Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi by Sir Richard Francis Burton
page 79 of 91 (86%)
One would think that he had read Kant on the "Knowable and the
Unknowable," or had heard of the Yankee lady, who could
"differentiate between the Finite and the Infinite." It is a
common-place of the age, in the West as well as the East, that
Science is confined to phenomena, and cannot reach the Noumena,
the things themselves. This is the scholastic realism, the
"residuum of a bad metaphysic," which deforms the system of
Comte. With all its pretensions, it simply means that there are,
or can be conceived, things in themselves (_i.e._, unrelated to
thought); that we know them to exist; and, at the same time, that
we cannot know what they are. But who dares say "cannot"? Who can
measure man's work when he shall be as superior to our present
selves as we are to the Cave-man of past time?

The "Chain of Universe" alludes to the Jain idea that the whole,
consisting of intellectual as well as of natural principles,
existed from all eternity; and that it has been subject to
endless revolutions, whose causes are the inherent powers of
nature, intellectual as well as physical, without the
intervention of a deity. But the Poet ridicules the "non-human,"
_i.e._, the not-ourselves, the negation of ourselves and
consequently a non-existence. Most Easterns confuse the
contradictories, in which one term stands for something, and the
other for nothing (_e.g._, ourselves and not-ourselves), with the
contraries (_e.g._, rich and not-rich = poor), in which both
terms express a something. So the positive-negative "infinite" is
not the complement of "finite," but its negation. The Western man
derides the process by making "not-horse" the complementary
entity of "horse." The Pilgrim ends with the favourite Soofi
tenet that the five (six?) senses are the doors of all human
DigitalOcean Referral Badge