Theos-Talk Archives (October 2006 Message tt00106)

The mind is urged to ask for one cause of many effects; then for the
cause of that; and again the cause, diving still into the profound:
self-assured that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient one,-
a one that shall be all. "In the midst of the sun is the light, in
the midst of the light is truth, and in the midst of truth is the
imperishable being," say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East and
West, has the same centripetence. Urged by an opposite necessity,
the mind returns from the one to that which is not one, but other or
many; from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary existence of
variety, the self-existence of both, as each is involved in the
other. These strictly-blended elements it is the problem of thought
to separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mutually
contradictory and exclusive; and each so fast slides into the other
that we can never say what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus
is as nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds; when we
contemplate the one, the true, the good,- as in the surfaces and
extremities of matter. – Emerson’s Plato