, your ideas and glimpses as various seeming facts, — these are all alike illusions. You confess this. You lament it. You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself king of infinite space, were it not that you have just these bad dreams of ordinary error and finitude. Of the true seer, who should go home to the Immediate Presence, one could say, with Shelley: —

“Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep.

He hath awakened from the dream of life.

’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings.”

Only, as mystic, you will add that your strife is made as little unprofitable as possible if steadfastly you so war with the invulnerable nothings that their inner illusoriness is dwelt upon, their contradictions are exposed, and their voices are thus gradually made to cease, until at last the lonely stillness of the Absolute alone shall be left. It is true that had you reached this perfect peace, we should no longer hear from you. For the mystic abode of Being is the silent land. They come not back who wander thither. For they, as mere finite thinkers, as seekers, are not at all, when once they have awakened to the truth. How should they return? “Believe not those prattlers,” says one often-quoted mystical word, “who boast that they know God. Who knows him — is silent.”

 

III

For us, who are here concerned with the mystic’s predicate, and not yet with the subject to which it could be applied, the mystic’s mere admission that he has not yet reached his goal, need of course so far arouse no objections against this definition. One can define what it is to be without asserting that he has yet faced the object which fulfils the definition. No realist supposes himself to have an exhaustive knowledge of the independent reality, just as no mathematician hopes, in any finite time, to see his science completed. Being is once for all, to a finite thinker, at least in part, the Other that he seeks. The case of the mystic must not stand or fall with his personal perfection, or with his winning of the Other, but with the inner consistency of his definition, and its adequacy to express the constitution of our search for truth.

In a general statement, this definition is now once more before you. Viewed as to its logical relations with its rival, the position of Mysticism should prove, from this starting point, readily comprehensible. You may remember our former sketch of the finite situation that sends us all alike looking for true Being. Data of experience, present facts, are on our hands, — colors, sounds, pains, passions. These are so far relatively immediate; in psychology we call them masses of sensation or of feeling; they are in general not wholly satisfactory, usually perplexing, often very tragic. The mystic would insist that for this very reason they are not wholly immediate. In our more clearly conscious moments they constantly stimulate us to think and to act. On the other hand, we have our ideas. These too are, in one aspect, masses of relatively immediate data; for they are present; the psychologists would find their mere contents, in general, to be of an obviously sensory type; they come and go in their own way. But then, the ideas too are explicitly and obviously facts that are not merely immediate. They are contents of thought as well as masses of feeling; and the peculiar way in which they are more than immediate is what makes them worthy to be called ideas. And as contents of thought, as ideas, they already present to us, however incompletely, that relative fulfilment of purpose, that partial embodiment of meaning, which sets them in contrast to those brute facts of the lower forms of immediacy, those meaningless accidents of sensation, which, in our case, always accompany them. The ideas thus constitute the relatively significant aspect, the uncomprehended brute facts present the relatively meaningless aspect, of our ordinary and momentary conscious life. In two ways, however, is the resulting form of finite consciousness unsatisfactory: first, in so far as its finite meanings, even where as nearly present as we ever get them, are viewed by ourselves as incompletely present; and, secondly, in so far as the seemingly accidental sensations of the instant are relatively opposed to even so much of our meaning as is now in sight, so that our sensations tend, as we say, to confuse or to puzzle us. This doubly unsatisfactory form of our finite consciousness is an universal character with us men as we are. Never do all the current sensory experiences completely fuse with our ideas, so as simply to aid in developing the meaning of our inner life. Never do our passing meanings get at any instant presented to us, in their own adequate wholeness, even as so-called “mere” ideas. We mean more than we find. We find also data foreign to those that we mean.

The advantage of this way of stating the universal form of our finite human consciousness lies in the fact that this, our fashion of statement, here presupposes no abstract sundering of the Intellect from the Will, but that it shows the actual unity of theoretical and practical processes, and is as valid for the consciousness of a wanderer struggling to reach a mountain top, or to find his way home, as it is for the conscious life of a mathematician seeking to solve an equation, of a chemist waiting for the results of the experiment which he all the while controls, of a soldier in battle, of a lover composing his woeful sonnet, of a statesman planning his nation’s destiny, of an anchorite in the desert waiting patiently for God. The endless varieties of the finite situation depend partly upon the immediate contents presented; partly upon the particular contrast between current data and current ideas; partly upon the degree to which fulfilment, never here consciously attained, is approximated at any instant; and finally, upon the direction in which the special search is tending. Browning’s lover, in the Last Ride Together, when he has his universal vision of finitude, sees, in essence, precisely the situation that we have been defining, precisely this aspect of all our present form of conscious life when he says: —

“Fail I alone, in words and deeds?

Why, all men strive, and who succeeds?

We rode; it seemed my spirit flew,

Saw other regions, cities new,

As the world rushed by on either side.

I thought, All labor, yet no less

Bear up beneath their unsuccess.

Look at the end of work, contrast

The petty done, the undone vast,

This present of theirs with the hopeful past;

I hoped she would love me; here we ride.

“What hand and brain went ever paired?

What heart alike conceived and dared?

What act proved all its thought had been?

What will but felt the fleshly screen?

We ride, and I see her bosom heave.

There’s many a crown for who can reach,

Ten lines, a statesman’s life in each!

The flag stuck on a heap of bones,

A soldier’s doing! What atones?

They scratch his name on the Abbey-stones.

My riding is better by their leave.”

