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No. 5
CHAPTER V THE DESTINY OF THE INDIVIDUAL By the Ignorance they cross beyond Death and by the Knowledge enjoy Immortality… By the Non-Birth they cross bend Death and by the Birth enjoy Immortality. Isha Upanishad. An omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concours2. Prom that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality.. All antinomies confront each ether in order to recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.
But this unity is in its nature indefinable. "When we seek to envisage it by the mind we are compelled to proceed through an infinite series of conceptions and experiences. And yet in the end we are obliged to negate our largest conceptions, our most comprehensive ex-
Page-257 pertinences in order to affirm that the Reality exceeds all definitions. We arrive at the formula of the Indian sages, Neti neti; " It is not this, It is not that," there is no experience by which we can limit It, there is no conception by which It can be defined. An Unknowable which appears to us in many states and attributes of being, in many forms of consciousness, in many activities of energy, this is what we can ultimately say about the existence which we ourselves are and which we see in all that is presented to our mind and senses. It is in and through those states, those forms, those activities that we have to approach and know the Unknowable. But if in our haste to arrive at a Unity that our mind can seize and hold, if in our insistence to confine the Infinite in our embrace we identify the Reality with any one definable state of being however pure and eternal, with any particular attribute however general and comprehensive, with any fixed formulation of consciousness however vast in its scope, with any energy or activity however boundless its application and if we exclude all the rest, then our thoughts sin against Its unknowable ness and arrive not at a true unity but at a division of the Indivisible.
So strongly was this truth perceived in the ancient times that the Vedantic Seers, even after they had arrived at the crowning idea, the convincing experience of Sachchidananda as the highest positive expression of the Reality to our consciousness, erected in their speculations or went on in their perceptions to an Asat, a Non-Being beyond, which is not the ultimate existence, the pure consciousness, the infinite bliss of which all our experiences are the expression or the deformation. If at all an existence, a consciousness, a bliss, it is beyond the highest and purest positive form of these things that here we can possess and other therefore than what here we know by these names. Buddhism, somewhat arbitrarily declared by the theologians to be an un-Vedic doctrine because it rejected the authority of the Scriptures, yet goes back to this essentially Vedantic conception. Only,
Page-258 the positive and synthetic teaching of the Upanishads beheld Sat and Asat not as opposites destructive of each other, but as the last antinomy through which we look up to the Unknowable. And in the transactions of our positive consciousness, even unity has to make its account with Multiplicity; for the Many also are Brahman. It is by Vidya, the Knowledge of the Oneness, that we know God; without it Avidya, the relative and multiple consciousness is a night of darkness and a disorder of Ignorance. Yet if we exclude the field of that Ignorance, if we get rid of Avidya as if it were a thing non-existent and unreal, then Knowledge itself becomes a sort of obscurity and a source of imperfection. We become f.s men blinded by a light so that we can no longer see the field which that light illumines. Such is the teaching, calm, wise and clear, of our most ancient sages. They had the patience and the strength to find and to know; they had also the clarity and humility to admit the limitation of our knowledge. They perceived the borders where it has to pass into something beyond itself. It was a later impatience of heart and mind, vehement attraction to an ultimate bliss or high masterfulness of pure experience and trenchant intelligence which sought the One to deny the Many and because it had received the breath of the heights scorned or recoiled from the secret of the depths. But the steady eye of the ancient wisdom perceived that to know God really, it must know Him everywhere equally and without distinction, considering and valuing but not mastered by the oppositions through which He shines. We will put aside then the trenchant distinctions of a partial logic which declares that because the One is the reality, the Many are an illusion, and because the Absolute is Sat, the one existence, the relative is Asat and nonexistent. If in the Many we pursue insistently the one, it is to return with the benediction and the revelation of the One confirming itself in the Many.
