"All that philosophy has sought as cause, or reason," he says,
"pluralism subsumes in the status and the given fact, where it stands
as plausible as it may ever hope to stand. There may be disease in the
presence of a question as well as in the lack of an answer. We do not
wonder so strangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel
such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact]
and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational
foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth
and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience.
Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free
and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his
whole nature and environment, 'I will.' This is the Jovian _fiat_, the
pure cause. This is reason; this or nothing shall explain the world
for him. For how shall he entertain a reason bigger than
himself? . . . Let a man stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth;
the obsequious meridians will bow to him, and gracious latitudes will
measure from his feet."
This seems to be Blood's mystical answer to his own monistic statement
which I quoted above, that "freedom" has no fertility, and is no reason
for any special thing.[8] "Philosophy," Mr. Blood writes to me in a
letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can
only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and
more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and
unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This
throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass
philosophy. The insight that mystery,--the Mystery, as such is final,
is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, and deny it
absolutely, you can't be beaten; be assured of that. But the _Fact_
remains, and of course the Mystery." [9]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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