, remains unanswered, unattained.THE PROBLEM OF FINITUDE AND OF EVIL [P. 10 foll.]
ARE we struck at beholding the cope of Heaven imaged in a dew-drop? The least of the animalcula to which that dew-drop is an ocean presents an infinite problem, of which the omnipresent is the only solution. If then even the philosophy of nature can remain philosophy only by rising above nature, and by abstracting from nature, much less is it possible for the philosophy of the Eternal to evolve out of itself, that is out of the pure reason, the actual existence of change, of the beginning of that which is, yet before was not, of that which has been and is not, of that which is not yet but is to come. The organs of philosophy are ideas only, and we arrive at ideas by abstracting from time: and this truth is so obvious that even in popular language we declare it impossible to form any idea of matter, of pleasure, or of pain. Yet shall we say that these are not? Is there no history because history, or the succession of acts and agents and of phenomena, considered as the effects, products, or results of acts and agents, is not the same with philosophy though it is grounded on it? Do the mechanical powers, the lever, the pulley, the screw, not exist because they are not the same with the immediate and magical and everywhere present powers, without which the former yet could not be? The passage from the absolute to the separated finite, this is the difficulty which who shall overcome? This is the chasm which ages have tried in vain to overbridge. If the finite be in no sense separate from the infinite, if it be one with the same, whence proceeded evil? For the finite can be one with the absolute, inasmuch only as it represents the absolute verily under some particular form. Herein no negation is implied, nor privation, no negation from without, for it is the position of all in the each. But that it is the form which it is (is) so far from being the result of negation that even in the less imperfect shapes of the senses, those which proceed from living forms as in all objects of the organic world (take a plant as an instance), this shape is at once the product and the sign of the positive power of the plant; and a form, or rather a parent-shape proceeding from negation, either simply or in connection with an overpowering impression from without, is found only in the inanimate : the termination of the path of the arrow in the air, or the form of the fragment storm-rent from the rock or of the aggregate of sands in the pebble, which the pressure of the waters has compressed, and the motion of the tide rounded. But if, on the other hand, the finite here spoken of be separate and diverse from the absolute, we might, indeed, explain the evil therefrom, but then the question would return how was the finite possible? I said hastily that from such a finite we might educe the origin of evil: but such a finite were Evil ! Still the standing room, the δὸς ποῦ στ, remains unanswered, unattained.
THE PRINCIPLE OF THE SOLUTION [P. 39 foll.]
The solution is this. To God the idea is real, inasmuch as it is one with that will, which, as we see in its definition, is verily Idem et Alter ; but to itself the idea is absolutely real, in so far only as its particular will affirms, and in affirming constitutes its particular reality to have no true being except as a form of the universal, and one with the universal Will. This, however, is the affirmation of a will, and of a particular will. It must, therefore, contain the potentiality, that is, the power of possibly not affirming the identity of its reality with the reality of God, which is actual absolutely (Actus purissimus sine ullâ potentialitate) ; or of willing to be, yet not willing to be only because God is, and in the being of God alone. In other words, if the essence of its being be will, and this will under a particular form, there must be a possibility of willing the universal or absolute under the predominance of the particular, instead of willing the particular solely as the glory and presentation of the plenitude of the universal. As long as this act remains wholly potential, i.e. implied in the holy will as its opposite, necessarily possible because, being a holy will, it is a will, and a particular will, so long is it compatible with God, and so long therefore hath it an actual reality as one of the eternal, immutable ideas of God. But in the will to actualize this potentiality, or as in common language we should say, in the will to convert this possibility into a reality it necessarily makes—itself! shall I say? or rather a self that is not God, and hence by its own act becomes alien from God. But in God all actual reality is contained: in making therefore a Self that is not God all actuality is necessarily lost, a potentiality alone remains . . a causativeness must remain, for this is the essential of the will ; but it is a causativeness that destroys, which annihilates the actual; and, in the potential swallowing up all actuality so that the potential as merely potential remains the only form of its reality, it is an act that may be said to realize the potential in the moment of potentializing the alone truly real. What would follow but a world of contradictions, when the first self-constituting act is in its essence a contradiction? The will to make a centre which is not a centre, a will not the same with the absolute will, and yet not contained in the absolute, that is an absolute that is not absolute.
AN OLD ILLUSTRATION [P. 124 foll.]
To borrow an illustration of spiritual truths, above all of spiritual truths so unutterably transcendent, from the most glorious objects of the senses or the most subtle and refined forms of the material world is not without peril. But I will venture to anticipate those higher views of the material world, which I trust will be opened out in the following section of this work, and after the example of the inspired prophets, no less than of the ancient sages, whose philosophy approached nearest to the doctrines of inspiration:
“We’ll try to borrow from the glorious sun
A little light to illustrate this act,
Such as he is in his solstitial noon,
When in the welkin there’s no cloudy tract,
For to make gross his beams and light refract.
Then sweep by all those globes that by reflexion
His long small shafts do rudely beaten back,
And let his rays have undenied projection,
And so we will pursue this mystery’s retection.”