We will guard ourselves also against the excessive importance that the mind attaches to particular points of
Page-259 view at which it arrives in its more powerful expansions and transitions. The perception of the spiritualised mind that the universe is an unreal dream can have no more absolute a value to us than the perception of the materialised mind that God and the Beyond are an illusory idea. In the one case the mind, habituated only to the evidence of the senses and associating reality with corporeal fact, is either unaccustomed to use other means of knowledge or unable to extend the notion of reality to a supra-physical experience. In the other care the same mind, passing beyond to the overwhelming experience of an incorporeal reality, simply transfers the same inability and the same consequent sense of dream or hallucination to the experience of the senses. But we perceive also the truth that these two conceptions disfigure. It is true that for this world of form in which we are set for our self-realisation, nothing is entirely valid until it has possessed itself of our physical consciousness and manifested on the lowest levels in harmony with its manifestation on the highest summits. It is equally true that form and matter asserting themselves as a self-existent reality are an illusion of Ignorance. Form and matter can be valid only as shape and substance of manifestation for the incorporeal and immaterial. They are in their nature an act of divine consciousness, in their aim the representation of a status of the Spirit.
In other words, if Brahman has entered into form and represented Its being in material substance, it can only be to enjoy self-manifestation in the figures of relative and phenomenal consciousness. Brahman is in this world to represent Itself in the values of Life. Life exists in Brahman in order to discover Brahman in itself. Therefore man’s importance in the world is that he gives to it that development of consciousness in which its transfiguration by a perfect self-discovery becomes possible. To fulfil God in life is man’s manhood. He starts from the animal vitality and its activities, but a divine existence is his objective.
Page-260 But as in Thought, so in Life, the true rule of self-realisation is a progressive comprehension. Brahman expresses Itself in- many successive forms of consciousness, successive in their relation even if coexistent in being or coeval in Time, and Life in its self-unfolding must also rise to ever-new provinces of its own being. But if in passing from one domain to another we renounce what has already been given us from eagerness for our new attainment, if in reaching the mental life we cast away or belittle the physical life which is our basis, or if we reject the mental and physical in our attraction to the spiritual, we do not fulfil God integrally, nor satisfy the conditions of His self-manifestation. We do not become perfect, but only shift the field of our imperfection or at most attain a limited altitude. However high we may climb, even though it be to the Non-Being itself, we climb ill if we forget our base. Not to abandon the lower to itself, but to transfigure it in the light of the higher to which we have attained, is true divinity of nature. Brahman is integral and unifies many states of consciousness at a time ; we also, manifesting the nature of Brahman, should become integral and all-embracing. Besides the recoil from the physical life, there is another exaggeration of the ascetic impulse which this ideal of an integral manifestation corrects. The nodus of Life is the relation between three general forms of consciousness, the individual, the universal and the transcendent or supra-cosmic. In the ordinary distribution of life’s activities the individual regards himself as a separate being included in the universe and both as dependent upon that which transcends alike the universe and the individual. It is to this Transcendence that we give currently the name of God, who thus becomes to our conceptions not so much supracosmic as extracosmic. The belittling and degradation of both the individual and the universe is a natural consequence of this division : the cessation of both cosmos and individual by the attainment of the Transcendence would be, logically, its supreme conclusion. Page-261 The integral view of" the unity of Brahman avoids these consequences. Just as we need not give up the bodily life to attain to the mental and spiritual, so we can arrive at a point of view where the preservation of the individual activities is no longer inconsistent with our comprehension of the cosmic consciousness or our attainment to the transcendent and supracosmic. For the World-Transcendent embraces the universe, is one with it and does not exclude it, even as the universe embraces the individual, is one with him and does not exclude him. The individual is a centre of the whole universal consciousness; the universe is a form and definition which is occupied by the entire immanence of the Formless and Indefinable. This is always the true relation, veiled from us by our ignorance or our wrong consciousness of things. When we attain to knowledge or right consciousness, nothing essential in the eternal relation is changed, but only the in view and the out view from the individual center is profoundly modified and consequently also the spirit and effect of its activity. The individual is still necessary to the action of the Transcendent in the universe and that action in him does not cease to be possible by his illumination. On the contrary, since the conscious manifestation of the Transcendent in the individual is the means by which the collective, the universal is also to become conscious of itself, the continuation of the illumined individual in the action of the world is an imperative need of the world-play. If his inexorable removal through the very act of illumination is the law, then the world is condemned to remain eternally the scene of unredeemed darkness, death and suffering. And such a world can only be a ruthless ordeal or a mechanical illusion.
It is so that ascetic philosophy tends to conceive it. But individual salvation can have no real sense if existence in the cosmos is itself an illusion. In the Monistic view the individual soul is one with the Supreme, its sense of separateness an ignorance, escape from the sense of separateness and identity with the Supreme its salvation.
