The real active and objective existence of this "one universe" is
made still more sure and is removed still further from all
possibility of "illusion," by the fact that we are forced to regard it
as being not only "our" universe but the universe also of those
"invisible companions" whose vision half-creates it and
half-discovers it, even as our own vision does. It is true that to
certain types of mind, for whom the definite recognition of mystery is
repugnant, it must seem absurd and ridiculous to be driven to the
acknowledgment of a thing's existence, while at the same time we
have to confess complete inability to predicate anything at all
about the thing except that it exists.
It must seem to such minds still more absurd and ridiculous that
we should be driven to recognize no less than three aspects of this
mysterious "something."
But since they are included in the same time and space, and since,
consequently, they are intimately connected with one another, it
becomes inevitable that we should take the yet further step and
regard them as three separate aspects of one and the same mystery.
Thus we are once more confronted with the inescapable trinitarian
nature of the system of things; and just as we have three ultimate
aspects of reality in the monistic truth of "the one time and space,"
in the pluralistic truth of the innumerable company of living souls
and the dualistic truth of the contradictory nature of all existence;
so we have three further ultimate aspects of reality, in the
incomprehensible "something" which holds all souls together; in
the incomprehensible "something" out of which all souls create the
universe; and in the incomprehensible "something" which forms
the substratum both of the souls of the invisible "companions of
men" and of the soul of every individual thing.
The supreme unity, therefore, in this complicated world, thus
revealed to us by the activity of the complex vision is the unity of
time and space. This unity is eternally reborn and eternally
re-discovered every time any living personality contemplates the
system of things. And since "the sons of the universe" must be
regarded as continually contemplating the system of things,
struggling with it, moulding it, and changing it, according to their
pre-existent ideal, we are compelled to assume that time and space
are eternal aspects of reality and that their eternal necessity gives
the system of things its supreme unity.
No isolated speculation of the logical reason, functioning apart
from the other attributes of the complex vision, can undermine this
supreme unity of time and space. The "a priori unity of
apperception" is an unreality compared with this reality. The
all-embracing cosmic "monad," contemplating itself as its eternal
object, is an unreality compared with this reality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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