Chapter XVIII: THE PROFOUND.--He leaves you at the edge, but himself plunges

like an expert diver into the vasty deeps; and there in twilight visible, if not in darkness felt, he converses with you about the mysterious, the metaphysical, the mystical, the profound. As you gaze with wondering vision, you hear a voice, but see no man. He invites you down into his caves of ocean thought; but, as you see not where he is, and know not the way to follow, nor think it worth while to go at a venture, you prefer remaining on the shore.

Nor is it always the _depth_ into which this talker delights to go. Were it this, with _transparency_, there would not be so much objection. He too frequently plunges into muddled waters, or makes them so by his movements therein. He persuades himself that he has acquired profound knowledge of philosophy from the dark and mystical writings of the Germans translated into English. With this persuasion he courts your attention, while he discourses to you in terms and phrases of marvellous vagueness about the Ego within us--the Infinite and the Immense, the Absolute, the Entity and Nonentity, and such-like subjects, of which you can make neither "top nor tail," and of which he knows nothing save the terms and phrases that he strings together with such adept expertness and palpable absurdity.

"What do you think," asked Mr. Stanley of Professor Rigg, "of Hegel's paradox, that nothing is equal to being, and that if being and nothing be conjoined you have existence?"

The Professor answered with his usual gravity and profundity: "Nothing could be more profound, and as lucid as profound, if Hegel's theory of the 'evolution of the concrete' was remembered. According to that theory the concrete is the idea which, as a unity, is variously determined, having the principle of its activity within itself, while the origin of the activity, the act itself, and the result, are one, and constitute the concrete. The innate contradiction of the concrete is the basis of its development, and though differences arise, they at last vanish into unity. To use the words of Hegel, there is 'both the movement and repose in the movement. The difference hardly appears before it disappears, whereupon there issues from it a full and complete unity.'"

"That is very clear and satisfactory," observed Mr. Stanley, ironically; not seeing anything but confusion confounded in the whole of it. "What is your view," he asked again, "of the Hegelian 'Absolute'?"

"This," said the Professor, "is nothing but a continual process of thinking, without beginning and without end. Now that the evolution of ideas in the human mind is the process of all existence--the essence of the Absolute--of a Deity, so that Deity is nothing more than the Absolute ever striving to realize itself in human consciousness."

Without questioning the truthfulness of such a doctrine, so _plainly expressed_, Mr. Stanley proceeded to ask, in a way rather beyond himself, "Whether there was not a little to be said for Schelling's notion that the rhythmical law of all existence is cognisable at the same time by the internal consciousness of the subjective self, in the objective operation of Nature?"

To this question, somewhat mystical it must be confessed, the Professor replied in his usual style of profundity:--

"I see clearly enough Schelling's great ingenuity; but think his three movements or potencies--that of 'Reflexion,' whereby the Infinite strives to realize itself in the Finite--that of 'Subsumption,' which is the striving of the Absolute to return from the Finite to the Infinite--and that of the 'Indifference-point,' or point of junction of the two first--were not to be admitted; for is it not clear as the day that the poles ever persist in remaining apart, the indifference-point having never been fixed by Schelling?"

In these ways Mr. Stanley and the Professor kept up the conversation until I and the rest of the company were perfectly involved in dense mists and fogs, wishing that the sun of simple truth would shine, to bring us into clear seeing and firm foot-standing. We longed for the day without a cloud. At last they ceased, and after a brief interval we found ourselves where we were before they began, with no more knowledge of the mystical, and no less love to the simplicity of truth spoken in words of plain meaning and thoughts of undisguised transparency.