trangely at an ingenious and well-set-up effect, for we feel
such in ourselves; but a cause, reaching out beyond the verge [of fact]
and dangling its legs in nonentity, with the hope of a rational
foothold, should realize a strenuous life. Pluralism believes in truth
and reason, but only as mystically realized, as lived in experience.
Up from the breast of a man, up to his tongue and brain, comes a free
and strong determination, and he cries, originally, and in spite of his
whole nature and environment, 'I will.' This is the Jovian _fiat_, the
pure cause. This is reason; this or nothing shall explain the world
for him. For how shall he entertain a reason bigger than
himself? . . . Let a man stand fast, then, as an axis of the earth;
the obsequious meridians will bow to him, and gracious latitudes will
measure from his feet."

This seems to be Blood's mystical answer to his own monistic statement
which I quoted above, that "freedom" has no fertility, and is no reason
for any special thing.[8] "Philosophy," Mr. Blood writes to me in a
letter, "is past. It was the long endeavor to logicize what we can
only realize practically or in immediate experience. I am more and
more impressed that Heraclitus insists on the equation of reason and
unreason, or chance, as well as of being and not-being, etc. This
throws the secret beyond logic, and makes mysticism outclass
philosophy. The insight that mystery,--the Mystery, as such is final,
is the hymnic word. If you use reason pragmatically, and deny it
absolutely, you can't be beaten; be assured of that. But the _Fact_
remains, and of course the Mystery." [9]

The "Fact," as I understand the writer here to mean it, remains in its
native disseminated shape. From every realized amount of fact some
other fact is _absent_, as being uninvolved. "There is nowhere more of
it consecutively, perhaps, than appears upon this present page." There
is, indeed, to put it otherwise, no more one all-enveloping fact than
there is one all-enveloping spire in an endlessly growing spiral, and
no more one all-generating fact than there is one central point in
which an endlessly converging spiral ends. Hegel's "bad infinite"
belongs to the eddy as well as to the line. "Progress?" writes our
author. "And to what? Time turns a weary and a wistful face; has he
not traversed an eternity? and shall another give the secret up? We
have dreamed of a climax and a consummation, a final triumph w