Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/567

548 testimony that Being is what the mystic declares it to be, is a witness borne by this self-detected and hopeless liar, thought, — whose words are the speech of one who exists not at all, but only falsely pretends to exist, and whose ideas are merely lies. This liar, at the moment of the mystical vision, declares that he rests content; and therefore we know, forsooth, that we have come upon “that which is,” and have caught the “deep pulsations of the world.” We accept, then, the last testimony of the wholly hardened and hopeless deceiver; and this dying word of false thought is our sole proof of the Absolute Truth.

Can this be really the mystic’s ultimate wisdom? No; the unconscious silence in which he ought forever to dwell, once broken by his first utterance when he teaches his doctrine, leads him to endless speech, — but to speech all of the same infinitely self-denying kind. The ineffable is ineffable. Therefore it is indeed “hard to frame, in matter-moulded forms of speech,” the meaning of what has been won at the instant of the mystical vision. This difficult task is, in fact, a self-representative and infinite task. For it is the task of endless denial even of every previous act of denial. The only word as to the Absolute must be Neti, Neti, — It is not so, not so. But this only word needs endless repetition in new forms. The Absolute, if you will, was not well reported when we just gave, as the reason for the truth of the mystical insight, the fact that thought found itself at rest in the presence of God. For the thought really finds not itself, at all. It finds, as the truth, only its own Other. But in what way does it find its Other as the truth? Answer, By seeing, in the endless process of its own failure, the necessity of its own defeat, — the need of Another. So then — as we afresh observe — thought does know itself as a failure. It does represent to itself its own defeat. It does, then, learn, by a dialectic process, to comprehend its own lying nature. But herewith we return to our starting-point, and can only continue the same process without end.

In brief, mysticism turns upon a recognition of the failure of all thinking to grasp Reality. But this recognition is itself