The Hegels had come: The _Logik_. Three volumes. The bristling Gothic
text an ambush of secret, exciting, formidable things. The titles flamed;
flags of strange battles; signals of strange ships; challenging, enticing
to the dangerous adventure.
After the first enchantment, the Buddhist Suttas and the Upanishads were
no good. Nor yet the Vedânta. You couldn't keep on saying, "This is
That," and "Thou art It," or that the Self is the dark blue bee and the
green parrot with red eyes and the thunder-cloud, the seasons and the
seas. It was too easy, too sleepy, like lying on a sofa and dropping
laudanum, slowly, into a rotten, aching tooth. Your teeth were sound and
strong, they had to have something hard to bite on. You wanted to think,
to keep on thinking. Your mind wasn't really like a tooth; it was like a
robust, energetic body, happy when it was doing difficult and dangerous
things, balancing itself on heights, lifting great weights of thought,
following the long march into thick, smoky battles.
"Being and Not-Being are the same": ironic and superb defiance. And then
commotion; as if the infinite stillness, the immovable Substance, had got
up and begun moving--Rhythm of eternity: the same for ever: for ever
different: for ever the same.
Thought _was_ the Thing-in-itself.
This man was saying, over and over and all the time what you had wanted
Kant to say, what he wouldn't say, what you couldn't squeeze out of him,
however you turned and twisted him.
You jumped to where the name "Spinoza" glittered like a jewel on the
large grey page.
Something wanting. You knew it, and you were afraid. You loved him. You
didn't want him to be found out and exposed, like Kant. He had given you
the first incomparable thrill.
Hegel. Spinoza. She thought of Spinoza's murky, mysterious face. It said,
"I live in you, still, as he will never live. You will never love that
old German man. He ran away from the cholera. He bolstered up the Trinity
with his Triple Dialectic, to keep his chair at Berlin. _I_ refused their
bribes. They excommunicated me. You remember? Cursed be Baruch Spinoza in
his going out and his coming in."
You had tried to turn and twist Spinoza, too; and always he had refused
to come within your meaning. His Substance, his God stood still, in
eternity. He, too; before the noisy, rich, exciting Hegel, he drew back
into its stillness; pure and cold, a little sinister, a little ironic.
And you felt a pang of misgiving, as if, after all, he might have been
right. So powerful had been his hold.