Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/390

 378 EDMUND MONTGOMERY : identification with universal consciousness by means of adequate thought. But meanwhile, in conformity with such a view, it should become our aim to realise in the sustained effort of a single synthetical act or concept as much of universal consciousness as possible ; a feat actually and seriously attempted by those Hindu Transcendentalists, who passed their lives in the intellectual intuition of the single and all-containing word Om. In comparison with such a consummation, Hegelian evolutionism would probably seem to most of us a lively occupation. But by giving prominence to the logical evolu- tion of reality at the expense of its synthetical unification, Hegel destroyed the immutable permanence of universal consciousness and thus deprived individual thought of its transcendental standard of truth. Those who have had sufficient curiosity to make themselves acquainted with some of the conceptual world-constructions evolved by the oracular genius of sundry young Hegelians, will agree that the pattern of the " adamantine woof of concepts " is at least as variable as the figurations projected from a magic-lantern. Logical world-evolution is a very grateful exercise to adventurous novices, allowing a grandiloquent and consequential sweep to their fertile imagination. To the learned and intellectually mobile master, dialectic evolution may have offered itself as a welcome device to evade the final attitude of quietistic fixation assumed by his more consistent Hindu forerunners. For, viewed in the light of Hegel's own system, this evolu- tional process means also only inadequate, discursive recognition on our part of the Absolute, in which all possible logical relations abide as a completed totality of being. World-emanation can be philosophically conceived as coinciding with world-immanence only through the inter- vention of an unintelligible miracle. A perfect, all-com- prising logical totality can be rightly thought of only as changeless and immutable. The influence which breaks the repose and deranges the perfection of All-Being has neces- sarily to be considered hostile and undesirable. There is no legitimate way of thinking by which particularisation within an Absolute can be made to appear as its own harmonious manifestation. Here determination is inevitably negation. The alchemy of Organisation alone renders possible and efficacious the coincidence in one and the same subject of an identically preserved totality with a successive determina- tion of manifold affections. Here we find structurally and functionally realised, through organic processes explained in former articles, the compatibility of logical steadfastness and