Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/199

180 ''in thy heart. Purify thyself. In thee is all truth. How'' shall it be except as known and as one with the Knower?”

Yet each doctrine, pursued to the end, culminates in a passive abandonment of all our actual finite ideas about Being as vain. Realism is often unwilling to observe that, if it is true, ideas are also Beings; Mysticism undertakes explicitly to deny that ordinary ideas are at all real. But both end in a reductio ad absurdum of every definite finite idea of the Real.

In their logical outcome these two theories, polar opposites of each other as they are, must, nevertheless, in consequence of this parallelism of their structures, precisely agree. Each in the end defines Nothing whatever. Only the realist does not intend this result, while the mystic often seems to glory in it. He thus glories, as we have seen, because in fact he is defining a very fascinating and a highly conscious contrast-effect, — a contrast-effect that, far from being itself anything absolute, or actually unknown and ineffable, is a constantly present character of our human type of finite consciousness. As a fact, our thinking is a search for a goal that is conceived at once as rationally satisfying and as theoretically true. And this goal we conceive as real precisely in so far as we consciously pursue it, and mean something by the pursuit. But now this goal, since it is not yet present to us, in our finite form of consciousness, is first conceived by contrast with the process of the pursuit. So far indeed we conceive it negatively. In this sense we can say of the goal, Nescio, Nescio, or Neti, Neti, just as Bernard of Cluny, or as the Hindoo sages, said. But the meaning of these very negatives