As statesman, soldier, poet, sculptor, musician thus in succession pass before the lover’s contemplation, he sees the common problem of their labors, whether their task be heroic or studious; and he sees this problem as identical with his own. It is the absolutely universal problem of being consciously finite. And the lover states the case with an almost technical exactness, when he asks: “What act proved all its thought had been?” “What will but felt the fleshly screen?”

Thoughts, ideas, inner contents as far as they come with a presented meaning, are, as you know from modern psychology, already nascent deeds. To conceive clearly, is to construct an object that is already, at the instant of its construction, more or less fully present to your inner observation as an embodiment of your meaning. But this embodiment is so far partial. Hence what we call outer acts, deeds that involve what the outer eyes can see, and what, as you accomplish such deeds, warms your muscles with the immediate glow of partially successful effort, — such outer deeds are, for your consciousness, at the instant, only more vivid thoughts, more brilliantly clear ideal expressions of your longing, so that in them, as they arise, you find what you also comprehend, as well as win what you seek. Herein lies the true unity of our thinking and our willing. That all our thoughts are not at once thus presented to our consciousness with the vividness of our external deeds, this defect is due in part to the triviality of our present materials for action, which often decline to furnish to us any data whatever that are at once vivid with the clearness of our sense perceptions, and adequate to our inner aim. But the same frequent divorce of inner aim and observable outward expression is also in part due to the confusedness of our inward purposes themselves, or to the fragmentariness with which we hold to these purposes, — in brief, to our powerlessness to retain before us the inner vision itself. And consequently we are accustomed to regard thought which conceives, and will which executes, as two sundered functions of our conscious life; because sometimes we have relatively clear masses of ideas, to which we still cannot give the vivid clothing of outer sense, and sometimes the defect seems to be that while outer sense is plastic, ideas are halting, and we know not what to undertake. Yet all such diversity is so far only one of the aspects. All our thinking is itself a process of willing; all our conscious deeds are merely immediately visible and tangible ideas. And the truer contrast between the idea and its Other is the one upon which Browning’s lover has fixed his attention. This contrast is between the inadequacy of all the expressions, whether inner or outer, which we just now find ourselves able to give to our finite purposes, — between this inadequacy of expression, and just these purposes themselves. The act never proves, for us, all that its thought had been. And by the “fleshly screen” that hinders the will, our lover in the poem means the same that we here more technically mean by whatever proves to be uncontrollable about the immediacy of our present conscious life.  

IV

This universal, this actually commonplace character of our human form of consciousness, first appears, if you will, as just an arbitrary fact of life. But it gives rise, we have said, to the whole problem of Being, as we men face that problem, and to the various definitions of the ontological predicate. What for us is real, is viewed as an Other that, if in its wholeness completely present, would consciously end at least so much of the finite search as could by any possibility be ended. It is true that, in ordinary life, we learn to make a very sharp distinction between the wished for and the real. And this distinction is, indeed, in the world of common sense, a very unconquerable one. It is also true, that realism, in its abstract sundering of facts from desire, would seem often to have abandoned entirely any effort to win for our consciousness any final satisfaction in the presence of reality. But it is also true that such separation of what is real from what is desirable, is a secondary result, in the consciousness of every one of us. Primarily, in seeking Being, we seek what is to end our disquietude. But secondarily we do, indeed, usually learn by experience that, since not all finite desires can be satisfied, more is won, for our finite striving, by making the desire to know what we ordinarily call facts a primal motive in the more rational life of common sense; while our desire merely to gratify this or that momentary impulse becomes a secondary matter, which we learn to oppose to the general desire to know. In time we thus come to hold, in the world of finite common sense, that much is real and inevitable, that thwarts our desires. Yet it still remains true that what we usually call reason, namely, the search for the truth as such, gets placed at the head, in our wiser daily life, and gets even opposed to the search for ordinary satisfaction, just because there is, in the long run, more true satisfaction in being rational, i.e., in our recognition of the facts of common sense, than there is in striving irrationally. And the real, although common sense thus often opposes it to the merely desirable, remains to the end that which, if present, would, as we say, satisfy reason, and thereby give us the greatest fulfilment possible to our type of consciousness.

We need not wonder, then, to find a view like Mysticism breaking altogether with ordinary thought, passing as it were to the limit, cutting the knot of the ultimate problems, casting down the usual distinctions, and insisting that the primal purpose of all our finite striving can be accomplished in presence of a form of Being which is at once the Real and the Good; the final Fact and the absolute Perfection. For the mystic, the common sense antitheses on the one hand, between the immediate and the ideal, and on the other hand, between the real and the desirable, are deliberately and consciously rejected, as something to be overcome. One overcomes them not, indeed, through an indulging of our fickle, momentary impulses, but through a transformation of these impulses. One wins the truth not through a cultivation of what we ordinarily call Reason, but through a quenching of Reason in the very presence of the absolute goal of all finite thought. And, finally, peace is attained not through a lapse into the ordinary, but always imperfect immediacy of the brute data of sense, but through a finding of a final and ideally perfect Immediate Fact.

Historically, as I have said, Mysticism first appears in India. Its early history is recorded in the Upanishads. But this early history contains already essentially the whole story of the Mystic faith. These half philosophical, half dogmatic treatises, compounded in a singular fashion of folk-lore, of legend, of edifying homily, and of reflective speculation, have for a number of years been best known to English readers through Professor Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East. They have lately been made more accessible than before, to the philosophical student, by the translations and comments of Professor Deussen, of Kiel, himself a learned representative of a modern philosophical Mysticism of the Schopenhauerian type. I venture upon no independent opinion as to the composition and chronology of these early Hindoo works. I take as simply as possible what upon their face they seem to contain. I read as well as I can Deussen’s systematic interpretation of their general sense; and then, as I try to restate this sense in my own way, I find, amidst all the numerous doctrinal varieties of these various Hindoo Scriptures, this main thought concerning the ultimate definition of Being.

