On the very day before this the doctor had come out with one of his
terse startling statements. He had a way of inserting parenthetically
some of his scraps of wisdom. It was in an Ethics class. We quote his
words as near as possible:
“Man, let me tell you, is egotistic. All our philosophy is based on ego.
We live threescore years and we balance it with all eternity. We are it.
Did you ever stop and think of eternity? It is a rather long time.
What right have we to say that life, which we assume to be everlasting,
immediately becomes restrospect once it passes out of the conscious
individuality which is allotted upon this earth? The trouble is
ourselves. We are five-sensed. We weigh everything! We so measure
eternity. Until we step out into other senses, which undoubtedly exist,
we shall never arrive at the conception of infinity. Now I am going to
make a rather startling announcement.
“The past few years have promised a culmination which has been guessed
at and yearned for since the beginning of time. It is within, and still
without, the scope of metaphysics. Those of you who have attended my
lectures have heard me call myself the material idealist. I am a
mystic sensationalist. I believe that we can derive nothing from pure
contemplation. There is mystery and wonder in the veil of the
occult. The earth, our life, is merely a vestibule of the universe.
Contemplation alone will hold us all as inapt and as impotent as the
old Monks of Athos. We have mountains of literature behind us, all
contemplative, and whatever its wisdom, it has given us not one thing
outside the abstract. From Plato down to the present our philosophy
has given us not one tangible proof, not one concrete fact which we can
place our hands on. We are virtually where we were originally; and we
can talk, talk, talk from now until the clap of doomsday.
“What then?
“My friends, philosophy must take a step sidewise. In this modern age
young science, practical science, has grown up and far surpassed us. We
must go back to the beginning, forget our subjective musings and enter
the concrete. We are five-sensed, and in the nature of things we must
bring the proof down into the concrete where we can understand it. Can
we pierce the nebulous screen that shuts us out of the occult? We have
doubted, laughed at ourselves and been laughed at; but the fact remains
that always we have persisted in the believing.
“I have said that we shall never, never understand infinity while within
the limitations of our five senses. I repeat it. But that does not imply
that we shall never solve some of the mystery of life. The occult is not
only a supposition, but a fact. We have peopled it with terror, because,
like our forebears before Columbus, we have peopled it with imagination.
“And now to my statement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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