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He suggested a reaction from a too-Manichaean dualism at some date after the time of St. John's Gospel. He maintained obstinately that that Gospel was dualistic. The unpleasant quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious.
The incorporeality of God proves also his unity. For what is not body cannot have the corporeal attributes of quantity or number, hence God cannot be more than one. And there are many powerful arguments besides against a dualistic theory. A unitary effect cannot be the result of two independent causes.
And, indeed, when we come to think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer.
The wonders of Nature furnish abundant imagery for his hymns or his litanies, and he relies for his cosmogony on the faint traditions of the past gathered from whatever nation, and reduced into conformity with his Dualistic creed. "Zend-Avesta" is the religious book of the Persians who professed the creed of Zarathustra, known in classic and modern times as Zoroaster.
The Dualistic principle being thus fully adopted, and the world looked on as the battle-ground between two independent and equal powers engaged in perpetual strife, it was natural that the imagination should complete the picture by ascribing to those superhuman rivals the circumstantials that accompany a great struggle between human adversaries.
This monistic confession has the greater claim to an unprejudiced consideration, in that it is shared, I am firmly convinced, by at least nine-tenths of the men of science now living; indeed, I believe, by all men of science in whom the following four conditions are realised: Sufficient acquaintance with the various departments of natural science, and in particular with the modern doctrine of evolution; Sufficient acuteness and clearness of judgment to draw, by induction and deduction, the necessary logical consequences that flow from such empirical knowledge; Sufficient moral courage to maintain the monistic knowledge, so gained, against the attacks of hostile dualistic and pluralistic systems; and Sufficient strength of mind to free himself, by sound, independent reasoning, from dominant religious prejudices, and especially from those irrational dogmas which have been firmly lodged in our minds from earliest youth as indisputable revelations.
If his dream of a European Empire could not be realized, the mission assigned to Belgium, as a natural link between East and West, remains even to-day one of the main features of European politics. History has shown that no annexation, no territorial division, of the dualistic country could ever guarantee peace between France and Germany.
Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and ipso facto we have our supreme revelation of God. So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gained something by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, and we must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualistic experience which created it.
The Yang and the Yin are divided into an infinite number of spirits respectively good and bad, called shen and kwei; every man and every living being contains a shen and a kwei, infused at birth, and departing at death, to return to the Yang and the Yin. Thus man with his dualistic soul is a microcosmos, born from the Macrocosmos spontaneously.
Early Cosmogony Dualistic The period before the appearance of the P'an Ku myth may be divided into two parts; that from some early unknown date up to about the middle of the Confucian epoch, say 500 B.C., and that from 500 B.C. to A.D. 400. We know that during the latter period the minds of Chinese scholars were frequently occupied with speculations as to the origin of the universe.
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