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As a tapestry picture, however various and full of meaning, is ultimately reducible to little squares; so the world of common sense is ultimately reducible to a series of static elements conditioned by the machinery of the brain. Subtle curves, swift movement, delicate gradation, that machinery cannot represent. It leaves them out.

It studies little but certain privileged moments of changing reality, certain stable forms, certain states of equilibrium. Ancient geometry, for example, is almost always limited to the static consideration of figures already traced. Modern science is quite different.

He said that pupils in these schools were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves, through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

In this way we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, with the objective character of memory.

Thus we are obliged to be satisfied with these mystical phrases and with the assurance that the self contained original state was neither static nor dynamic, neither in a state of rest nor of motion.

But if the object should act in any unusual way, then the animating process which, as we have just said, was rendered static by its habitual exercise, again becomes dynamic, and the special and permanent character of the act is at once revealed.

In him sensation itself was absolute not spiritual consummation, but physical sensation. So he could not marry, it was not for him. He belonged to the god Pan, to the absolute of the senses. All the while his beauty, so perfect and so defined, fascinated me, a strange static perfection about him. But his movements, whilst they fascinated, also repelled.

So men who have been accustomed to think of revelation in static terms, now that the long leisureliness of man's developing spiritual insight is apparent, fear that this does away with revelation. But in God's unfolding education of his people recorded in the Scriptures revelation is at its noblest. No man ever found God except when God was seeking to be found.

In the Buddhistic conception God is an abstract vacuity; in the Greek, a static intellect; in the Christian, a dynamic will. As is the conception of God, so is the conception and character of man. The two are so intimately interdependent that it is useless at this time to discuss which is the cause and which the result. They are doubtless the two aspects of the same movement of thought.

Progressive change is not simply an environment to which Christianity conforms; it is a fact which Christianity exhibits. This idea that Christianity is itself a progressive movement instead of a static finality involves some serious alterations in the historic conceptions of the faith, as soon as it is applied to theology.