"A belated wayfarer mistakes a piece of rope lying on the road for a snake; the delusion disappears, but the rope remains the rope. So with the apparitional world: the delusion passes, and unity remains.[AA]
"All the figments of the world-fiction may be made to disappear in such a way that pure thought, or the self, shall alone remain, in the same manner as the fictitious serpent seen in a piece of rope may be made to disappear, and the rope that underlies it may be made to remain. The rope was only the rope all the time it falsely seemed to be a snake. The fictitious world may be made to disappear as the fictitious snake is made to disappear, and this is its sublation."[AB]
Professor Seth, referring in his book, entitled The Position of Man in the Kosmos, to Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, remarks: "Reality 'must own' and somehow include appearance." In another part of his book he writes: "We are ourselves immersed in the process of the universe. We can only live our own life, and see through our own eyes. If we could do more, that would mean that we ourselves had vanished from the universe; the place which had known us would know us no more; and there would be, as it were, a gap created in the tissue of the world."
Under "Mysticism," in the Encyclopædia Britannica, we read: "Our consciousness of self is the condition under which we possess a world to know and to enjoy; but it likewise isolates us from all the world beside. Reason is the revealer of nature and God; but, by its acts, reason seems the thing reasoned about. Hence mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire—a union in which the consciousness of self has disappeared, and in which, therefore, subject and object are one."
The Great Self, or Immanent Power—expressions barely communicable to the understanding by the rather restrictive sounding and abrupt terminology of the word "God"—perhaps nearer in thought to the Will in Nature of Schopenhauer—with which the Brahmins of India sought communion, has been to them from time immemorial the Alpha and Omega of their being. When religion steps in it is a frame of mind, not a set of opinions. They cannot in truth be called superstitious; they are, to coin a word, substitious. They sink, plummet-wise, into the fathomless; the line is severed, and they are lost in the depths and caverns of nescience. The concrete, with them, has always ranked lower than the abstract.
Vamadéo Shastri, writing in the Fortnightly Review of November, 1898, on the theological situation in India, says:—
In Europe, as I understand, your churches have long ago closed the era of unlimited metaphysical speculation, retaining only certain mysterious dogmata that are authoritatively prescribed as facts—that are not philosophical discoveries, but are declarations of revealed truth.
You have drawn up your creeds; you have settled finally all essential beliefs in future rewards and punishments, in man's redemption from sin and resurrection, and, above all, in a Divine Personality. You have numbered and ended the list of your sacred books; you look for no fresh revelation; you have regulated by ordinances the rites and ceremonies which unite the worshippers and divide the Churches....
But I want you to understand that we are still wandering in the metaphysic wilderness, and that Christianity, returning at last after an interval of so many centuries, finds us still engaged on the same problems as those which occupied the schools of Antioch and Alexandria and the secret professors of the Jewish Kabbala.
We have never yet set limits, either by philosophic criticism or by ecclesiastic ordinance, to the range of free inquiry or to the thinking faculty. We cannot submit to the restrictions placed by faith upon inquiry into mysteries; we are driven by our mental constitution to overleap the bounds of sentient experience, and to construct, like your ancient heretics, some intelligible theory of the unconditioned.
We are incapable of apprehending a Personality, except in the sense of something that masks or represents an incomprehensible notion; and dogmatic systems are to us no more than the formal envelopes of spiritual truth.
Two cardinal ideas run through our deeper religious thought. One is the Maya, or cosmic illusion, which cuts the knot of any difficulty touching the relation between Spirit and Matter, and produces Unity by exhibiting the visible universe as a shadow projected upon the white radiance of eternity; the other is the notion of the soul's deliverance by long travail from existence in any stage or shape.
In short, we have a religion, but no theology.
"By Plotinus 'The One' is explicitly exalted above the 'νοῦς' and the 'ideas'; it transcends existence altogether, and is not cognizable by reason. Remaining itself in repose, it rays out, as it were, from its fulness an image of itself, which is called 'νοῦς,' and which constitutes the system of ideas, or the intelligible world. The soul is in turn the image or product of the 'νοῦς' and the soul, by its motion, begets corporeal matter. The soul thus faces two ways—towards the 'νοῦς,' from which it springs, and towards the material life, which is its own product" (vide Encyclopædia Britannica).
A consideration of the theosophy of the "Sohar," or Book of Splendour, does not afford a key to the solution of this problem. We meet there with the same difficulty, the inconceivable transition point, where the "inactive" mingles with the "active." Ensoph is the Absolute, the great "I am," the endless, the boundless, the incomprehensible.
Mr. Bradley, in his book on Appearance and Reality, asks whether we really have a positive idea of an absolute defined as "one comprehensive sentience"; and he answers that, while we cannot fully realize its existence, its main features are drawn from our own experience, and we have also a suggestion there of the unity of a whole embracing distinctions within itself. "Identity only exists through differences, unity through multiplicity. Such is the constant thesis of the Hegelian philosophy."[AC]