 

V

What is, is at all events somehow One. This thought came early to the Hindoo religious mind. For the sake of its illustration and defence, the thinkers of the Upanishads seize, at first, upon every legend, upon every popular interpretation of nature, which may serve to make the sense of this unity living in the reader’s or hearer’s mind. For the writers of the greater Upanishads, this unity of Being is not so much a matter of argument as it is an object of intuition. You first look out upon the whole circle of the heavens, and upon the multitudes of living forms, and you say of the whole: It is One, because at first you merely feel this to be true. Especially is the life of the body, or the life of any animate creature, felt to be one. But the Hindoo is animistic. His world is all alive. Hence he easily feels all this life to be one.

But, as we saw at the last time, a metaphysical realist also can attempt, however inconsistently, to call all Being One. In this case there would result such a doctrine as that of the Eleatic school. But to what obvious objection any Eleatic doctrine is open, we also saw. For if the Real is the Independent Being, existent wholly apart from your ideas about it, there is no way of escape from the assertion that our false opinions are themselves real in the same sense in which the One is real. The realist is essentially a dualist. The Hindoo was early aware of this danger threatening every monistic interpretation of the Real. He undertook to escape the danger by a device which in the Upanishads appears so constantly, and with such directness of expression, as to constitute a sort of axiom, to which the thinker constantly appeals. The Hindoo seer of the period of the Upanishads is keenly and reflectively self-conscious. His own thinking process is constantly before him. He cannot view any reality as merely independent of the idea that knows it, because he has a strong sense that he himself is feeling, beholding, thinking, this reality, which he therefore views as an object meant by himself, and so as having no meaning apart from his point of view. The axiom which our European idealists often state in the form: No object without a subject, is therefore always, in one shape or another, upon the Hindoo’s lips. He states it less technically, but he holds it all the more intuitively. The world is One — why? Because I feel it as one. What then is its oneness? My own oneness? And who am I? I am Brahman; I myself, in my inmost heart, in my Soul, am the world-principle, the All. In this form the Hindoo’s Monism becomes at once a subjective Idealism; and this subjective Idealism often appears almost in the epistemological form in which that doctrine has so often been discussed, of late, amongst ourselves. But the further process of the Hindoo’s monistic philosophy leads beyond this mere beginning, and results in an elaborate series of reflections upon the mystery of the Self. The final product of these reflections transforms the merely epistemological Idealism, which, if abstractly stated, has with us often led to a rather trivial scepticism, into something very different from mere scepticism, namely into a doctrine not merely epistemological, but metaphysical. Let us follow a few steps of the process.^[1]

“1. Verily the universe is Brahm. Let him whose soul is at peace, worship it, as that which he would fain know.

“Of knowledge, verily, is man constituted. As is his knowledge in this world, so, when he hath gone hence, doth he become. After knowledge then let him strive.

“2. Whose substance is spirit, whose body is life, whose form is light, whose purpose is truth, whose essence is infinity, — the all-working, all-wishing, all-smelling, all-tasting one, that embraceth the universe, that is silent, untroubled, —

“3. That is my spirit within my heart, smaller than a grain of rice or a barley-corn, or a grain of mustard-seed; smaller than a grain of millet, or even than a husked grain of millet.

“This my spirit within my heart is greater than the earth, greater than the sky, greater than the heavens, greater than all the worlds.

“4. The all-working, all-wishing, all-smelling, all-tasting one, that embraceth the universe, that is silent, untroubled, — that is my spirit within my heart; that is Brahm. Thereunto, when I go hence, shall I attain. Who knoweth this, he in sooth hath no more doubts.

“Thus spake Shandilya — spake Shandilya.”

In such passages, which are very frequent in the Upanishads, an immediate sense of the unity of all things runs parallel with an equally strong sense that this unity is wholly in myself who know the truth, — in my heart, just because what for me is, is precisely what I know.

The famous and often quoted instruction given to the young disciple, called Shvetaketu, by his father Uddalaka, deserves closer analysis in this connection. This instruction begins with a statement of the general monistic view of Being, uses arguments at first partly identical with those of the Eleatic school, illustrates unity by various observations of nature; but then, in the very midst of what at first seems a merely realistic doctrine, suddenly, and with a dramatic swiftness of transformation, identifies the world principle with the inmost soul of the disciple himself, and with him, in so far as he is the knower of the Unity.

The beginning of the argument, I repeat, appears, from one side, realistic. The world, says Uddalaka, is, and is one. The disciple is to note this fact and to bring it home to himself by frequent empirical illustrations taken from outer nature. Then he is to observe that he, too, in so far as he is at all real, is for this very reason one with the world principle. The teaching seems at this state still a realism, only now a realism that has become reflective, recognizing the observer of the reality as also a real being, and therefore asserting of him, as knower, whatever one also asserts of the Being that he knows. But suddenly, even as one speaks, one becomes aware that, through this very identification of the essence of the knower and of the object known, the inmost reality of the world has itself become transformed. It is no longer a world independent of knowledge. One never really has observed it as an external world at all. It has no independent Being. It is a world identical with the knower. It is a vision of his soul. Its life is his life. It is in so far as he creates it. Whatever he is as knower, that is his world.^[2] “Being only, O gentle youth,” says Uddalaka to his son, “was this [universe] in the beginning, one only, without a second.

