THE ULTIMATE DUALITY
What we are really, all of us, in search of, whether we know it or not, is some concrete and definite symbol of life and the "object" of life which shall gather up into one living image all the broken, thwarted, devious, and discordant impressions which make up our experience. What we crave is something that shall, in some permanent form and yet in a form that can grow and enrich itself, represent and embody the whole circle of the joy and pain of existence. What we crave is something into which we can throw our personal joys and sorrows, our individual sensations and ideas, and know of a certainty that thrown into that reservoir, they will blend with all the joys and sorrows of all the dead and all the living.
Such a symbol in order to give us what we need must represent the ultimate reach of insight to which humanity has attained. It must be something that, once having come into existence, remains independent of our momentary subjective fancies and our passing moods. It must be something of clearer outlines and more definite lineaments than those vague indistinct ecstasies, half-physiological and half-psychic, which the isolated intuition brings us.
Such a symbol must represent the concentrated struggle of the human soul with the bitterness of fate and the cruelty of fate, its long struggle with the deadly malice in itself and the deadly malice in nature.
There is only one symbol which serves this purpose; a symbol which has already by the slow process of anonymous creation and discovery established itself in the world. I mean the symbol of the figure of Christ.
This symbol would not have sufficed to satisfy the craving of which I speak if it were only a "discovery" of humanity. The "God-man" may be "discovered" in nature; but the "Man-god" must be "created" by man.
We find ourselves approaching this symbol from many points of view, but the point of view which especially concerns us is to note how it covers the whole field of human experience. In this symbol the ultimate duality receives its "eternal form" and becomes an everlasting standard or pattern of what is most natural and most rhythmic. As I advance in my analysis of the relation of the ultimate duality to this symbolic figure of Christ, it becomes necessary to review once more, in clear and concise order, the various stages of thought by means of which I prove the necessity of some sort of universal symbol, and the necessity of moulding this symbol to fit the drama of One ultimate duality.
A summary of the stages of thought through which we have already passed will thus be inevitable; but it will be a summary of the situation from the view-point of a different angle.
Philosophy then is an attempt to articulate more vividly the nature of reality than such "reality" can get itself articulated in the confused pell-mell of ordinary experience. The unfortunate thing is that in this process of articulating reality philosophy tends to create an artificial world of its own, which in the end gets so far away from reality that its conclusions when they are confronted with the pell-mell of ordinary experience appear remote, strange, fantastic, arbitrary, and even laughable.
This philosophical tendency to create an artificial world which when confronted with the real world appears strange and remote is due to the fact that philosophers, instead of using as their instrument of research the entire complex vision, use first one and then another of its isolated attributes. But there must come moments when, in the analysis of so intricate and elaborate a thing as "reality" by means of so intricate and elaborate an instrument, as the complex vision, the most genuine and the least artificial of philosophies must appear to be following a devious and serpentine path.