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Immediate unity of quality and being which comes in the

"this" (Chapter xix.). The soul is not these things, and

we must now try to say what it is. It is one of these

same personal centres, not taken at an instant, but

regarded as a "thing." It is a feeling whole which is

considered to continue in time, and to maintain a

certain sameness. And the soul is, therefore, not

presented fact, but is an ideal construction which

transcends what is given. It is emphatically

the result of an ideal process; but this process, on the

other hand, has been arbitrarily arrested at a very low

point. Take a fleeting moment of your "given," and then,

from the basis of a personal identity of feeling,

enlarge this moment by other moments and build up a

"thing." Idealize "experience," so as to make its past

one reality with its present, and so as to give its

history a place in the fixed temporal order. Resolve its

contingency enough to view it as a series of events,

which have causal connections both without and within.

But, having gone so far, pause, and call a halt to your

process, or, having got to a soul, you will be hurried

beyond it. And, to keep your soul, you must remain fixed

in a posture of inconsistency. For, like every other

"thing" in time, the soul is essentially ideal. It has

transcended the given moment, and has spread out its

existence beyond that which is "actual" or could ever be

experienced. And by its relations and connections of co-

existence and sequence, and by its subjection to "laws,"

it has raised itself into the world of eternal verity.

But to persist in this process of life would be suicide.

Its advance would force you to lose hold altogether on

"existence," and, with that loss, to forfeit individual

selfness. And hence, on the other side, the soul clings

to its being in time, and still reaches after the

unbroken unity of content with reality. Its contents,

therefore, are allowed only to qualify the series of

temporal events. And this result is a mere compromise.

Hence the soul persists through a contrivance, and

through the application of matter to a particular

purpose. And, because this application is founded on and

limited by no principle, the soul in the end must be

judged to be rooted in artifice. It is a series, which

depends on ideal transcendence, and yet desires to be

taken as sensible fact. And its inconsistency is now

made manifest in its use of its contents. These (we have

seen) are as wide as tile Universe itself, and,

on this account, they are unable to qualify the soul.

And yet, on the other hand, they must do so, if the soul