g its setting. But wait!

If the Humanity-God is always right, it must be that two contradictory
propositions can be true at the same time, since contradictions abound
in the history of human thoughts. If two contradictory propositions can
be true, there is no more truth. What then is our reason, of which truth
is the object? We are seized with giddiness. Might not everything in the
world be illusion? and myself--? Listen to a voice which reaches us,
across the ages, from the countries crowned by the Himalayas. "Nothing
exists.... By the study of first principles, one acquires this
knowledge, absolute, incontestable, comprehensible to the intelligence
alone: I neither am, nor does anything which is mine, nor do I myself,
exist."[156] What is there beneath these strange lines? The feeling of
giddiness, which seeks to steady itself by language. Here is now the
modern echo of these ancient words. One of those writers who accept all,
in the hope of understanding all, describes himself as having come at
last to be aware that he is "only one of the most fugitive illusions in
the bosom of the infinite illusion." One of his colleagues expresses
himself on this subject as follows: "Is this the last word of all?--And
why not?--The illusion which knows itself--is it in fact an illusion?
Does it not in some sort triumph over itself? Does it not attain to _the
sovereign reality_, that of the thought which thinks itself, that of the
dream which knows itself a dream, that _of nothingness which ceases to
be so_, in order to recognize itself and to assert itself?"[157] We are
gone back to ancient India. You will remark here three stages of
thought. The fugitive illusion is man. The infinite illusion is the
universe. The universal principle of the appearances which compose the
universe is nothingness. Here is the explanation of the universe!
Nothingness takes life; nothingness takes life only to know itself to be
nothingness; and the nothingness which says to itself, "I am
nothingness," is the reason of existence of all that is. I said just now
that the sun was declining to the horizon. Now the last glimmer of
twilight has disappeared; night has closed in--a dark and starless
night. Yes, Sirs, but there is never on the earth a night so dark as to
warrant us in despairing of the return of the dawn. If the modern mind
is such as it is described to us, it has lost all the rays of light; but
the sun is not dead.

The doctrine of non-existen