Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.t1.16

c7.t1.16

In the strength and the weakness of the forms of life of this class of thinkers lies also, as it were in a germ, the strength and weakness of their thought. They were, so to speak, banished into a self-made world, cut off from the refreshing atmosphere of real life, by nothing shaken in their unbounded belief in themselves and in their unique omnipotence, in comparison with which all that gave character to the life of others, must have appeared small and contemptible. And thus, therefore, in their thought also the utmost boldness of world-disclaiming abstraction shows itself, which soars beyond all that is visible into the regions of the spaceless and timeless, to caper in sickly company in baseless chimeras, without limit or aim, in fancies such as can be conceived only by a spirit which has lost all taste for the sober realities of fact. They have created a mode of thought in which the great and profound has joined partnership with childish absurdities so uniquely that the history of the attempts of humanity to comprehend self and the universe affords no parallel. To study this thought in its development is our next task.