What is always reckoned the mystery by pre-eminence is the union of BODY
and MIND. How, then, should we treat this Mystery according to the
spirit of modern thought, according to the modern laws of explanation?
The course is to _conceive_ the elements according to the only possible
plan, our own sensibility or consciousness; which gives us matter as one
class of facts--extension, inertness, weight, and so on; and mind as
another class of facts--pleasures, pains, volitions, ideas. The
difference between these two is total, diametrical, complete; there is
really nothing common to the experience of pleasure and the experience
of a tree; difference has here reached its _acme_; agreement is
eliminated; there is no higher genus to include these two in one; as the
ultimate, the highest elements of knowledge, they admit of 110 fusion,
no resolution, no unity. Our utmost flight of generality leaves us in
possession of a double, a _couple_ of absolutely heterogeneous elements.
Matter cannot be resolved into mind; mind cannot be resolved into
matter; each has its own definition; each negatives the other.
This being the fact, we accept it, and acquiesce. There is surely
nothing to be dissatisfied with, to complain of, in the circumstance
that the elements of our experience are, in the last resort, two, and
not one. If we had been provided with fifty ultimate experiences, none
of them having a single property in common with any other; and if we had
only our present limited intellects, we might be entitled to complain
of the world's mysteriousness in the one proper acceptation of
mystery--namely, as overpowering our means of comprehension, as loading
us with unassimilable facts. As it is, matter, in its commoner aspects
and properties, is perfectly intelligible; in the great number and
variety of its endowments or properties, it is revealed to us slowly and
with much difficulty, and these subtle properties--the deep affinities
and molecular arrangements--- are the mysteries rightly so called. Mind
in itself is also intelligible; a pleasure is as intelligible as would
be any transmutation of it into the inscrutable essence that people
often desiderate. It is one of the facts of our sensibility, and has
a great many facts of its own kindred, which makes it all the more
intelligible.
The varieties of pleasure, pain, and emotion are very numerous; and to
know, remember, and classify them, is a work of labour, a _legitimate_
mystery. The subtle links of thought are also very various, although
probably all reducible to a small number; and the ascertaining and
following out of these has been a work of labour and time; they have,
therefore, been mysterious; mystery and intellectual toil being the real
correlatives. The _complications_ of matter and the _complications_ of
mind are genuine mysteries; the reducing or simplifying of these
complications, by the exertions of thinking men, is the way, and the
only way out of the darkness into light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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