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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE
sounding but otherwise empty words. Of the thousands of preachers who preach in the public, and of the equally large number of those who write their doctrines in books, bardly one in a thousand has any idea of what the words employed by him signify ; yet, they all, unblushingly and shame-facedly, go on discharging a ceaseless torrent of rhetoric in the supposed interests of their presumably defenceless god whose cause, they seem to imagine, requires a vast army of champions to defend ! Most of them, when asked to define their concept of God, lose their footing on the terra firma of relevant sense, and begin to flounder in the quagmire of metaphysical nonsense. If this is the case with the teachers themselves, what must be the plight of their victims '?
Definitions fail to serve their object when they cease to be true to nature, and philosophers only prattle when they talk of pure abstractions as existing by themselves.
The notion of the Absolute which Vedanta and certain other systems of thought persist in positing as the sole existent reality is a fair instance of confusion resulting from want of discrimination between a mental abstraction and concrete things. Regarded as pure existence, it is merely a quality of substance, and not a substance or thing itself. As such, it is impossible that it can exist by itself, for qualities only inhere in substances and substances are but bundles of qualities. If it were otherwise, we should have existence existing apart from all other qualities. But this is absurd' ; for existence would not then pertain to anything but itself, which would make all other qualities and things nonest.
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