Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/167

148 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.”

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 con-