If two contradictory propositions can
be true, there is no more truth. What then is our reason, of which truth
is the object? We are seized with giddiness. Might not everything in the
world be illusion? and myself--? Listen to a voice which reaches us,
across the ages, from the countries crowned by the Himalayas. "Nothing
exists.... By the study of first principles, one acquires this
knowledge, absolute, incontestable, comprehensible to the intelligence
alone: I neither am, nor does anything which is mine, nor do I myself,
exist."[156] What is there beneath these strange lines? The feeling of
giddiness, which seeks to steady itself by language. Here is now the
modern echo of these ancient words. One of those writers who accept all,
in the hope of understanding all, describes himself as having come at
last to be aware that he is "only one of the most fugitive illusions in
the bosom of the infinite illusion." One of his colleagues expresses
himself on this subject as follows: "Is this the last word of all?--And
why not?--The illusion which knows itself--is it in fact an illusion?
Does it not in some sort triumph over itself? Does it not attain to _the
sovereign reality_, that of the thought which thinks itself, that of the
dream which knows itself a dream, that _of nothingness which ceases to
be so_, in order to recognize itself and to assert itself?"[157] We are
gone back to ancient India.
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