United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I had found a triumphant answer to the charge of Ditheism, in that I believed the Son to be derived from the Father, and not to be the Unoriginated No doubt! yet, after all, could I seriously think that morally and spiritually I was either better or worse for this discovery? I could not pretend that I was.
For the sole alternative is one which would be equally mysterious, and besides, contradictory to the marks of change of transition and of perishableness in our planet itself, viz. the hypothesis of an eternal unoriginated race: and that is more confounding to the human intellect than any miracle whatever: so that, even tried merely as one probability against another, the miracle would have the advantage.
Hence Brahman is something, or someone, transcendently great. The word may be defined as connoting that whence all things proceed. This implies absolute, unoriginated origin, absolute subsistence, and also reabsorption, for as all things go forth from Brahman, so shall all things return to that whence they started forth.
But it is not the existence of these natural laws, nor even their regular operation in the common course of Providence, that is hostile to our religious beliefs, it is only the supposition that they are unoriginated, independent, and invariable; and to assume this without proof, as if it were a self-evident or axiomatic truth, or to apply it in a process of historical deduction respecting either the past development or the future prospects of the race, is such a shameless begging of the whole question, that we know of no parallel to it except in the kindred speculations of Strauss, who assumes the same radical principle, and gravely tells us that whatever is supernatural must needs be unhistorical.
This last argument led Aristotle to the concept of an eternal matter, the basis of becoming for all else besides, itself not subject to any such process. It is an ultimate, to ask for the origin of which would signify to misunderstand the meaning of origin. All things of the sublunar world originate in matter, hence matter itself is the unoriginated, the eternal.
It is without stability, without movement, without basis: it is the end of sorrow, unborn, unoriginated, uncreated, uncompounded ." The statements about nirvana in the Questions of Milinda are definite and interesting. In this work , Nâgasena tells King Milinda that there are two things which are not the result of a cause, to wit space and Nirvana.
Word Of The Day