“Now some indeed say, ‘Non-being only was this [universe] in the beginning, one only, without a second. From this non-being, Being was born.’

“But how, O gentle youth, might it be so? — thus spake [his father]. How from non-being might Being be born?

“Rather, Being only, O gentle youth, was this [universe] in the beginning, one only, without a second.”

And this One Being, so Uddalaka hereupon continues, somehow mysteriously resolved to become many. And immediately there follows in the text at some length, a cosmology, in which the various principles appear in an order obviously determined by tradition. This tradition, however, at first seems upon its face thoroughly realistic. But erelong this mere cosmology gives place to deeper inquiries. It is one thing to teach the tradition about how, in Nature, the Many came from the One. It is another thing to ask how the Many, now that they appear, are related to the One. As Uddalaka dwells upon this mysterious relation, he soon is led to explain that the Many are essentially illusory, and that not the false consciousness which seems to display to us their diversity, but rather even the unconsciousness of deep sleep itself must express the true relation of the false finite to the true absolute.

“As, O gentle youth, the honey-makers, when they make honey, gather the juices of manifold trees, and bring the [resulting] juice to unity [one-ness, eka-tām], — “As those [juices] therein [in that unity] retain no distinction [so that one could say], ‘I am the juice of such-and-such a tree’ [and another], ‘I am the juice of such-and-such a tree,’ —

“Just so, O gentle youth, have all these creatures, when [in sleep] they merge in the [one] Being, no consciousness that they are merged in the [one] Being;

“They, whatsoever in the world they be, be it tiger or lion or wolf or boar or worm or moth or gadfly or midge, — that [on emerging] become they once more.”

So far you see, the result is still like the Eleatic doctrine. In vain does any mere cosmology endeavor to explain how the Many came out of the One. As a fact, Uddalaka, in his cosmological speculations, has by this time exhausted the motives of the traditional lore. Through the experiences of a long fast, the disciple has been taught to observe how the psychical principle can be made to fade away, like a dying coal, until only a spark remains, and how, when food is again taken, the psychical principle flames once more like the spark that finds fuel. What is thus hinted is that the psychical principle is the one central coal of the world-fire. In a similar spirit the sequence of the physiological process has been discussed; the relations of body and soul to the universal world life have been illustrated, the meaning of growth and decay in nature has been brought into relation to the doctrine of the absolute One; but still the theory has not made clear in what sense the One can have decreed to itself: “I will be Many.”

What way remains? Does it not become plain that the many must be indeed altogether illusory? And that is why one has now turned to the figure of the honey and the plant juices, and to the reflection that in sleep all the fierce hostilities of the jungle lapse, and the countless living beings are as one, even while their life-principle survives in all its central might. It is the process of the many that is then the falsity. The One really never resolved to be many at all. How could it thus resolve? In truth, the illusory universe sleeps in one central soul.

An Eleatic doctrine would at this point remain fast bound, dimly suggesting perhaps, as Parmenides did, that Being and Thought are somehow one, but not making anything definite of the suggestion, and meaning it, as no doubt Parmenides also did, in the purely realistic sense, as an assertion that thought knows Being, even while Being is independent of thought. But the Hindoo goes further. He, at just this stage, turns from the world directly to the disciple himself. This mystery, he says, this oneness of all Being, in this you too at all events share. In whatever sense the world is real, you are real. Is the world but One Being, then you, so far as you are real, are identical with that One.

Still the assertion, if understood in a realistic sense, appears only to make the self of the disciple one of the many juices that are really lost in the honey, one of the countless living creatures that roam the jungle in illusory mutual hatred, and that enter again into the truth only when they sleep. And still the mystery of the nature of the One Being has not been lighted up. But Uddalaka means his teaching to be taken, from this point on, in quite another sense. The variety is illusory. But whose illusion is it? The One Being exists. But how? As known Being, and also as One with the Knower. The very reflection that knowledge is real, — that reflection which Realism finds it so hard and so fatal to make, is now to furnish the solving word. The reality cannot be independent. Its life is the Knower’s life and his alone. Its multiplicity is his illusion, and his only. The disciple has been taught by nature symbols. They were, in a way, to mediate the higher insight. But still their interpretation was itself intuitive and in so far unmediated, just because only unmediated intuition was from the outset really present. There was and is only the Knower. The disciple was the Knower. It was he who blindly resolved, “Let me become many.” He shall now, in a final intuition, grasp the immediate fact that he is, and eternally was, but One. The parable of the honey and the juices is at once to be interpreted in this form. Another parable may assist: —

“These rivers, O gentle youth, flow eastward towards the sunrise, and westward towards the sunset. From ocean to ocean they flow, and become (again) mere ocean.

“And as they there know not that they are this or that river, so verily, O gentle youth, all these creatures know not when they issue from the One Being, that they issue from the One.

“What that hidden thing is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.” And now the nature allegories recur. But henceforth they have quite a new sense: —

“‘Bring me a fruit from that Nyagrodha tree.’ ‘Here it is, venerable Sir.’ ‘Cut it open.’ ‘It is cut open, venerable Sir.’ ‘What seest thou in it?’ ‘Very small seeds, venerable Sir.’ ‘Cut open one of them.’ ‘It is cut open, venerable Sir.’ ‘What seest thou in it?’ ‘Nothing, venerable Sir.’

“Then spake he: ‘That hidden thing, which thou seest not, O gentle youth, from that hidden thing verily has this mighty Nyagrodha tree grown.’

“Believe, O gentle youth, what that hidden thing is, of whose essence is all the world, — that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.

