Inalienability

“ There is, in fact, not a single object of our experience that we cannot suppose annihilated. Extend this annihilation of a first object to a second, then to a third, and so on as long as you please: the nought is the limit toward which the operation tends. And the nought so defined is the annihilation of everything. ”

“ Outside the religions, there are four imaginable solutions and no more: total annihilation; survival with our consciousness of to-day; survival without any sort of consciousness; lastly, survival in the universal consciousness, or with a consciousness different from that which we possess in this world.
2 Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. ”

“ Now, we know that every effect must also be a cause, and that every cause must be an effect. The atoms coming together did produce an effect, and as every effect must also be a cause, the effect produced by the collision of the atoms, must as to something else have been a cause. Then we have matter, force, law, order, cause and effect without a being superior to-nature. Nothing is left for the supernatural but empty space. His throne is a void, and his boasted realm is without matter, without force without law, without cause, and without effect. ”

“ One day, when I was in his company, a certain pretender of Níshápúr happened to use the expression: “He becomes annihilated and then becomes subsistent.” Khwája Muẕaffar said: “How can subsistence (baqá) be predicated of annihilation (faná) ? Annihilation means ‘not-being’, while subsistence 171refers to ‘being’: each term negates the other. We know what annihilation is, but when it is not, if it becomes ‘being’, its identity (`ayn) is lost. Essences are not capable of annihilation. Attributes, however, can be annihilated, and so can secondary causes. ”

“ Now this, regarded as an explanation (`ibárat) , is an excellent saying, but neither annihilation nor subsistence can be annihilated: every subsistent thing that suffers annihilation is annihilated from itself, and every annihilated thing that becomes subsistent is subsistent from itself. Annihilation is a term of which it is impossible to speak hyperbolically. If a person says that annihilation is annihilated, he can only be expressing hyperbolically the non-existence of any vestige of the idea of annihilation ”

“ The first point which he desired to emphasise was that human intelligence should hesitate before no improbability, however improbable, provided that some explanation was humanly conceivable, and no definite material object rendered the improbability an impossibility. ”

“ But how, if the alien nature contradicts his own, fights with it, perplexes, and confounds it? How, again, if not one alien nature, but two, but three, but four, but five, are introduced within what once he thought the inviolable sanctuary of himself? These, however, are horrors from the kingdoms of anarchy and darkness, which, by their very intensity, challenge the sanctity of concealment, and gloomily retire from exposition. ”

“ But is not the birth of this illusion too an inexplicable mystery, if human consciousness be a web of unchangeable relations? How did it issue from the eternity of thought in order to project itself into time? Moreover, if the Absolute live in it, must not its every idea perforce be true? In Green’s philosophy there is no room for error and illusion, which can only be understood if we admit a certain degree of independence and spontaneity in the individual subject as against Absolute Consciousness. ”

“ No sooner did he see me, however, than he gave me one sharp glance from his keen black eyes, perpended for a second whether to trust me or not, and then, this way and that dividing the swift mind, came quickly at the end to the safe conclusion that men were bad lots, even when they pretend to be playing the observant philosopher. So up the smooth bark he darted, quick as thought, finding his foothold by magic, as is the wont of his race, all ignorant of Newton’s troublesome theory of gravitation. ”

“ To explain the world, whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and free will,—between the Infinite Personality, which should [78] seem boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to bound it,—let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain appears in the Prometheus Bound, for alas it was an old grief when Æschylus was a baby. ”

“ If he cannot take care of his affairs. Where none of these circumstances exist, there should be no confinement. For though the mistaken idea continues to exist, yet if no actions are produced in consequence of it, the patient cannot be called insane, he can only be termed delirious. If every one, who possesses mistaken ideas, or who puts false estimates on things, was liable to confinement, I know not who of my readers might not tremble at the sight of a madhouse!
The most convenient distribution of insanities will be into general, as mania mutabilis, studium inane, and vigilia ”

“ There is in matter an unlimited potentiality, incommensurate with the limited efficacy of natural agencies. Hence it evades the absolute control of all finite factors and forces. But the anomalies and irregularities, which are contingent upon the limitation or frustration of second causes unable to impose an iron necessity upon evasive matter, are not referable to the First Cause, but rather to the finite efficacy of second causes. Such anomalies in natural processes, consequently, are not inconsistent with infinite wisdom and power on the part of the Creator. ”

“ For though finite minds, as has been before argued, bear a resemblance to God, yet they bear no proportion to his infinity; and therefore there is not and cannot be any being, beings or agency of being or beings, complexly considered or otherwise, which are infinite in capacity, or which are infinitely evil and detestable in the sight of God, in that unlimited sense; for the actions or agency of limited beings, are also limited, which is the same as finite: so that both the virtues and vices of man are finite ”

