dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world
of phenomena--of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of
empirical knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in
reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities.
And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a
negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object
we are defining one or more potential qualities. The more definite
things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension,
the more, it might be said from the logician's point of view, have we
denied about them. It might seem that their increasing reality as
objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their
distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times
in every possible mode of being. A [35] thing visibly white is found
as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added
quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other
possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+ Vain
puerilities! you may exclaim:--with justice. Yet such are the
considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile
on the abstract formula to which the "rational theology" of Xenophanes
leads him. It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between
the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former
annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or
legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite
yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is--
nothing! Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it
might be said, that it more properly is not than is.

From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious
poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in
indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of