Section 14

OF THE HER ME TICS
peopled with devils. As man expands and grows wiser, lie discovers tte secret of the thunder, and utilizes the lightning. His God becomes more and more mysterious and farther removed. He tears down the altar upon which his bronze image rests and locates a throne in far space, upon some ultimate star, brighter than Sirius, out of sight, where he places a Beiug as grand as his imagination can conjure, to which all constellations do homage in their ceaseless whirl toward the center of the Universe, where the Giver of Light dispenses its beneficent rays. To this sublime Entity, anthropomorphic, terrible, giving birth to sun-systems, sending comets as fiery mes- sengers to the utmost verge of heaven with prophetic warnings, tossing meteors right aud left as signs and signals, surrounded by cherubs and cherubim, seraphs aud seraphim, angels and arch-angels, he kneels and prays. But the astronomer sweeps the sky for the great white throne and finds it not. He predicts the return of the comet, and gets an inkling of the meaning of the meteor. He
228 SOME MORE PHILOSOPHY
catches the shooting-star in invisible hands, and picks it to pieces. He analyzes the chemicals of distant suns with his spectrum, and discovers that the far-off and the near by, in substance, are one and the same. To comprehend heaven, he dives into earth. As geologist, he investigates the strata of the planet on which he lives, and learns from it how stars are made. He solves the riddle of the sky near home, and bases his deductions upon data close at hand. The majesty of Aldebaran and Sol are akin to that of the spinning ball on which he dwells, and the throne of God were as well set on Olympus as at the highest peak of a fiery star in mid-heaven. He is growing, and his God grows with him. There has come upon him the consciousness that the Little and the Great are equally mysterious and out of reach. He seizes his microscope and nervously hunts for the small, smaller, smallest, till the lens fails, and his eye is exhausted. In his terror of the minute, the immense vanishes, Life, more and more tiny, beyond him, exquisite! awful! The
OF THE HERMBTICS
majesty of tlie invisible frightens him; his intellect can no more grasp this never-ending power of divisibility, this decreasing ratio in amount, accompanied by activity as propor- tionate to itself as is the animus to the body of man, than it can comprehend the awful size and distance, one from another, of the suns above. This astronomer, geologist, microscopist, has long since abandoned his wood and stone image. His great white throne upon which sat au anthropomorphic God, went also and something more subtle and abstract compels obeisance. As a man of science, he harnessed the lightning, and now that he finds that the ponderosity of the stars can be calculated, and their substance discovered, he seeks a more mysterious and subtler Object to revere. A something which shall compel him by its very mystery to bow the head.
The Sphinx assumes a new mask each day to the explorer along the path of Truth; yet the Sphiux, for it is not a still creature, ever moves, and keeps ahead of man. By fast running he gains upon it and tears off
230 SOME MORE PHILOSOPHY
its disguise, but another appears more in- scrutible than the first, and the Sphinx, unfathomed, marches on. " Canst thou by searching find out God ? " Man leaves the outer and explores the inner; from physics to metaphysics, is but a step. He studies the Ego and the Alter Ego, the Subject and Object; he investigates the emotions, the intellect, the will; he reaches for the meeting place of physiology and phychology, matter and mind; he debates the power of choice, the influence of environ- ment, the truth of heredity; then back again to biology to mentally dissect the germ-cell and the nuclei, chemically analyzing the protoplasm, and frantically experimenting on the ameba, but, new-faced, the Sphinx moves on. Then turning upon himself, a true iconoclast, he tears out his own heart; with the dissecting instrument of intellect he probes it, and in the very act, its love and hate escape him. He attacks his own brain, to find the meaning of it also, and the subtle something recorded there, but thought van- ishes with the onslaught.
OF THE HERMETtCS
"Canst thou draw out Leviatliaii with a hook?"
The depths of man are fathomless. His Entity floats on its sea of being like a boat on the ocean, asking "Whence, whither?" but discerning no shore. Then striving to analyze Ego with Ego, desperate, over- mastered, balked, he finds the impossible iacing him full-orbed.
« « 4 « * tt
Nature manifests in innumerable forms. Where is the Ultimate upon which these phenomena rest? This very multiplicity, greeting man at every turn, necessitates Unity at the base. Before this Unknowable Unity, he pauses, absorbed and hushed. Effects have causes. He siu6.\t.s Principles; he finds in them stability and universality. The rule of a combination is changeless. Gravitation is unerring. Laws are com- batted by laws only. But what these laws, why? His lips are sealed, he finds no answer. Then slowly, surely, there dawns upon him the certainty that there must be a Principle of the principles, a Law of the
saa SOME MORE PHILOSOPHY
laws. At last he stands stripped of delusion
before the Ultimate, the Incomprehensible,
the ever-present Unity. The changeless
Mate of Change, for which he finds no name.
He coils, like a serpent, upon himself, and
unites the extremes of his own being, into
the spiral symbol of the East, to discover
the fixed Principle of principles — a devouring
mouth, drawing the lashing tail of Variety
into its depths. He uncoils and extends his
glittering body, stiff and stark in the sun,
to find the Law of laws dictating the length
' \ of the stretch. Licensed to create in variety,
;'' yet ever restricted by the Principle of Unity,
;'; discerning this incomparable pair, finding
\j. himself undiscoverable as IT, and discover-
( • able in many, awed by the opposition of the
two poles of his unfathomable being, shocked
i. at his puerile attempts in the days of his
H' youth to find out God, he holds his breath
r^^ and utters no sound, lest he desecrate the
p Everlasting, and profane the Unknown.
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