“About a dying man sit his relatives, and ask: ‘Dost thou know me? Dost thou know me?’ So long as his speech does not merge in his mind, his mind in his life, his life in that central glimmer, and this in the highest divinity, so long he knows them.

“But when this has taken place, then he knows them no more.

“What this fine thing is, of whose essence is all the world, that is the Reality, that is the Soul, that art thou, O Shvetaketu.”

 

VI

Our own difficulties in comprehending such passages as this teaching of Shvetaketu come from a failure to see easily at what point and why the allegorical and essentially exoteric cosmology passes over into that subjective idealism upon which the whole doctrine finally depends. Clearer becomes the nature of this doctrine when we compare such a scripture as the teaching of Shvetaketu with those passages, elsewhere in the Upanishads, in which the teacher starts with an explicit idealism. In such passages the topic of inquiry is directly the problem: What is the Self? It is here assumed that the Self is the universe. But even here the Self appears in a twofold way. It is first one’s life principle, typified by the breath, by the desire, or by the mere physical sense of being, which any one feels within him at any moment. As thus typified the Self or Atman seems finite, changes, grows old, longs, is disappointed, dies, transmigrates, is subject to fate. On the other hand, the Self is the Knower. As such it is the topic of an ingenious reflective process, which these Hindoo thinkers pursue through an endless dialectic, recorded in legendary dialogues and discourses of seers with learners. The purpose of the dialectic is always to make naught of every dualistic account, either of the relation between the Self and the universe, or of the inner structure and meaning of the Self. All the finite process of thinking and of desiring is now to be treated as a process of seeking the Self. Could the true Self be found, it would be found as the fulfilment of desire, as the perfection, as the finality, and as nothing but this. The contrast between the real and the desirable is itself a dualism. It must be cast off, together with the false realism that regards any truth as independently real. The finite world is simply the process of striving after self-knowledge. And in this process the seeker pursues only himself. But if he found himself, if all desires were fulfilled, if knowledge were complete — what would remain? Or rather, since this use of if and of would is itself a mere expression of finite illusion, since in very truth there is only the Self, since the finite process of striving after the Self is wholly illusory, and the Self in its perfection is alone real, what now remains as the Absolute? Well, in the first place the true Self does not strive. It has no idea of any other. It has no positive will. Object and Subject are in it no longer even different. It has no character. There is the murderer no longer murderer, nor the slave a slave, nor the traitor a traitor. Differences are illusory. The Self merely is. But now is in what sense? Not as the independent Other, not as the object of a thought, not as describable in terms of an idea, not as expressible in any way, and still less as mere nothing. For it is the All, the only Being. There remains to hint what the being of the Self is only what we now call the immediacy of present experience. Only henceforth we must regard the absolute immediacy not as the raw material of meaning, but as the restful goal of all meaning, — as beyond ideas, even because it is simpler than they are. It is at once nothing independent of knowledge and nothing that admits of diversity within knowledge. The Self is precisely the very Knower, not as a thing that first is real and then knows, but as the very act of seeing, hearing, thinking, in so far as the mediating presence of some Other, of some object that is known, seen, heard, thought, is simply removed, and in so far as the very diversity of the acts of knowing, seeing, hearing, thinking, is also removed.

Most obvious about the Self, from our finite point of view, is its perfection as a fulfilment of our striving. For us to win oneness with the Self means to attain a state of perfect finality, simplicity, peace. Upon this fulfilment of desire the Upanishads constantly insist. We therefore have to express the nature of the Self in terms of feeling, of states of mind. And the Hindoo expressly declines to go outside of the knowing Subject for the definition of the Reality. That art thou, is the whole story. But within the mind what comes nearest to simplicity and peace? Plainly, the most satisfying and ineffable experience, just in so far as it involves no diversity, and sends us in no wise abroad either for other experience, or for any ideal characterization of the what of this experience itself. The Self then is some final and wholly immediate fact within the very circle of what we now call consciousness, but apart from the restlessness from which consciousness suffers.

 

VII

But now comes indeed the hardest problem of Mysticism. Absolute Immediacy, perfect peace, fulfilment of meaning by a simple and final presence, — when do we finite beings come nearest to that? On the borderlands of unconsciousness, when we are closest to dreamless slumber. The Absolute, then, although the Knower, must be in truth Unconscious. Into Being all the fierce creatures, all the swarms of the jungle, enter, as we have seen, when they sleep. The dreamless sleeper is, for the Upanishads, the frequent type of the soul gone home to peace. It is so too with the dead, so far as they are really dead, although not so far as they return from death, to the bad dream of finite life, through the wretched fate of transmigration. But if this is so, wherein does the Absolute Being differ from pure Nothing?

The seers of the Upanishads are fully alive to this problem. It is a mistake to imagine that they ignore it. More than once they discuss it with the keenest dialectic. In one legend Indra, the god, learns from Prajapati, the highest god, the lore about the true Self, in the form of a series of parables. He first learns that the Self is not the material self, the mere “Me” (as some of our modern psychologists would call it), but that the Self is rather the Knower. A man dreaming is therefore a better type of the true Self, since the dream is the dreamer’s own creation. But even the subjective idealism of the dreamer’s world is an insufficient illustration of the truth, since to the dreamer it still is as if facts beyond himself were real. But the true Self does not dream. He knows the truth. And that truth is only himself. Of what beyond him should he therefore dream? That is what Aristotle himself says of God. But for the Hindoo this means that the dreamless sleeper must be a still better type of the Self. But, as Indra hereupon objects to this teacher: Has not the dreamless sleeper gone to mere nothingness? Is he real at all?

