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There is here, too, a bare possibility that some one of these absolutes may be a representation of the truth; but the method by which this representation is acquired is violent and artificial; while the traditional conception of God is the spontaneous embodiment of passionate contemplation and long experience.
When a young man or young woman gets of marriageable age, which is rather early, the parents decide on some satisfactory prospective partner, and a "middleman" interviews the parents of the prospective partner aforesaid, and if they are willing, and financial and other considerations are satisfactory, it doesn't matter what the girl thinks, nor does it matter much whether young Barkis himself is "willin'." The Sir Anthony Absolutes in Japan indeed brook no opposition.
In his savage craving for absolute originality the most impossible of all "absolutes" he sought to abstract from the art its chief components. He would have it in its naked innocence: rhythmic, undefiled by customary treatment, and never swerving from the "truth" of the poem. His devotion to the verbal text and dramatic action out-Wagners Wagner.
Wherefore, absolute beauty is too often fitted into a whole system of absolutes or rather into The Absolute; and, of course, it would be intolerable to suppose that we could ever fail to recognize should I say Him? Unluckily, history and personal experience those two black beasts of a priori idealists here await us.
He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiricist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up.
It is a fact, which every one who wishes to think must get clear, that when you are dealing with absolutes and ultimates, you can prove whatever you want to prove. Metaphysics is like the fourth dimension; you fly into it and come back upside down, hindside foremost, inside out; and when you get tired of this condition, you take another flight, and come back the way you were before.
Superficially it may be so, but not fundamentally. Any country is old where birth and death are like the coming and dropping of leaves on a tree, and where the individual is of as much importance as the leaf. Old world and New world are not mere relatives; they are as near absolutes as anything.
But such a literal interpretation of the phrase has no sanction for us, and any other than a literal meaning is essentially meaningless. Jesus was a noble and tender-hearted man with the beliefs of his age. To speak of him as ideally perfect and sinless is absurd just because these terms are absolutes where relatives alone have meaning.
For years all patient students of Latin had writhed in agonies untold. They had learned long lists of Latin words, with their meanings; they had wrestled in their teens with gerunds, supines, ablative absolutes and distracting rules about the subjunctive mood, and they had tried in vain to take an interest in stately authors far above their understanding. Comenius reversed the whole process.
You may talk of Absolutes as much as you like, you may contemplate the fundamental categories of the mind, you may dwell upon the a priori conceptions to which all our experiences must conform, but the fact remains, says Professor James, turning his back on all transcendental idealism, "the concrete truth for us will always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most profitably combine."
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