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Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself accidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other beings will have been revealed to private intuition.
The slayer knows better than we do, when she sticks the Bee under the chin. The cerebral ganglia are reached through the little hole in the neck and death ensues immediately. The relation of these acts of brigandage cannot satisfy my distressing habit of following each reply obtained with a fresh question, until the granite wall of the unknowable rises before me.
If the half-savage Greek could share our feelings thus far, it is irrational to doubt that he went further, to find, as we do, that upon that brief gladness there follows a certain sorrow, the little light of awakened human intelligence shines so mere a spark amidst the abyss of the unknown and unknowable; seems so insufficient to do more than illuminate the imperfections that cannot be remedied, the aspirations that cannot be realized, of man's own nature.
And, if I had done my best in the same direction, I should trust in the Unknowable for help. Then too, is not gratitude to Heaven the best of prayers? Unhappy he who has never felt it! Unhappier still, who has never had cause to feel it! It may be deemed unwarrantable thus to draw the lines between what, for want of better terms, we call Material and Spiritual.
It had eyes eyes that were now only shadows darkening within its luminosity like veils falling, and falling, opening windows into the unknowable; deepening into softly glowing blue pools, blue as the Moon Pool itself; then flashing out, and this only when the face bore its most human resemblance, into twin stars large almost as the crown of little moons; and with that same baffling suggestion of peep-holes into a world untrodden, alien, perilous to man!
The unknowable is admitted to be a power which cannot be regarded as having sympathy with us, but as one to which no emotion whatever can be ascribed, and we are expressly forbidden "by duty," to affirm personality of God as much as to deny it of Him. How such a being can be presented as an object on which to exercise religious emotion it is difficult indeed to understand.
For it is possible to possess great talent, or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as regards the feelings and even morally imbecile. There have been instances. These clever-witted, affectively stupid persons are wont to say that it is useless to seek to delve in the unknowable or to kick against the pricks.
Unluckily, their course of instruction was stereotyped ages ago, when learned men devoted themselves to writing huge books on divinity, casuistry, logic, and metaphysics; concealing their ignorance of facts under an affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many millions of angels could dance on a needle's point; writing treatises "de omni re scibili," and on a good many things unknowable also; and teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not.
Entity "X" could therefore not exist permanently in one and the same form, and the permanency of the ego that is, immortality would still be illogical, would not exist within the realm of science, but would carry us beyond the limitations of the human mind into the unknowable.
Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."
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