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Home-rule for Ireland would be a millennium in comparison. It is a trunk without a tag, a dog without a collar, in the eyes of most professors of philosophy. What then would tighten this loose universe, according to the professors? Something to support the finite many, to tie it to, to unify and anchor it. Something unexposed to accident, something eternal and unalterable.
Joy is fatal when it rises into ecstacy: nature cannot support the strain which in one moment is thrown upon the whole nervous system. The joy as well as the grief of finite beings is limited, and dare not pass beyond a certain point without ruin.
She loves them, and she works for them day and night; but when they are ranting and ramping and quarrelling, and torturing her over-tense nerves, she forgets the infinite, and applies herself energetically to the finite, by sending Harry with a round scolding into one corner, and Susy into another, with no light thrown upon the point in dispute, no principle settled as a guide in future difficulties, and little discrimination as to the relative guilt of the offenders.
The obvious portions of extension that affect our senses, carry with them into the mind the idea of finite: and the ordinary periods of succession, whereby we measure time and duration, as hours, days, and years, are bounded lengths.
It is only in recent years that we have been able to realise that it is the Invisible which is the Real, that the visible is only its shadow or its manifestation in the Physical Universe, and that Time and Space have no existence apart from our physical senses, in short, that they are only the modes or limits under which those senses act or receive their impressions and by which they are necessarily rendered finite.
As the person and the condition are distinct in man, because he is a finite being, the condition cannot be founded on the person, nor the person on the condition. Admitting the second case, the person would have to change; and in the former case, the condition would have to continue. Thus in either supposition, either the personality or the quality of a finite being would necessarily cease.
My father had educated me with broadly materialistic views; he himself was a follower of Voltaire, and with his finite rod he took the measure of Divinity, greatly to his own satisfaction. He was a good man, too, and he died with exemplary calmness in the absolute certainty of there being nothing in his composition but dust, to which he was as bound to return.
It crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.
Human life has always been, and always will be, only the unfolding of the personal mind into recognition of the Absolute Mind. The Universe is under the Law Eternal and in the degree that we know this, we stop our limitations; mankind is free in the Absolute Law, and only seemingly bound in the finite one.
As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to, although they may be outside of the present thought as well as in it, humanism sees no ground for saying they are outside of finite experience itself. Pragmatically, their reality means that we submit to them, take account of them, whether we like to or not, but this we must perpetually do with experiences other than our own.
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