Page-262 But who then profits by this escape? Not the supreme Self, for it is supposed to be always and inalienably free, still, silent, pure. Not the world, for that remains constantly in the bondage and is not freed by the escape of any individual soul from the universal Illusion. It is the individual soul itself which effects its supreme good by escaping from the sorrow and the division into the peace and the bliss. There would seem then to be some kind of reality of the individual soul as distinct from the world and from the Supreme en in the event of freedom and illumination. But for the Illusionist the individual soul is an illusion and non-existent except in the inexplicable mystery of Maya. Therefore we arrive at the escape of an illusory non-existent soul from an illusory non-existent bondage in an illusory non-existent world as the supreme good which that non-existent soul has to pursue 1 For this is the last word of the Knowledge, "There is none bound, none freed, none seeking to be free. " Vidya turns out to be as much a part of the Phenomenal as Avid3-a ; Maya meets us even in our escape and laughs at the triumphant logic which seemed to cut the knot of her mystery. These things, it is said, cannot be explained; they are the initial and insoluble miracle. They are for us a practical fact and have to be accepted. We have to escape by a confusion out of a confusion. The individual soul can only cut the knot of ego by a supreme act of egoism, an exclusive attachment to its own individual salvation which amounts to an absolute assertion of its separate existence in the Maya. We are led to regard other souls as if they were figments of our mind and their salvation unimportant, our soul alone as if it were entirely real and its salvation the one thing that matters. I come to regard my personal escape from bondage as real while other souls who are equally myself remain behind in the bondage!
It is only when we put aside all irreconcilable antinomy between Self and the world that things fall into their place by a less paradoxical logic. We must accept the many-sidedness of the manifestation even while we
Page-263 assert the unity of the Manifested. And is not this after all the truth that pursues as wherever we cast our eyes, unless seeing we choose not so see? Is not this after all the perfectly natural and simple mystery of Conscious Being that It is bound neither by its unity, nor by its multiplicity? It is "absolute" in the sense of being entirely free to include and arrange in Its own way all possible terms of Its self-expression. There is none bound, none freed, none seeking to be free, for always That is a perfect freedom. It is so free that it is not even bound by its liberty. It can play at being bound without incurring a real bondage. Its chain is a self-imposed convention, Its limitation in the ego a transitional device that it uses in order to repeat its transcendence and universality in the scheme of the individual Brahman.
The Transcendent, the Supracosmic is absolute and free in Itself beyond Time and Space and beyond the conceptual opposites of finite and infinite. But in cosmos It
use its liberty of self-formation, Its Maya, to make a scheme of Itself in the complementary terms of unity and multiplicity, and this multiple unity It establishes in the three conditions of the subconscient, the conscient and the superconscient. For actually we see that the Many
objectified in form in our material universe
strait with a subconscious unity which expresses itself openly enough in cosmic action and cosmic substance, but of which they are not themselves superficially aware. In the conscient the ego becomes the superficial point at which the awareness of unity emerges; but it applies its perception of unity to the form and surface action and failing to take account of all that operates behind
flails also to realise that it is not only one in itself but one with others. This limitation "of the universal "I" in the divided ego-sense constitutes our imperfect individualised personality. But when the ego transcends the personal conscience it begins to include and be overpowered by that which is to us superconscious; it becomes aware of the cosmic unity and enters into the Transcendent Self which here cosmos expresses by a multiple oneness.
Page-264 The liberation of the individual soul is therefore the keynote of the definitive divine action ; it is the primary divine necessity and the pivot on which all else turns. It is the point of Light at which the intended complete self-manifestation in the Many begins to emerge. But the liberated soul extends its perception of unity horizontally as well as vertically. Its unity with the transcendent One is incomplete without its unity with the cosmic Many. And that lateral unity translates itself by a multiplication, a reproduction of its own liberated state at other points in the Multiplicity. The divine soul reproduces itself in similar liberated souls as the animal reproduces itself in similar bodies. Therefore, whenever even a single soul is liberated, there is a tendency to an extension and even to an outburst of the same divine self-consciousness in other individual souls of our terrestrial humanity and,—who knows?—perhaps even beyond the terrestrial consciousness. Where shall we fix the limit of that extension ? Is it altogether a legend which says of the Buddha that as he stood on the threshold of Nirvana, of the Non-Being, his soul turned back and took the vow never to make the irrevocable crossing so long as there was a single being upon earth undelivered from the knot of the suffering, from the bondage of the ego ?