Not more impossible is it to conceive the Sun, the triunity of the focus, lux et lumen, to be in all its splendour, and yet rayless, than to conceive the spiritual Sun without its effluence, the essentially causative will without its co-eternal products. As long as the rays are part of the glory, radiant distinctly, but without division, so long are they one with the sun, and such must be from eternity to eternity. But these spiritual rays are themselves essentially Wills, and have their causativeness, which is one with that of the Divine will as long as they are rays of the Sun. But if we could conceive any number as separate from the solar orb and no longer a prolongation of its effluence, strangled in clouds, and born(e?) anew as it were in rainbows and the phantoms of the air, would there be for this any loss or change in the sun or in the solar sphere? But to what purpose do I adduce this symbol? If the reader beholds and contemplates it in the spirit of the corpuscular system, the utter differences will overlay the shadowy and less than poetic likeness, and set into ferment the sensuous imagination which it is our main desideratum to keep at rest, silent, and under a veil? … I have no other answer to this objection, but that I have found it a help in my own mind to use this image, as the philosopher of Nola had done before, as a mental diagram for the fixing of the attention, and the ordinance of the memory, as, in short, the best, most comprehensive, richest and most flexible organ of a memoria technical and this the sun with its profundity of forms and forces, of lights and shadows will not fail to present and without risk of error, if only the main difficulty have been once thoroughly apprehended, and in that very apprehension overcome and disarmed, though not removed. It is enough to have seen that it is a difficulty which arises out of our nature, and while that nature remains, must remain with it . . nay, will be active, as while the ear is deeply listening to some sweet harmony from an unknown distance, the eyes will gaze thitherward, even though it should have been ascertained that it was the music of the air, such as travellers are said to have heard in Ceylon and Sumatra, produced by currents and counter-currents, the glancing fingers of electric fire in the higher atmosphere.
PROOFS OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD [P. 145 foll.]
If we can prove that the failure in each particular scheme is not attributable to any fault on the part of the reasoner, which some following reasoner might correct, but to the very nature of the proof itself, we shall have amply demonstrated our position, that there is no speculative proof, no properly scientific or logical demonstration possible. In other words, that the idea of the Godhead is the true source and indispensable precondition of all our knowledge of God. That consequently all that is true and valuable in any of the so-called proofs and demonstrations, consists of expositions of this idea, or the different means, by which the understanding is enabled to exemplify this idea in all its experiences, whether inward or from without, whether derived from the sense and the senses, or by reflection on itself and on its own operations. Nor is this all—we must add (to) the theoretic purpose answered by thus exemplifying the idea of God the moral one of awakening the conscious attention of the soul to the great idea with the emotions inseparable from its due contemplation—which, so far from the idea or knowledge being deduced or concluded from any or all the particulars of sensation or reflexion, is that of deriving these as components of a world (τοῦ κόσμου and not τοῦ χάους) from this idea. The Reason1 as the living source of living and substantial verities, presents the Idea to the individual mind and subjective intellect, which receives and employs it to its own appropriate ends, namely, to understand thereby both itself and all its objects—receives it, I say, uncomprehended by it, to comprehend the universe, the world without and the yet more wonderful world within.
There is in almost all the Sanscrit philosophical and religious writings, as far as they have fallen under my notice, a character, which, it seems to me, might be plausibly accounted for on the supposition of childish intellects living among gigantic objects, of mean thoughts and huge things—living Lilliputs among inanimate Brob-dignags. Thus their Pantheism or visible God, God, proved to them, not from, but in and by the evidence of their senses, taken in conjunction with the languor of a relaxing climate and the lulling influence of a deep, sombre and gigantic vegetation, seems to me a natural result of an imbecile understanding, producing indistinction, half from indolence and half intentionally by a partial closure of the eyelids, and when all hues and outlines melt into a garish mist deeming it unity.
The translator of the Bhagavad Gita finds in the story of churning the ocean for the fourteen jewels, a wonderful affinity to—Milton ! I could not, I confess, help inferring from this remark that taste does not resemble the wines that improve by a voyage to and from India. For if there be one character of genius predominant in Milton it is this, that he never passes off bigness for greatness. Children never can make things big enough, and exactly so is it with the poets of India.
It would be more than we are entitled to expect of the human mind, if Sir W. Jones, Mr. Wilkins, etc., great and good as we know them to have been, had not overrated the merit of works, the power of understanding which is of such rare occurrence, and so difficultly attained. In the present instance there is an additional excuse ; an excuse which more than acquits the judges, though it cannot prevent the reversal of their decision; for to the writings in question all the notions, images, and feelings, which are best calculated to excite that obscure awe, that lies midway between religion and superstition, hang and encluster. Their undoubted antiquity is so great, and the antiquity claimed for them at once so daring and so visionary that we might almost say “liber ipse supersta”, the book itself walks like a ghost of a departed world. There is a superstition involved in a survival so contrary to the ordinary experience of mankind. I have myself paid this debt of homage on my first presentation to these foreign potentates by aid of the great linguists above mentioned. But having so done, I sought to purge the sight with the euphrasy of common sense, and took a second and more leisurely view before I put the question to myself, “And what then have I seen?”
“What are
These Potentates of inmost Ind?”
Shall I confess the truth? Their next neighbour of the North, the temple-throned infant of Thibet, with the Himālā behind and the cradle of the Ganges at his feet, conveys to my mind an impressive likeness, seems to me a pregnant symbol of the whole Brahman Theosophy. Without growth, without production ! Abstract the enormous shapes and phantasms the Himālā, the Ganges of the fancy, and what remains?—A baby ! The personality and the additional mystery of secondary impersonation, metamorphoses, incarnations, these and all the attributes of persons, dance in and out like wandering flashes, or motley aliens from a distant country, the mutes of the show, often enough to remind us of their incompatibility with the doctrines of omneity and infinity, which are the constant theme and the philosophic import of the Indian theology; but without even an attempt to resolve the riddle. These impersonations or Avatars betray themselves as fables μυθοι half verbal and built on accidents of language, and half symbolical; though nothing can be more obscure and conjectural than their direct interpretation.
1 Autograph note: I here use the word in its highest as well as most comprehensive sense—and not for the mere Collectaneum of theoretic principles, or of such speculative truths as are accompanied with the sense of unconditional necessity and absolute universality.