In a similar fashion, in another legend, the sage Yâjnavalkya teaches his wife Maitreyî, first that nothing in the universe is real or is desirable except the Absolute Self. But then the Self, he goes on to say, is in its immortality unconscious. For all consciousness involves partially dissatisfied ideas of a Beyond, and includes desires that seek another than what is now wholly present. But in the true Self all is attained, and therefore all is One; there is no Beyond, there is no Other. There are then, in the true Self, no ideas, no desires, just because he is the final attainment of all that ideas and desires seek.

Yet Maitreyî objects. “The doctrine confuses me,” she says. How, in fact, should the immortal One be unconscious? Yâjnavalkya, in reply, can only give, as reductio ad absurdum of every objection, the argument that all dualism, involving the reality of objects outside the Knower, is illusory, while all consciousness implies just such dualism.

Absolute Immediacy is to be something better, you see, than the only partially immediate sensations which, in our present finite state, merely serve to set us thinking. It is also to be above ideas, — as the peace that passeth understanding. But all our relative immediacy actually does set us thinking. All our relative satisfactions take the form of finite ideas. The Absolute must then be ineffable, indescribable, and yet not outside of the circle within which we at present are conscious. It is no other than we are; consciousness contains it just in so far as consciousness is a knowing. Yet, when we speak of the Absolute, all our words must be: “Neti, Neti,” “It is not thus; it is not thus.” So the sage Yâjnavalkya himself, more than once in these legends, teaches: To us, it is as if the Absolute, in its immediacy, were identical with Nothing. But once more: — Is the Absolute verily a mere nothing?

The Hindoo’s answer to this last question is in one sense precise enough. The Absolute is the very Opposite of a mere Nothing. For it is fulfilment, attainment, peace, the goal of life, the object of desire, the end of knowledge. Why then does it stubbornly appear as indistinguishable from mere nothing? The answer is: That is a part of our very illusion itself. The light above the light is, to our deluded vision, darkness. It is our finite realm that is the falsity, the mere nothing. The Absolute is All Truth.

One sees, at last then, this mystic Absolute gets, for the Hindoo, its very perfection from a Contrast-Effect. Here is the really solving word as to the whole matter. It is by contrast with our finite seeking that the goal which quenches desires and ideas at once appears as all truth and all life. But to attribute to the goal a concrete life and a definite ideal content would be, for this view, to ruin this very contrast. For concreteness means variety and finitude, and consequently ignorance and imperfection. The Absolute home appears empty, just because, wherever definite content is to be found, the Hindoo feels not at home, but finite, striving, and deluded into a search for something beyond.

Yet just this very contrast-effect, whereby what is defined as having no definite characters, is even thereby conceived as the most perfect, — we all know this same feature well in our own religious literature. The mediæval poem of Bernard of Cluny concerning the Golden Jerusalem, — the poem called De Contemptu Mundi, — what is it, apart from its sensuous, and so far consciously false imagery, but a crowding of antitheses and of negations, to the end that by merely denying our illusions, and forsaking our world, we may contemplate an ineffable glory whose true names are all only negative. Addressing the Eternal, the poet says: —

“Tu sine littore.

Tu sine tempore.”

Shoreless and timeless is the depth of true Being. Contrasting the present life with the perfect life, one has the wholly negative antithesis:

“Hic breve vivitur

Hic breve plangitur

Hic breve fletur;

Non breve vivere

Non breve plangere

Retribuetur.”

To be sure, Bernard’s hymn is a very treasure-house of brilliant sensuous characterizations of the joys of the home of peace; but just these characterizations, as we but now observed, are metaphorical, and are as such intended to be false. They hint at some final immediacy; and this justifies their use of sensuous language. They mean the ineffable, but their intended truth lies, above all, in the antitheses and in the negations that they merely illustrate: —

“Nescio, nescio

Quae jubilatio

Lux tibi qualis.”

The Nescio, nescio of Bernard, is identical in meaning with the Neti, Neti; it is not so; it is not so, of the sage Yâjnavalkya. In the very contrast of the finite with the ineffable this mysticism lives, whether it be Hindoo or Christian Mysticism: —

“Urbs Sion unica

Mansio mystica

Condita Caelo, —

Nunc tibi gaudeo

Nunc mihi lugeo

Tristor, anhelo.”

And in view of this fact, that these infinite contrasts are the only expressible aspect of the whole situation, the Hindoo metaphor of the dreamless sleeper is, indeed, as apt to suggest the perfect glory of the home of peace, as are many of the metaphors of Bernard; as are, for instance, the joys and delights, the sweet sounds and the gay colors, with which his vision falsely fills the depths, where, truly, as the poet himself believes, eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard.

But if you ask why the Hindoo philosophical mystics feel so sure that, despite this wholly negative expression of the nature of their Absolute, they are still teaching a truth that is not only indubitable, but positively significant and even portentous, then the answer for them always lies in the reductio ad absurdum of opposing efforts either to win final truth or to satisfy the practical needs of life. For our conscious finitude, they insist, means at once dissatisfaction, and the admission that the truth is not present to us. Common-sense Realism, observing this very fact, makes the truth an independent Being, that is beyond our striving, in the sense of being wholly apart from every knowledge which refers to it. But, in reply, the Hindoo in his own way observes, and insists upon, that essentially contradictory character of all ordinary Realism, — that very character which we at the last time set forth, in our own way, in detail. What the Hindoo finds, then, positively sure, is that Nothing can be real that is independent of the Knower. Here is indeed the centre, the moving principle, of this entire dialectical process which the sages of the Upanishads remorselessly pursue. The only alternative to their own view of Being that is known to them is simply Realism. But simple Realism they see to be self-contradictory, and so absurd. The truth cannot then be independent of the Knower. But if not independent of the Knower, and yet if not given to him by his finite experience and thought, what can the truth be except what one approaches, within one’s own very heart, when one gradually casts off finitude, and wins unity and peace.