But we can attain to the highest without blotting ourselves out from the cosmic extension. Brahman preserves always Its two terms of liberty within and of formation without, of expression and of freedom from the expression. We also, being That, can attain to the same divine self-possession. The harmony of the two tendencies is the condition of all life that aims at being really divine. Liberty pursued by exclusion of the thing exceeded leads along the path of negation to the refusal of that which God has accepted. Activity pursued by absorption in the act and the energy leads to an inferior affirmation and the denial of the Highest. But what God combines and
synthetics, wherefore should man insist on divorcing? To be perfect as He is perfect is the condition of His integral attainment.
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Through Avidly, the Multiplicity, lies our path out of the transitional egoistic self-expression in which death and suffering predominate; through Vidya consenting with Avidya by the perfect sense of oneness even in that multiplicity, we enjoy integrally the immortality and the beatitude. By attaining to the Unborn beyond all becoming we are liberated fro n this lower birth and death ; by accepting the Becoming freely as the Divine, we invade mortality with the immortal beatitude and become luminous
centers of its conscious self-expression in humanity.
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The Wherefore
of the Worlds THE CREATIVE PRINCIPLE By their mutual ignorance the various theories of the beginning of things only reveal their fundamental ignorance of the causes of existence. And one may class among these theories even those speculations which under the philosophic name of Agnosticism avow their ignorance and affirm it expressly as their point of departure. For if they do not pose the question of the wherefore of the worlds, it is because in reality they hold it to be solved. Under their Agnosticism their lurks, tacitly and ill-disguised, the postulate of an unknown First Principle. Some, even, perceive clearly that it is impossible to escape from the necessity of this postulate and affirm under the name of the Unknowable such a First Principle. But even those which confine themselves to the assertion of the empirical fact of evolution, those in whose view the universe is nothing but a perpetual motion without cause or finality, will be found always ready to assert that this motion reposes on the existence of an eternal force or an eternal substance. For many physicists nowadays the notion of ether as an absolute substratum of all phenomena takes the place of a creative Deity.
And, on the other hand, is not this formula of a creative God, which is the conclusion of the majority of the other theories, itself the most supremely agnostic of
Page-267 all formulas ? Does it not unconsciously disguise in its appeal to the miracle, the mystery of the primal act, the very ignorance that the partisans of the Unknowable avow ? Does not the affirmation of an eternal Being, creator of things, amount in fact to the statement of a principle of uncreated force or ‘substance from which things must have arisen ? No doubt, in one of these points of view we find the elements of a psychological explanation of the world conceived as the result of a free act of will, of thought; in the other, on the contrary, are resumed all the data of a mechanical conception assuring the fact of ‘evolution on the concrete base of a substantial realism, But, however contradictory all these theories may be in their form, they agree, in substance, ,in postulating as first fact an essential principle of existence, an absolute cause, personal or impersonal, a thing that is the mother of beings or a being that is the former of things. They have, moreover, this feature in common that none of them explains how from this Absolute, whether thing or being, pure matter or pure spirit, there could have come into existence a world of relativities at once subjective and objective. Far from solving the problem each of them merely translates into its own particular formula one or other of these two mysterious terms.
