It is remarkable and quite characteristic that the whole difficulty and
its peculiar nature become much more intelligible to us through the
familiar images and expressions of religion. There we readily admit that
we cannot comprehend the number of the stars and stellar spaces, because
for us they never reach an end, there being always one more; but that in
the eyes of God all is embraced in His universality, in a “perfect
synthesis,” and that to Him Being is never and in no point “always one
more.” God does not count.
Without the help of religious expressions we say: Being itself is always
itself and never implies any more; for if there were “always one more” it
would not be Being. It can only exist “as a perfect synthesis,” which does
not mean an endless number, which nevertheless somewhere comes to an
end—again wooden iron—but something above all reckoning and beyond all
number, as it is beyond space and time. And that which we are able to
weigh and measure and number is therefore not reality itself, but only its
inadequate manifestation to our limited capacity for understanding.
But enough of this. The puzzles in the doctrines of the simple and the
complex, of the causeless and the caused, into which this world of ours
forces us, should teach us further to recognise it for what it
is—insufficient and pointing beyond itself,—to its own transcendent
depths. So, too, the problems that arise when we penetrate farther and
farther into the ever more and more minute, and the indefiniteness of our
thought-horizons in general should have the same effect.
Intuitions of Reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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