Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/210

Rh genuine coherence of meaning, and defines the whole duty of man as simple fidelity to that meaning. To the mystics, then, has been historically committed the feeding of the flock of the faithful, the gathering of the heavenly manna, the saving of humanity from the abyss into which the mere respectability of dogmatic Realism, if left to itself, would have infallibly plunged all the deeper interests of the Spirit.

So much for the obvious positive efficacy of the mystical undertaking. But the undertaking itself takes the form, as we said, of a search for a certain limiting state of that finite variable which is called your knowledge, or your experience, or your insight, and for a definition of what happens when that state is reached. The mystic also attempts to define how this state is related to consciousness, and he tries to treat this limiting state very much as (if he were a mathematician) he might attempt to define, in a purely quantitative world, the limit of an infinite series of terms, and to consider how one series of values can be a function of another. The mystic ignores the sum of the series. He cares only for the final term itself, viewed as the limit which the other terms approach. And he attempts to define this limiting state of the finite variable by a process which is, as a fact, fallacious. His position is that since, in us mortals, consciousness means ignorance, and since, the less we observe our ignorance, the nearer we are to unconsciousness, therefore, at the limit, to be possessed of absolute knowledge is to be unconscious.

If you persist in asking how the mystic can thus conceive the zero of consciousness as also the goal of knowl-