"The cause of all things is neither soul nor intellect Hong Kong international school; nor has it imagination, opinion, or reason, orintelligence; nor is it reason or intelligence; nor is it spoken or thought. It is neither number, nororder, nor magnitude, nor littleness, nor equality, nor inequality, nor similarity, nor dissimilarity. Itneither stands, nor moves, nor rests. . . . It is neither essence, nor eternity, nor time. Evenintellectual contact does not belong to it. It is neither science nor truth. It is not even royalty orwisdom; not one; not unity; not divinity or goodness; nor even spirit as we know it," etc., adlibitum.[264] [264] T. Davidson's translation, in Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 1893, vol. xxii., p. 399. But these qualifications are denied by Dionysius, not because the truth falls short of them, butbecause it so infinitely excels them. It is above them. It is SUPER-lucent, SUPER-splendent,SUPER-essential, SUPER-sublime, SUPER EVERYTHING that can be named. Like Hegel in hislogic, mystics journey moving truck rentaltowards the positive pole of truth only by the "Methode der AbsolutenNegativitat."[265] [265] "Deus propter excellentiam non immerito Nihil vocatur." Scotus Erigena, quoted byAndrew Seth: Two Lectures on Theism, New York, 1897, p. 55. Thus come the paradoxical expressions that so abound in mystical writings. As when Eckharttells of the still desert of the Godhead, "where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son, norHoly Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than initself."[266] As when Boehme writes of the Primal Love, that "it may fitly be compared toNothing, for it is deeper than any Thing, and is as nothing with respect to all things, forasmuch asit is not comprehensible by any of them. And because it is nothing respectively, it is therefore freefrom all things, and is that only good, which a man cannot express or utter what it is, there beingnothing to which it may be compared, to express it by."[267] Or as when Angelus Silesius sings:-"Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn ruhrt kein Nun noch Hier; Je mehr du nach ihm work visa hong konggreiffst, je mehrentwind er dir."[268] [266] J. Royce: Studies in Good and Evil, p. 282. [267] Jacob Bellmen's Dialogues on the Supersensual Life, translated by Bernard Holland,London, 1901, p. 48. [268] Cherubinischer Wandersmann, Strophe 25. To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage towards a higher kind ofaffirmation,
