Persons who assume to know all about God, as if He lived just around
the corner, as Matthew Arnold said, will not find much comfort in
Emerson's uncertainty and blind groping for adequate expression
concerning Him. How can we put the All, the Eternal, in words? How can
we define the Infinite without self-contradiction? Our minds are cast
in the mould of the finite; our language is fashioned from our
dealings with a world of boundaries and limitations and concrete
objects and forces. How much can it serve us in dealing with a world
of opposite kind--with the Whole, the Immeasurable, the Omnipresent,
and Omnipotent? Of what use are our sounding-lines in a bottomless
sea? How are we to apply our conceptions of personality to the
all-life, to that which transcends all limitations, to that which is
everywhere and yet nowhere? Shall we assign a local habitation and a
name to the universal energy? As the sunlight puts out our lamp or
candle, so our mental lights grow pale in the presence of the Infinite
Light. We can deal with the solid bodies on the surface of the earth,
but the earth as a sphere in the heavens baffles us. All our terms of
over and under, up and down, east and west, and the like, fail us. You
may go westward around the world and return to your own door coming
from the east. The circle is a perpetual contradiction, the sphere a
surface without boundaries, a mass without weight. When we ascribe
weight to the earth, we are trying it by the standards of bodies on
its surface--the pull of the earth is the measure of their weight; but
the earth itself--what pulls that? Only some larger body can pull
that, and the adjustment of the system is such that the centripetal
and centrifugal forces balance each other, and the globes float as
lightly as any feather.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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