The Star in the West

204 THE STAR IN THE WEST The Qabalah , if it may be called a philosophy ; for it was never synthetical , or concrete , being a con glomerated mass of ecstatic ideals and exalted desires , evolved in the mind of man as an attempt to grasp all possible quantities emanating from the Ain Soph , which in itself remained Zero . Turning now for a short time from the Mystic to the Idealistic philosophy , we find that though both are closely united , the former founds its system on man's wondering ignorance in trying to link subject and object esoterically , whilst the latter builds up reality in mind perceptions , treating nothing as illusion but the reality of the materialists . Berkeley , when he de clared in his transcendental philosophy that esse = percipi was only in reality reiterating the idea held ages pre viously in “ The Veil of Maya .” Kant threw more fuel on the Berkeleyan argument when he stated in his “ Critique of Pure Reason , ” that we can have no positive knowledge whatsoever of “ the thing in it self .” Since then this idea of the subjectivity of reality has gained more ground under Hegel , and later in numerous works dealing directly or indirectly with Spiritual Monisms . Even in the middle of the eight eenth century , forty years after Berkeley had stimu lated the dry bones of this problem into a vigorous existence , materialism waged but a losing , or at best an unprogressive war against it. Holbach himself had to admit that , though he considered Berkeley's arguments as sheer sophisms , they nevertheless re mained unanswerable . . . Idealism may not be correct , neither may its intenser form Spiritualism ; but so far as this argument is of value , neither may Realism nor Materialism ; for both these philosophies have , as we have just seen , resolved themselves into an infinite