“ Such facts show at once that any idea of inevitable or of universal progress is untenable, the product of an irrational idealism which prefers its own desires to reality. They show further that, up to the present, suffering and pain on the one hand, and on the other degeneration in a certain number of individuals, are as universal and apparently inevitable in human as in animal evolution. ”

“ Even Pliny makes it a question. The apparent eternal cosmical alternation of existence and destruction is not annihilation; it is merely the transition of matter into new forms, into combinations which are subject to new processes. ”

“ Annihilate, they say, every human being—nay, all life—and the objects will remain as they are, and retain the same reality. Yes, the same reality; which means that if just one fortunate fellow escaped annihilation, he would find them all just as they were. ”

“ For a consistent scientific thinking that goes this way, therefore, nothing is left but to recognize chaos as the only real basis of an apparently ordered world, a chaos on whose surface the laws that seem to hold sway are only the illusory picturings of the human mind. This, then, is the principle of Indeterminacy as it has been encountered in the course of practical investigation into the electrical processes within physical matter. ”

“ Abú Sa’íd Kharráz, the author of the doctrine, says: “Annihilation is annihilation of consciousness of manhood (`ubúdiyyat) , and subsistence is subsistence in the contemplation of Godhead (iláhiyyat) ,” i.e., it is an imperfection to be conscious in one’s actions that one is a man, and one attains to real manhood (bandagí) when one is not conscious of them, but is annihilated so as not to see them, and becomes subsistent through beholding the action of God. ”

“ We who believe in iron law, which surely implies a rigid pattern, are by a curious want of logic sceptics, and we treat each new emergence of the pattern as a strange exception to scientific rule. We cannot believe that Nature arranged howlings of dogs and disasters in the stars to accompany the death of a Cæsar or a Napoleon. Everything that we can call dramatic in Nature we put down to chance and coincidence. Superstitious people confront us with instance upon instance of the succession of omen and event, but we label these exception No. ”

“ But with the dawn of consciousness an entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos.
The enemies of evolution have been quick to pounce upon this undeniable discontinuity in the data of the world and many of them, from the failure of evolutionary explanations at this point, have inferred their general incapacity all along the line. Every one admits the entire incommensurability of feeling as such with material motion as such. ”

“ Of immateriality, said Imlac, our ideas are negative, and therefore obscure. Immateriality seems to imply a natural power of perpetual duration as a consequence of exemption from all causes of decay: whatever perishes, is destroyed by the solution of its contexture, and separation of its parts; nor can we conceive how that which has no parts, and therefore admits no solution, can be naturally corrupted or impaired. ”

“ The anomalies, or, rather, the contradictions which we seem to find in the applications of the idea of the infinite, when any thing is presented to us as infinite which we afterwards discover not to be so, originate in the application of this idea under different conditions. ”

“ At the outset of all investigation, we are forced to recognise that the only way we can approach conception of the Infinite is necessarily in the form of a negative, the negative applying to those things of which [Pg 108] we have cognisance; we carry our thought to the utmost limit possible with our present knowledge, and, when we have come to a standstill, we conceive the Infinite to be not that but something further on. ”

“ The illusion arises from our constitutional tendency to put the positive pole of the category of relation — Substance, Cause, Agent — as if it were something additional to the system of experience, instead of merely a term within this. It is thus itself a contradiction, one not simply functional but organic, and therefore provokes to endless other contradictions. ”

“ The alienation of immediacy
The term alienation requires a short explanation. Generally, it is used to describe the estrangement, through work, of human beings from the object of their effort. Awareness of having one's life turned into products, which then appear to those who made them as entities in themselves, open to anybody to appropriate them in the market, is an expression of alienation. There are quite a number of other descriptions, but basically, alienation is a process of having something that is part of us (our bodies, thoughts, work, feelings, beliefs, etc.) ”

“ But this mystery [i. e., the existence of evil] , vast and inscrutable as it is, is but one aspect of a more general problem; it is but the moral form of the ever-recurring secret of the Infinite. How the Infinite and the finite, in any form of antagonism or other relation, can exist together; how infinite power can coexist with finite activity; how infinite wisdom can coexist with finite contingency; how infinite goodnesss can coexist with finite evil ”

“ Allen means what he does mean, the outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself' whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate, which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or scientific character. ”

“ When then, as in the insane, all the restraining powers of the mind are lost, can we wonder that the mental energies should be subject to accidental and baneful influences? that they should impetuously rush with fearful, because with unguided force, into the most opposite and direful extremes? These extremes, however, always correspond to the individual peculiarity of mind, and the nature of the exciting causes, which exciting causes often exist internally long before they become externally evident ”

“ We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left—progress—a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. ”

“ These conditional plans of superintendance must be allowed the widest range, a range which no inexperienced person, still less those who have false notions and impressions of the general character of the insane, can possibly imagine, and for which no acts or rules can give directions—How then can those without knowledge and experience pretend to undertake such a charge? ”