Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/190

Rh site of a mere Nothing. For it is fulfilment, attainment, peace, the goal of life, the object of desire, the end of knowledge. Why then does it stubbornly appear as indistinguishable from mere nothing? The answer is: That is a part of our very illusion itself. The light above the light is, to our deluded vision, darkness. It is our finite realm that is the falsity, the mere nothing. The Absolute is All Truth.

One sees, at last then, this mystic Absolute gets, for the Hindoo, its very perfection from a Contrast-Effect. Here is the really solving word as to the whole matter. It is by contrast with our finite seeking that the goal which quenches desires and ideas at once appears as all truth and all life. But to attribute to the goal a concrete life and a definite ideal content would be, for this view, to ruin this very contrast. For concreteness means variety and finitude, and consequently ignorance and imperfection. The Absolute home appears empty, just because, wherever definite content is to be found, the Hindoo feels not at home, but finite, striving, and deluded into a search for something beyond.

Yet just this very contrast-effect, whereby what is defined as having no definite characters, is even thereby conceived as the most perfect, — we all know this same feature well in our own religious literature. The mediæval poem of Bernard of Cluny concerning the Golden Jerusalem, — the poem called De Contemptu Mundi, — what is it, apart from its sensuous, and so far consciously false imagery, but a crowding of antitheses and of negations, to the end that by merely denying our illusions, and forsaking our world, we may contemplate