indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are
mystics, distrusting thought and craving the largeness of indistinction,
they may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem
positively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation.
If on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediate
with scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they
cannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however,
are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if
dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the
substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of
matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who
attempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist,
dealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks
into the immediate much better appreciated the situation. This immediate
is not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and
brutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they have
any permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dull
suicide and no salvation. Peace, which is after all what the mystic
seeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it in
a measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he still
practises, not by his heats or his languors.

The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the immediate, but what reason
draws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is the
perturbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace in
reason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of ideal
permanence. When the flux manages to form an eddy and to maintain by
breathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slight
foothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in
the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal.