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But there is one difference between the schools of sectarian philosophy and the Advaita of Śaṅkara which goes to the root of the matter. Śaṅkara holds that the world and individual existences are due to illusion, ignorance and misconception: they vanish in the light of true knowledge.
"I have known more than one man, now very eminent, very active, who at your age felt the same estrangement from the practical pursuits of others." "And what reconciled those men to such pursuits?" "That diminished sense of individual personality, that unconscious fusion of one's own being into other existences, which belong to home and marriage." "I don't object to home, but I do to marriage."
What calm enjoyment in that happiness which is always shared with others; in that community of interests which unites such various feelings; in that association of existences which forms one single being of so many! What is man without those home affections, which, like so many roots, fix him firmly in the earth, and permit him to imbibe all the juices of life?
With its triple enclosure, its dungeons, its interior court-yards, its machicolations, its underground passages, its ramparts piled one upon the other, like a bark on a bark and a shield on a shield, the ancient Château of the Clissons rises before your mind and is reconstructed. The memory of past existences exudes from its walls with the emanations of the nettles and the coolness of the ivy.
Why do I say "existence", and not "existences"? Why, with a fine handsome plural ready to hand, do I wind you up and turn you off, so to speak, with a piffling little singular not fit for a half-starved newspaper fellow, let alone a fine, full-fledged, intellectual and well-read vegetarian and teetotaller who writes in the reviews? Eh?
Slowly she began to see it as a vast concerted enterprise in which she was called to play her part. The days when the world was made for her pleasure were over. The days had begun when she saw her obligation, not alone to the man and child who were part of her, but out and beyond these to the diminishing circles of existences that had never touched hers.
But this work is characterized by a peculiar power of attention, which causes the mind to dwell upon a subject in a species of meditation, the characteristic mark of genius; the outcome is an internal life rich in activities, just as the germinative cells are the fruit of internal existences.
Melissus applied the results of his analysis in an interesting way to the question already raised by his predecessors, of the trustworthiness of sensation. His argument is as follows: "If there were many real existences, to each of them the same reasonings must apply as I have already used with reference to the one existence.
I dare say that the simile is not perfect for I am very far from admitting that he who contemplates existences through the medium of thought, sees them only 'through a glass darkly, any more than he who considers them in action and operation.
He said that when his body died in the jacket, and he himself went forth from prison, he was never anybody but Ed Morrell. He never experienced previous existences. When his spirit wandered free, it wandered always in the present.
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