Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/205

186 to define your needs in an absolutely general way. What do you want when you want Being? Mysticism replies to this question, as the sage Yâjnavalkya replies, in the Upanishads, to the questions of his wife Maitreyî: You want yourself, — the Self in its completeness, in its fulfilment, in its final expression. In brief, when you talk of reality, you talk of self-possession, of perfection, and of peace. And that is, therefore, all that you mean by the Being of the world or of any type of facts. Being therefore is nothing beyond yourself. You even now hold it within you, in your heart of hearts. Being therefore is just the purely immediate. To be means to quench thought in the presence of a final immediacy which completely satisfies all ideas. And by this simple reflection, the mystic undertakes to define the Absolute.

The advantage of this mystical method of dealing with the problem of Reality lies in the fact that Mysticism, because it is essentially a self-conscious and reflective doctrine, explicitly states its own defects, and points beyond its own abstractions. Realism actually asserts hopeless contradiction, and then stubbornly declines to take note of the fact that it does so. But philosophical Mysticism always expounds its own paradoxes, and actually glories in them. The process of getting beyond Realism therefore involves a hostile and paradoxical dialectic, whereby one exposes the realistic paradoxes. The realist himself takes as little part in this process as possible, and opposes to his critics merely the authority of sane common sense. Everybody knows,