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The secondary I consider as an echo of the former; it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects are essentially fixed and dead. Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites.
But now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine.
It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.
In the succession of the seasons, the rising and setting, the fixities and aberrations, of the heavenly bodies, in the mysteries of coming into being and passing out of it, in these and other similar marvels, and in the thoughts which they evoked, a whole and ample world seemed open for inquiry.
The concept of mechanism suits the phenomena which occur within the zone of wreckage, on this shore of fixities and corpses. But life itself is rather finality, if not in the anthropomorphic sense of premeditated design, plan, or programme, at least in this sense, that it is a continually renewed effort of growth and liberation.
For the scholar the hour is not an interval, but a coincidence, an instantaneous arrangement, and time is resolved into a dust of fixities, as in those pneumatic clocks in which the hand moves forward in jerks, marking nothing but a sequence of pauses.
Concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of truth, so that for any knowledge of ours to be quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by particular experiences, for these notoriously are mutable and corruptible.
We are glad to be driven from false, automatic fixities, anyhow. And once we are driven right on to nihilism we may find a way through. So, there is nothing absolute left in the universe. Nothing. Lord Haldane says pure knowledge is absolute. As far as it goes, no doubt. But pure knowledge is only such a tiny bit of the universe, and always relative to the thing known and to the knower.
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