Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/197

178 Eternal, or Eckhart’s Stille Wüste, or the One of Plotinus, or the “Æonian music” of Tennyson’s famous vision in the In Memoriam, or the unspeakable happiness which Browning’s lover has vainly mourned. In any case, both your process and your result, if you are a Mystic, will be the same. First you look for the object in a realistic world. It is so far an Independent Being. In theory you define it. In life you try to win it. Then you become reflective. You observe that such a Being, just in so far as it is independent, is unknowable, inaccessible, indefinable, in fact, self-contradictory. You observe then that your Realistic definition was false. Moreover, you also see that the whole meaning of the search lies within yourself; that your theory of Being never had any but a practical sense; that the whole question is one of the search for a certain limiting state of your finite variable, for a state called Attainment. And hereupon you are prepared to come on that which is and to catch “the deep pulsations of the world.” Your ideas, keenly observing all the paradoxes and failures of finitude, finally, through their dialectic, destroy one another and themselves as well. And the goal of the process is at least momentarily reached when you come to the conclusion of Browning’s lover. For he, after his vision of the vanity of all finite striving, abandons at last the hope for the so-called lady, the Independent Being who rides so proudly beside him in the illusory world of ordinary life, — abandons that hope, only to take refuge in the ineffable immediacy of an experience that he takes for the instant to be the ultimate reality.