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It is by the will that we assert ourselves amidst the existences around us; and as the will is the man in relation to phenomena, so on the other side the will is the one and only force among the forces of this world which takes cognizance of principles and is capable of acting in pursuit of an aim not to be found among phenomena at all. The will is not the whole spiritual faculty.
If our senses, therefore, suggest any idea of distinct existences, they must convey the impressions as those very existences, by a kind of fallacy and illusion.
Why now "existence" and not "existences"? You may wonder; you may ask yourselves one to another mutually round the tea-table putting it as a problem or riddle. You may make a game of it, or use it for gambling, or say it suddenly as a catch for your acquaintances when they come up from the suburbs.
They are differently speculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notions that might by chance represent actual existences; while science terminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, but verified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experience as those from which the theory started.
Shameless polyandrist, she maintains several consorts from three to five seems to be the average number and they, semi-transparent, feeble, meek, subdued little fellows, maintain precarious isolated existences in the outskirts of the web.
We can hardly suppose it possible that an Infinite Being, in some sense, as we suppose will be generally allowed, the Governor of the world, should not have an important relation to all other existences; much less, that the relation which He bears to man, the most noble existence of which we have any actual experience, should be of an insignificant character.
The dominant philosophical principle of Plato is what is known as the Theory of Ideas. He imagined a world of real existences, invisible, incorporeal, eternal, grasped only by thought, prior to the objects of the physical universe, and the models or archetypes of them.
Let him cease to be ambitious, let him purge himself of selfish aims and revengeful or unkind thoughts, and a man may at last enter into Nirvana, even a politician may slowly be extinguished. Life follows life, and each life fulfils its Karma of destined expiation, working out the earthly stain of previous existences. "Quisque suos patimur manes."
The dependence upon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of existences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence and mortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable, is saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance.
Jesus has taken possession of the human race; He has made of it a single nationality, the nationality of upright men, whom He calls to a perfect life. "'The existence of Christ from beginning to end is a tissue entirely mysterious, I admit; but that mystery meets difficulties which are in all existences.
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