Page:Leo Jung - Foundations of Judaism (1923).pdf/29



AN you imagine the beginning of the world, the sudden fullness of the chaos with real life; can you imagine a beginning that had nothing before it, no matter, no spirit; can you imagine something that has no limit in time or space? As we cannot imagine this, because our mind is bodybound, and can think only in terms of solid actuality , so is it impossible for us ever to solve the last questions. So does the real thinker and the true scientist set limits to himself, reproclaiming Sirach's great dictum—“Do not meddle with what is beyond you,” appreciating the fact that we cannot dip below the surface, that we but read our own mind into the phenomena of life, that we can get but human truth from our own labors, that the final and the last is God's. But our own nature we can study, our own proclivities and prejudices, our own assets and failings. Nay, by our experience we are able to reconstruct the mental growth, the struggles and the achievements of distant ages, of times above and before the hustle and fastness of modern life. We can reach through dreamland to ages still in the bosom of the future; reach by our effort the ancestor of a thousand or two, or five thousand, years ago. Through the voices he has left us, crude inscriptions on the rocks, crude instruments in his cave, through the songs he transmitted, the poems, the stories, the outward witnesses of his inward life, we can picture him to ourselves, how he lived, how he worked, struggled, fought and died.

Primitive man cowers in his cave. There is a heaviness in the air, an oppressive something that makes him all aquiver, that causes him to tremble. The sky is heavy with dark clouds, and soon, he knows, those terrible noises will come—the thunder, which makes him whimper, and