THE SOLDIER AND THE HUNCHBACK
But McCabbage is wasted on the philosopher whose belief
in a soul rests on introspection ; we must have heavier metal ;
Hume will serve our turn, may be.
But Hume in his turn becomes perfectly futile, pitted
against the Hindu mystic, who is in constant intense enjoy-
ment of his new-found Atman. It takes a Buddha-gun to
knock 47s castle down.
Now the ideas of McCabbage are banal and dull; those of
Hume are live and virile; there is ajoy in them greater than the
joy of the Man in the Street. So too the Buddha-thought,
Anatta, is a more splendid conception than the philosopher’s
Dutch-doll-like Ego, or the rational artillery of Hume.
This weapon, too, that has destroyed our lesser, our
illusionary universes, ever revealing one more real, shall we
not wield it with divine ecstasy? Shall we not, too, perceive
the inter-dependence of the Questions and the Answers, the
necessary connection of the one with the other, so that (just as
o x ois an indefinite) we destroy the absolutism of either ?
or ! by their alternation and balance, until in our series
PLl?tPl?...12?1?... we care nothing as to which may
prove the final term, any single term being so negligible a
quantity in relation to the vastness of the series? Is it not
a series of geometrical progression, with a factor positive
and incalculably vast?
In the light of the whole process, then, we perceive that
there is no absolute value in the swing of the pendulum,
though its shaft lengthen, its rate grow slower, and its sweep
wider at every swing.
What should interest us is the consideration of the Point
from which it hangs, motionless at the height of things! We
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