The process of accomplishing this end proves to consist of a series of stages whose terms lose finite definition and expressible qualities the farther you proceed in the series. The limit of this series of stages of purification and of simplification of life appears to the restless finite creature as zero. But, as the Hindoo now with assurance insists, this zero must be also the Absolute, the One sole Being, and must be so precisely because, even as the limit of the series, it is also the goal of the process, the wished for home of the soul, the expected object of perfect knowledge, — in brief, the Attainment. Now this contrast-effect, and this alone, gives the zero, that is the limit of the finite process, its value, its truth, its absoluteness. And if you waver at the gate of this heaven, half minded to turn back to error and to transmigration, wondering whether there be any true glory within, the Hindoo, reminding you of the hopelessness of every realistic definition of truth, and of the failure of every finite effort to express the reality, can now only ask you: For what else but this Absolute within the gate, within the knowing heart, smaller than the mustard seed, yet vaster than the heavens, — for what else can you seek? He simply defies you to find other definition of Being than this. And herewith you have his whole case presented.

 

VIII

I have dwelt so long upon the Upanishads, because, as I have said, they contain already the entire story of the mystic faith, so far as it had a philosophical basis. The rest of its story is not any part of philosophy. Endlessly repeated in history, perhaps often independently rediscovered elsewhere, the dialectic of Mysticism has nowhere any essentially different tale to tell, nor any other outcome to record. How in Europe Plotinus combined the mystical theory of the One with realistic, and in some respects with still deeper and often more constructively idealistic, conceptions of the constitution of the world from the Nous downward; how the Christian faith took to its heart the stranger doctrine whose original home was in India, until the faith of the Middle Ages became half a Mysticism; how the heretics used the mysterious light of the same teaching to guide them into forbidden paths; how the devotional books and the poets have taught to the laity many of the formulas that one first finds in the Upanishads — all this I have already very vaguely sketched in a former lecture. But to narrate the tale of the mere historical fortunes of Mysticism would require volumes, but would introduce no novelties except those involved in the profoundly interesting personal temperaments of individual mystics.

Our concern lies here in observing that the philosophical Mystic, whatever his personal type, and whatever his nation or tongue, always uses the same general metaphysical and dialectical devices. His theoretical weapon is some reductio ad absurdum of Realism. His polemic is against the sharp outlines of the world of Independent Beings, against the fallacies of all finite ideas, and against the possibility of worldly satisfaction. With the author of the Imitation of Christ, he reminds you that if you could see all created things together, it would be but a vain show, and hence he bids you forsake every creature. With Spinoza, he tells you that only in the Eternal is there joy alone, and that all else, being but imagination, perishes. With Eckhart he explains that the very creed of the Church, as ordinarily understood, is but allegory, and that even the Trinity is only, as it were, a superficial emanation from the Godhead, while the true Godhead, the Deitas, never “looked upon deed,” never dreamed of diversity, but is a “simple stillness” that you can find within your heart whenever you have won the ultimate virtue, and have forsaken all things for the wilderness of Being.

In general, the mystic knows only Internal Meanings, precisely as the realist considers only External Meanings. But the mystic, nevertheless, condemns all finite ideas, just because they have no absolute internal meaning. He bids you look within; but he desires first wholly to transform your inner nature. He compares your heart to the Bethlehem, where God may at any instant be born. Nor in all this is the mystic, if he be a thinker, devoid of reasons. His thought is eager to dwell: —

“On doubts that drive the coward back,

And keen through wordy snares to track

Suggestion to her inmost cell.”

His doubts are exposures of the fallacies of all ordinary opinion. He thinks, to the very end that he may destroy the vanity of mere thinking. An Eckhart is amongst the most learned of trained scholastic disputants. A Spinoza is the most merciless foe of the illusions of common sense. With ideas the mystic wars against all mere ideas. With the abstract weapons of Realism he refutes Realism. At last he believes himself to have won the right, by virtue of the very breadth of his vision of finitude, to condemn, like Browning’s lover in the Last Ride Together, the whole of finitude.

Nor, after all, is the mystic’s result so unlike, in its logic, the result reached by Browning’s lover himself. I have said, more than once, that the essence of Mysticism lies not in the definition of the subject to which you attribute Being, but in the predicate Being itself. This predicate in case of Mysticism is such that, as soon as you apply it, the subject indeed loses all finite outlines, lapses into pure immediacy, quenches thought, becomes ineffable, satisfies even by turning into what ordinary Realism would call a mere naught. Now you may call this subject by any name you please: The Self of our Hindoo, or the Holy Grail, or Spinoza’s Eternal, or Eckhart’s Stille Wüste, or the One of Plotinus, or the “Æonian music” of Tennyson’s famous vision in the In Memoriam, or the unspeakable happiness which Browning’s lover has vainly mourned. In any case, both your process and your result, if you are a Mystic, will be the same. First you look for the object in a realistic world. It is so far an Independent Being. In theory you define it. In life you try to win it. Then you become reflective. You observe that such a Being, just in so far as it is independent, is unknowable, inaccessible, indefinable, in fact, self-contradictory. You observe then that your Realistic definition was false. Moreover, you also see that the whole meaning of the search lies within yourself; that your theory of Being never had any but a practical sense; that the whole question is one of the search for a certain limiting state of your finite variable, for a state called Attainment. And hereupon you are prepared to come on that which is and to catch “the deep pulsations of the world.” Your ideas, keenly observing all the paradoxes and failures of finitude, finally, through their dialectic, destroy one another and themselves as well. And the goal of the process is at least momentarily reached when you come to the conclusion of Browning’s lover. For he, after his vision of the vanity of all finite striving, abandons at last the hope for the so-called lady, the Independent Being who rides so proudly beside him in the illusory world of ordinary life, — abandons that hope, only to take refuge in the ineffable immediacy of an experience that he takes for the instant to be the ultimate reality.

