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No account is taken of the mental conditions by which a creed is engendered and limited; nor of the train of historic circumstance which prepares men to receive it. The modern apologist escapes by explaining religion; the apologist of a hundred years ago was required to prove it. The end of such a method was inevitably a negation.
All day he sat and watched the maple cast its glory, and did not bother much with his simple meals. The Wise house was erected on three terraces. Always through the dry summer the grass was burned to an ugly negation of color. Later, when rain came, the grass was a brilliant green, patched with rosy sorrel and golden stars of arnica. Then later still came the diamond brilliance of the frost.
Suppress all interest, all feeling, and there is nothing left but the reality that flows, together with the knowledge ever renewed that it impresses on us of its present state. From annihilation to negation, which is a more general operation, there is now only a step. All that is necessary is to represent the contrast of what is, not only with what has been, but also with all that might have been.
Pierre raised a dolorous cry: "No, no, the death born of doubt has swept through me, withering and shattering everything, and nothing more can live in that cold dust!" "But, come," resumed Guillaume, "you cannot have reached such absolute negation. No man reaches it. Even in the most disabused of minds there remains a nook of fancy and hope.
For it is this picture of the unaccommodated man 'unaccommodated' still, with all his empiric arts, with all his wordy philosophy it is this picture of man 'as he is, in the misery of his IGNORANCE, in his blind struggle with his law of KIND, which is his law of 'BEING, unreconciled to his place in the universal order, where he must live or have no life for the beast, obedient to his law, rejects from his kinds the degenerate man it is this vivid, condensed, scientific exhibition, this scientific collection of the fact of man as he is, in his empiric struggle with the law which universal nature enforces, and will enforce on him with all her pains and penalties till he learns it it is this 'negation' which brings out the true doctrine of man and human society in this method of inquiry.
As the years go on, the value of that legacy will be more and more felt; not so much, perhaps, in doctrine as in spirit, in those utterances of a devout soul which are above and beyond the affirmation or negation of dogma.
She contrived to shake her head slightly and utter an inarticulate sound of negation, then began slowly to mount the stairs. Below, Nogam stood watching, in a pose of indecision, as if tempted to follow and offer the support of an arm lest she fall, restrained only by fear of a rebuff.
She caught a look of negation in her father's eye "I will go that is, if papa will give me leave," says Miss Ethel. "By Gad, sir," says Barnes, "I think it is the very best thing she could do; and the best way of doing it, Ethel can go with one of the boys and take Mrs. What-do-you-call'em a gown, or a tract, or that sort of thing, and stop that infernal Independent's mouth."
Perhaps Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva, which might not as well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
Organic and inorganic nature would apparently then rest on four essential principles, in fact, if we could decompose nitrogen which we ought to consider a negation, we should have but three. This brings us at once close upon the great Ternary of the ancients and of the alchemists of the Middle Ages, whom we do wrong to scorn. Modern chemistry is nothing more than that.
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