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Updated: May 6, 2025
Wherein had she failed of duty? her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just reward. It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent soul. It was life he accepted to-night, he thought, a life of growth, labor, achievement, eternal. "Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast," favorite words with him. "Ohne Hast."
Speaking of Nature as self-existent and eternal, Mr. Holyoake ascribes such attributes to it as might seem to imply a leaning towards Pantheism, rather than the colder form of mere material Atheism. "It seems to me," he says, "that Nature and God are one; in other words, that the God whom we seek is the Nature whom we know."
Nature is self-existent; she will always exist; she produces every thing; contains within herself the cause of every thing; her motion is a necessary consequence of her existence; without motion we could form no conception of nature; under this collective name we designate the assemblage of matter acting by virtue of its peculiar energies.
But neither the simple concept of Being, which is derived from experience and framed by abstraction, nor the additional concept of self-existent Being, which springs from the action of our rational faculties on the data furnished by experience, can afford any explanation of the nature and origin of the real, concrete existences in the universe.
The "Substance" of which he speaks is God, the infinite, self-existent, eternal Being, whose essential nature is defined in terms which might seem to be expressive of a great truth, for he says: "I understand by God an absolutely infinite Being, that is to say, a Substance constituted by an infinity of Attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence."
The former is more simple, clear, and like to nature in the self-existent perfection of her separate works; the latter, notwithstanding its fragmentary appearance, approaches more to the secret of the universe. For Conception can only comprise each object separately, but nothing in truth can ever exist separately and by itself; Feeling perceives all in all at one and the same time.
In a word, Gautama never reached the idea of a personal self-existent God, though toward that truth he groped. He was satisfied too soon. His followers were even more easily satisfied with abstractions. When Gautama saw the power over the human heart of inward culture and of love to others, he obtained peace, he rested on certainty, he became the Buddha, that is, the enlightened.
This principle or law of human thought leads him up to a region which far transcends his present sensible experience, and guides him to the stupendous height of self-existent and eternal Being. It is assumed and applied to prove the self-existence and eternity of matter.
That there is no creature now tenanting Bedlam who would or could scribble purer nonsense about God than this of Newton's, we are well convinced for how could the most frenzied of brains imagine anything more repugnant to every principle of good sense than a self-existent, eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent Being, creator of all the worlds, who acts the part of 'universal emperor, and plays upon an infinitely larger scale, the same sort of game as Nicholas of Russia, or Mohammed of Egypt, plays upon a small scale.
"Markandeya replied, 'Indeed, I shall explain all, after having bowed down to that Self-existent, Primordial Being, who is eternal and undeteriorating and inconceivable, and who is at once vested with and divested of attributes. O tiger among men, this Janardana attired in yellow robes is the grand Mover and Creator of all, the Soul and Framer of all things, and the lord of all!
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