Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/174

Rh 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