“And yet, she has not spoke so long!

What if heaven be that, fair and strong

At life’s best, with our eyes upturned

Whither life’s flower is first discerned,

We fixed so, ever should so abide?

What if we still ride on, we two,

With life forever old yet new,

Changed not in kind but in degree,

The instant made eternity,

And heaven just prove that I and she

Ride, ride together, forever ride.”

The language is here not that of the mediaeval or of the Hindoo mystics. But the ontology is in essence one with theirs.

In fine, mysticism is, as a conception of Being, the logically precise and symmetrical correspondent of realism. In its innermost conceptual constitution it is the mirror picture, so to speak, of its opponent. Each doctrine seeks an Absolute finality, — a limit which is conceived solely by virtue of its contrast with the process whereby our ideas tend towards that limit. Realism seeks this limiting object, this true Being, as somewhat Independent of Ideas. Mysticism, declaring that independent Being is self-contradictory and so impossible, seeks Being within the very life of the knowing process. Each doctrine is a conscious abstraction. Neither can tell what it means by its goal. Each is sure that its goal is. Practically, the two doctrines are related as are positive and negative quantities in mathematics. “Submit to the facts,” says Realism. “They are without. You can do nothing to make them different by merely knowing them.” “Know,” says Mysticism. “The truth is nigh thee, even in thy heart. Purify thyself. In thee is all truth. How shall it be except as known and as one with the Knower?”

Yet each doctrine, pursued to the end, culminates in a passive abandonment of all our actual finite ideas about Being as vain. Realism is often unwilling to observe that, if it is true, ideas are also Beings; Mysticism undertakes explicitly to deny that ordinary ideas are at all real. But both end in a reductio ad absurdum of every definite finite idea of the Real.

In their logical outcome these two theories, polar opposites of each other as they are, must, nevertheless, in consequence of this parallelism of their structures, precisely agree. Each in the end defines Nothing whatever. Only the realist does not intend this result, while the mystic often seems to glory in it. He thus glories, as we have seen, because in fact he is defining a very fascinating and a highly conscious contrast-effect, — a contrast-effect that, far from being itself anything absolute, or actually unknown and ineffable, is a constantly present character of our human type of finite consciousness. As a fact, our thinking is a search for a goal that is conceived at once as rationally satisfying and as theoretically true. And this goal we conceive as real precisely in so far as we consciously pursue it, and mean something by the pursuit. But now this goal, since it is not yet present to us, in our finite form of consciousness, is first conceived by contrast with the process of the pursuit. So far indeed we conceive it negatively. In this sense we can say of the goal, Nescio, Nescio, or Neti, Neti, just as Bernard of Cluny, or as the Hindoo sages, said. But the meaning of these very negatives lies in the positive contrast-effect that they even now actually present to us. Finite as we are, lost though we seem to be in the woods, or in the “wide air’s wildernesses,” in this world of time and of chance, we have still, like the strayed animals or like the migrating birds, our homing instinct. It is this homing instinct that we for the first merely articulate when we talk of true Being. Being means something for us, however, because of the positive presence, in finite consciousness, of this inner meaning of even our poorest ideas. We seek. That is a fact. We seek a city still out of sight. In the contrast with this goal, we live. But if this be so, then already we actually possess something of Being even in our finite seeking. For the readiness to seek is already something of an attainment, even if a poor one. But when the Mystic, defining his goal wholly in negative terms, lays stress upon the contrast as simply absolute, he finds that so far his Absolute is defined as nothing but the absence of finitude, and so as apparently equivalent to nothing at all, since all definite contents are for us so far finite, and since the absence of finitude is for us the absence of contents. If hereupon the mystic skilfully points out that this apparent zero is still, by virtue of the contrast, defined as our goal, as our coming attainment, as our peace, our hope, our heaven, our God, — then one rightly replies to the mystic that what makes his Absolute appear thus glorious is precisely its presented contrast with our imperfection. But a zero that is contrasted with nothing at all, has so far not even any contrasting character, and remains thus a genuine and absolute nothing. Hence, if the Absolute of the Mystic is really different from nothing, it is so by virtue of the fact that it stands in real contrast with our own real but imperfect Being. We too then are. If our life behind the veil is, as the mystic says, our goal, if already, even as we are, we are one with the Knower, then the absolute meaning does not ignore, but so far recognizes as real, even by virtue of the contrast, our present imperfect meaning.

It follows that if Mysticism is to escape from its own finitude, and really is to mean by its absolute Being anything but a Mere Nothing, its account of Being must be so amended as to involve the assertion that our finite life is not mere illusion, that our ideas are not merely false, and that we are already, even as finite, in touch with Reality.

Notes

1. The following passage, from the Chandogya Upanishad, III, 14, has been translated for me by my colleague, Professor C. R. Lanman.
2. I quote again from the Chandogya VI, 2-15, and again owe the translation to Professor Lanman.