Konx Om Pax

viii KONX OM PAX solemn fool to assert that nothing ever was so plain, and (with a little luck) the rest of the solemn fools—brief, all England—to follow them: till Konx om Pax replace Reading without Tears in every Infant School. Yet, suppose this were to happen, how would the world be advanced? In no wise. For the brilliance wherein we walk will be but thick dark ness to all those who have not become so blind that light and darkness are akin. The light wherein I write is not the light of reason; it is not the darkness of unreason ; it is the L. V. X. of that which, first master ing and then transcending the reason, illumines all the darkness caused by the interference of the opposite waves of thought; not by destroy ing their balance, and thereby showing a false and partial light, but by overleaping their limitations. Let not the pedant exclaim with Newman that I avoid the Scylla of Ay and the Charybdis of Nay by the Straits of No-meaning. Athing is not necessarily A or not-A. It may be outside the universe of discourse wherein A and not-A exist. It is absurd to say of Virtue either that it is green or not-green; for Virtue has nothing to do with colour. It is one of the most suggestive definitions of KONX—the LVX of the Brethren of the Rosy Cross—that it transcends all the possible pairs of opposites. Nor does this sound nonsensical to those who are acquainted with That LVX. But to those who do not, it must (I fear) remain as obscure and ridiculous as spherical trigonometry to the inhabitants of Flatland. Kant and others have remarked on the similarity of our hands and feet, and the impossibility of one replacing its fellow in ordinary 3-di mensional space. This to them suggested a space in which they can be made to coincide. Similarly, a consistent equilibration of all imaginable opposites will suggest to us a world in which they are truly one; whence to that world itself is but the shortest step. All our contradictories are co-ordinate curves; they are on opposite sides of the axis, but otherwise are precisely similar, just as in the