The keynote of it is
invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the
world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our
difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do
they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus,
but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the
genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself.
This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of
common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I
feel as if it must mean something, something like what the
hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more
clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear; to me the
living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic
state of mind.[233]
[233] What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a
perfected Being with all its otherness soaked up into itself,
which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the
prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in
most persons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly
characteristic of the mystical level and the Aufgabe of making it
articulate was surely set to Hegel's intellect by mystical
feeling.
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