It is, besides, a misunderstanding of the problem to suppose that it can once for all be eluded or elucidated by putting it back in the far distant and mysterious origin of things. It helps the mind not at all to resume the difficulties and relegate them in a block to the single fact of the beginning; for they return incessantly in detail in the constant fact of perpetual recommencement. At each instant and in each act of creative evolution the mind sees renewed before it the prodigy of creation. And these words, creation, evolution, over which the opposing doctrines have so long battled, tell us neither of them any thing very much more than the other. Already a certain religious philosophy attempts to reconcile them by
considering the creative act as the first act of evolution and
Page-268 evolution itself as a continuous creation. One may go even farther and show that these apparently hostile words can1be reduced without difficulty to the same notion; for what is called creation is, not necessarily the first ?ct of all, but only the first discernable act of the evolution made by its importance in this point of view to appear to us as if unique, essential and primordial, and what is called evolution is not only the uninterrupted reproduction of creative acts indiscernable by their’ continuity, but the very mode of their production and even more their procedure than their processes. The idea of evolution throws light, then, on the idea of creation, but receives from it, in exchange, an equal service. And it is never without mutual detriment that they are separated in order to be opposed to each other. When we speak of the evolutionary action with the idea that it excludes the act of creation it is because we forget to ask ourselves how that can appear which was not yet or at least was not in the form in which it now becomes, how from that which was can be born that which is, and how even the least transformation can take place without a veritable act of creation. But, on the other hand, when we speak of an act of the creator with the idea that it explains the evolutionary action, we forget first to ask ourselves how this creator himself could reach such a point or how he could have produced anything at all without there taking place a veritable fact of evolution.
For in every act of creation, whatever otherwise may be its nature, there is always necessarily established that relation of antecedent and consequent which characterises the evolutionary action. The only difference is that in one case what appears derives from an antecedent more or less known and in the other from a principle of which we are ignorant, a reality without any visible relation with the phenomenon produced. The relation exists nevertheless between the two terms, whatever the first of them may be. All creation is a disguised evolution.
Page-269 What is creation ? What is meant by this word suspected and equivocal by reason of the confusions to which it lends itself and the extent to which it has been1 abused ? Certain of the senses given to it are, indeed, void of sense. If, for example, to create means to make; something out of nothing, as well say that the word signifies nothing. If there is any appearance of a creator, it is always, though he should be deprived of all other resource, from himself and not from nothing that he evolves in reality what he creates. But even if the creator were absent, if it were a question of a creative operation effected not only nihilo but a nihilo, by nothing an I by nobody, that is to say without any creator but itself, it is not from nothing but still from something that it would evolve in passing thus, without any assistance, from all that it was not to that which it becomes, from non-being to being. For by this "nothing" we mean without knowing it all or rather the all of which we know nothing. This " nothing " is only the symbol of our ignorance. And what we call non-being or nothingness is in sum, only the beyond of all our limits of existence. If creation means simple)’ self-creation, as well say that nothing is created which was not already virtually in existence before its appearance. Everything creates itself which appears, evolves, takes form or changes form ; and creation ca1 then no longer be distinguished from the work of universal and progressive manifestation. But it is not this ultimate sense which is generally given to the word, creation. Those who employ it, stop usually half way in their search after the primary fact. They furnish the creator with a propitious chaos all ready to be put in the form he chooses and from the concourse of these two they conceive the rise of the worlds of existence.
To create, then, means in their view to make something out of something else. And if the word keeps its value, it is because that other thing, in fact, could not give birth to aught without the power which sets it at
Page-270 work. It 13 in this sense that the word is applied to the production of the artist whose mastery has alone to be reckoned, since the only importance his material has for him is the obstacle it represents. Chaos can only discharge this negative role. But it is sufficient that it should be and that the creator should utilise it for the original act to appear as an act of formation or rather of transformation analogous to those which voluntarily or involuntarily every being is at each moment accomplishing. Certainly, it is quite possible that each great beginning has been the effect of an exceptional intervention of power or of will. In the great hierarchy of existence, there are formative beings who can thus create things. It is even possible that certain of them, before things took substantial form, drew from themselves the elements and the means of their creation. But docs not man at each instant, by his word, by his thought, thus create without knowing it ? And if such beings are called gods, who is not in some sort a god in the infinite relativity ? But whatever they be, great or little, all these formative gods are themselves only the effective forms assumed in the course of the evolution by the creative Principle. Theology, when, in order to explain the beginning of things, it make, appeal to one of these, though it be the first of all, only pushes farther back the problem of the genesis. For this problem consists precisely in the inquiry how anything or anyone capable of movement or of will could arise from the immobility of the Non-Being or from the immutability of the unknowable Being. Whatever be, indeed, the conceivable reality whose ‘pre-existence is postulated, the very fact that it is connected with the manifested world makes it also enter into the order of relativity whose first cause we seek. For the very idea of a creator contains under a form more concrete and familiar to the mind the whole enigma that has to be solved. It personifies the enigma, but it is only in appearance that it renders it less impenetrable.
