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Updated: May 10, 2025
This emptiness finds its expression in the whole form of existence, in the infiniteness of Time and Space as opposed to the finiteness of the individual in both; in the flitting present as the only manner of real existence; in the dependence and relativity of all things; in constantly Becoming without Being; in continually wishing without being satisfied; in an incessant thwarting of one's efforts, which go to make up life, until victory is won.
And though on the one hand there be finiteness and on the other infinitude: though we have to talk, in big words, of which we have very little grasp, about 'Omniscience, and 'Omnipresence, and 'Eternity, and such like, these things may be deducted and yet the Divine nature may be retained; and the poor, ignorant, finite, dying creature, that perishes before the moth, may say, 'I am kindred with Him whose years know no end; whose wisdom knows no uncertainty nor growth; whose power is Omnipotence; and whose presence is everywhere. He that can say, 'I am, is of the same nature as His whose mighty proclamation of Himself is 'I AM THAT I AM. He who can say 'I will' is of the same nature as He who willeth and it is done.
From the Platonists and Epicureans of Renaissance Italy our greatest dramatists learned that cheerful and serious love of life, that solemn and manly facing of death, that sense of the finiteness of man, the inexhaustibleness of nature, which shines out in such grand, paganism, with such Olympian serenity, as of the bent brows and smiling lips of an antique Zeus, in Shakespeare, in Marlowe, in Beaumont and Fletcher, even in the sad and savage Webster.
Others, as Kant for example, have denied intellectualism's pretensions to define reality an sich or in its absolute capacity; but Kant still leaves it laying down laws and laws from which there is no appeal to all our human experience; while what Bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this human experience in its very finiteness.
If this be true, as I believe it is, then religion is the most practical thing in life and the thought of God the greatest thought that can enter the human mind or heart. His reply is that religion is not superstition and does not rest upon a vague fear of the unseen forces of nature, but does rest upon "man's consciousness of his finiteness amid an infinite universe and of his sinfulness."
The body's being ruled by the soul is due to the unseen principle in the form of good and evil works, and has for its end the requital of those works. Your analogy would thus imply that the Lord also is under the influence of an unseen principle, and is requited for his good and evil works. The Lord cannot therefore be a ruler. Finiteness or absence of omniscience.
The earth is as yet not half explored, and its cultivation and development, in comparison with what shall some time be, have scarcely begun. Will not the race be blessed, when its two mortal foes, Nature and the alphabet, have been finally and forever subdued? This necessary finiteness of literature may be illustrated in another way.
Our present Conception, that the Earth turns round on its axis once every day, and rolls in its orbit round the Sun once in every year, may be called a Reality to our finite Senses; but I shall show later on that, except for the finiteness of our senses and the imperfection of our Knowledge, the Concept is not a true one.
What pantheism taught was that God cannot be known practically that He is without limitations or conditions that we can distinguish Him from our finiteness only by divesting our conception of Him of all that we are wont to predicate of ourselves. He is subject to no such limitations as good or evil. To know the God of the Bhagavad Gita is to know that he cannot be known.
For to me the word seemeth capable of two senses, universal and special: first, a form indicating to A. B. C. &c., the existence and finiteness of some one other being 'demonstrative' as 'hic', and 'disjunctive' as 'hic et non ille'; and in this sense God alone can be without body: secondly, that which is not merely 'hic distinctive', but 'divisive'; yea, a product divisible from the producent as a snake from its skin, a precipitate and death of living power; and in this sense the body is proper to mortality, and to be denied of spirits made perfect as well as of the spirits that never fell from perfection, and perhaps of those who fell below mortality, namely, the devils.
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