Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/211

192 edge, then he replies with his endlessly repeated reductio ad absurdum. If, he says, you stopped anywhere short of unconsciousness in the series of states of finite consciousness, you would find yourself thinking of something beyond you, desiring another, less troubled, state, — confessing your imperfection. You would, therefore, be confessedly not in presence of Being. If you are to get into the presence of Being, and know what the Knower finally knows, you must then finally pass to the limit itself. But so to pass is to leave no variety, no external object, no passing moment’s ideas, no conscious content in the field of knowledge. It is, in short, to leave nothing present but the Knower alone, and the Knower as finally immediate datum, too completely immediate to be conscious at all.

If one hereupon replies that this paradox of the mystic, the passing to the limit, and undertaking to define it in terms of the vanishing series, deprives the Absolute of any value as a Being, by making the whole truth a mere zero, then the mystic assures you that just this zero has infinite value, because it is the goal of the series of states of finite consciousness. Do you not want peace? he says. Can anything be of more worth to you than attainment? If attainment involves what for finite consciousness means the quenching of desire, of thought, and of consciousness, does that deprive the search for attainment of meaning? For now that you are finite, all your passion is for attainment and for peace.