Whether we consider the creator to be immanent or
Page-271 transcendent, alien to the world or one with it, whether we confound the idea of God with that of the universe, as in Pantheism, or identify the universe with the thought of God, as in Idealism, the question of the creator remains that of the creation itself. And the problem remains the same, whether it be of a first Being or of a first Thing. How could this being, if it is relative, rise out of the Absolute? And how if it is absolute, could it create the relative ? Can the Absolute create anything that does not already exist ? And if anything in the Absolute can create itself other than it is, how in so creating itself does it become the relative ? Or more simply, how, by what mystery of evolution does it become? * * * Absolute, relative, these words return with an indefatigable monotony at the term of each view of the problem. For the problem, in whatever aspect we may envisage it, is precisely that of the relations between the Absolute and the relative. It cannot then be resolved by the simple affirmation of the eternal Being or of the eternal substance which are postulated by the various theories. It is not in the Absolute alone, under the form of person or thing, that we must seek for the principle of the relative, but in a sort of relation between the two, between that which is, if we may use the expression, most absolute in the relative and that which is most relative in the Absolute. This relation cannot, indeed, be one of dependence or causality. But nothing prevents us from conceiving it as allowing the pure spontaneities of the relative to find in the absolute realities their own possible conditions or, if you prefer, the pure possibilities of the Absolute to realise themselves as relative. Why should not the Absolute have the power of forgetting itself in the relative
These two abstract terms, which appear to us so irreducible, are in fact exclusive only from one point of view, that of our own relative conceptions. There can be no exclusion in the Absolute. And here appears as something essentially distinctive and specific that character of
Page-272 exclusive affirmation which is assumed by the very principle of existence. But if we must attribute this form of relative affirmation to some power of primary activity and of creation, we may at least discover a preliminary and fundamental antecedent in the affirmation, also creative, of the Absolute itself in which all is included. If this Absolute escapes our thought, it is because all our contradictories become indistinguishable in its identity. It is indivisible and indiscernable unity. And nevertheless it discerns in this very unity the infinite multiplicity. It is the non-manifest which manifests itself to itself. And in its eternal objectification at once conscient and substantial is contained the foundation of the principle of distinction, determination, differentiation, without which things and the idea of things could not be. In order that from their absolute creation relative creations should come into existence, it suffices that to this principle of differentiation there should be added the principle of exclusive affirmation imposing as an absolute relativity that which was only a relative determination in the Absolute; or, rather, it is sufficient that from the infinity of being that which is to be the finite existence should exclude itself, should cut itself off by self-limitation. * * * One may thus place the origin of existences, their first cause, either in the profundities of the unconditioned which conditions them or in themselves, in their secret power of self-manifestation. It is this which explains the plurality of theories and the legitimacy of opposite points of view.
For to be in these worlds is to be thought, objectifies by the infinite Consciousness, willed by the eternal Will, formed in the image of the Eternal, but it is also to think oneself, to will oneself, to form oneself, to rise out of that which has no end nor beginning, no bound nor measure of Time or Space, from that which is without age and without limits and to enter into all that, to enchain
Page-273 oneself, subject oneself and reduce oneself to all that; it is to make oneself a thought when one was the Thought and a movement when one is the Immobile. The philosophical theories are therefore right, both those which place in the universe itself its immanent cause and those which seek its cause outside it in some transcendent beyond. And when their respective affirmations oppose and exclude each other, in that very opposition, unknown to then. ‘lies the secret for which they seek. For if the wherefore of things is founded on the decree of the Eternity which includes them all, it resides also in the law of mutual exclusion which they impose on themselves. Participating in the infinite possibilities of the Being, they draw from "its essence their power of becoming and from its pure liberty the bond of their future determinisms. Being, they make themselves. Children of the Uncreated, they create themselves, give birth to themselves, bring themselves into the world. From the play of the Absolute they pass into that which every relativity plays for itself. And their initial principle becomes by their own initiative that which affirms and manifests itself in every being, which becomes conscious in every ego as the desire to exist for A thing in itself and a desire to exist for oneself, a cause without cause, eternal and in cognizable, mother of beings and things, and the spontaneity of an effort evolving things towards being, is not this the double origin absolute and relative, the double reason for existence of Page-274 |