The negatives that haunt our ideals here below
must be themselves negated in the absolutely Real. This alone makes
the universe solid. This is the resting deep. We live upon the
stormy surface; but with this our anchor holds, for it grapples
rocky bottom. This is Wordsworth's "central peace subsisting at the
heart of endless agitation." This is Vivekananda's mystical One of
which I read to you. This is Reality with the big R, reality that
makes the timeless claim, reality to which defeat can't happen. This
is what the men of principles, and in general all the men whom I
called tender-minded in my first lecture, think themselves obliged
to postulate.
And this, exactly this, is what the tough-minded of that lecture
find themselves moved to call a piece of perverse abstraction-
worship. The tough-minded are the men whose alpha and omega are
FACTS. Behind the bare phenomenal facts, as my tough-minded old
friend Chauncey Wright, the great Harvard empiricist of my youth,
used to say, there is NOTHING. When a rationalist insists that
behind the facts there is the GROUND of the facts, the POSSIBILITY
of the facts, the tougher empiricists accuse him of taking the mere
name and nature of a fact and clapping it behind the fact as a
duplicate entity to make it possible.
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