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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
The delight of a child at the possession of a new toy is nothing as compared with the leaping' emotion of the scientist who suddenly succeeds in discovering some hidden law of nature, and even the latter's feeling kicks the beam in comparison to the pure joy of the mystic who catches a fleeting 'glimpse of the lustre of his effulgent soul. The degree of permanence of freedom gained, thus, determines the intensity and duration of the emotion of joy. He who realizes himself to be the all-knowing, the ever free and the very source, as it were, of blissfulness itself must, therefore, necessarily enjoy bliss; for, for him there is an end of all anxieties and bondage. The relation of happiness to desire, which directly mars the manifestation of the natural delight of the soul, may be expressed mathematically as happ
as desires so that if we keep on increasing the denominator our unit of happiness may be reduced to an infinitesimal fraction, but become whole by its elimination.
If our analysis is correct, grief is a condition foreign to the nature of the soul, as it is caused by the imposition of some sort of restraint or obligation, hence, burden or fetters on it. We might go further and add that grief, with all its kindred feelings, such as sorrow, anguish, and the like, arises only in consequence of the conjunction of the body and the soul; for, as we have already seen, the natural state of pure spirit is one of unalloyed bliss. Taken separately, neither the body nor the soul is capable of feeling pain or pleasure, as sensations, or grief, and the like, as emotions. For the body has no feelings of its own, and the natural feeling of the soul is that of joyousness. In proof of the first of these
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