Collected Works (Vol. II)

THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE; OR, THE SCEPTIC REFUTED 263 S. Cogitavi,! ergo fui. To my _ breezy nature such a controversy as this of ours on ‘* Tessaracts”” was as the ozone-laden dis- charge from a Brush machine. M. I was not aware that the termination -ozoon was connected with the allotropic form of oxygen. S. Little boys should be seen, but not obscene. M. Seen, no doubt for the Arabic form of Samech; in Yetzirah Sagittarius, or ‘lem- perance in the Tarot of your ridiculous Rosicrucians. S. No more so than your Semitic Romeike. M. Semitic? ; S. Ike for Isaac, non est dubium— M. Quin— 5S. God save His Majesty !? but is this Midsummer Night, ance are we dream- ing? MM. ‘‘There are wetter dreams!’3 us discuss the Divided Middle ! 5S. Beware of the Water Jump! Mf. Hurrah for Taliganj! I can improve on, John Peel’s Map of Asia and that ere dawn. I will map you the lucubrations of the (converted) Hindu intellect upon this vital part of the Hegelian logic. Aum Shivaya vashi !4 S. Dulce ridentem Mysticum amabo, Dulce loquentem. M. Will you not elide the ‘um’? S. Then I were left with a_ bee Let in - 1 See Descartes, Dziscours de la Méthode, i. 1; Huxley, Des Cartes; and Mucksley, Night Carts, published San, Auth., Bombay 1goz, (At this point the damned don who was writing these notes was mercifully struck by lightning. He had intended to annotate every word in this manner in order (as he supposed) to attain a reputation like that of Max Miiller e¢ hoc genus omne.) 2 Auberon Quin, King of England, in a novelette called ‘‘ The Napoleon of Notting Hiil.”’ 3 Wells, ‘‘ There are better dreams’; but it turns out to mean that the young man is drowned, and at Folkestone too. 4 Cf. Prof. Rice. ‘'The waters of the Hoang-Ho rushing by intoned the Kung.” my breeches— worse than Plato’s in his bonnet. -M. A Scottish sceptic ! S. A Wee Free, Mysticus. . A gaelic- speaking Calvinist with three thousand million bawbees in my sporran and a brace of bed-ridden cattle-thieves in my kirk. So I withdraw breeks. AZ. And you rely not on Plato? S. Verily and Amen. As the French lady exclaimed, O mon Plate !—she would not say Platon, having already got one rhyme in ‘ mon ’—and the Italian took her up that omoplat was indeed good to support the head, wherein are ideas. But to our divided middle ! a Mf. As I should have said before I became a Christian:? ‘*OQ Bhavani! be pleased graciously to bow down to thy servants: be pleased to construe our prattlings as Japas our prayers as Tapas, our mantras as Kudradarshana, our bead-tellings as Devas ! be pleased moreover to accept our Badli for Sach-bat, our Yupi for Lalitasarira, _our subject—O bless our divided middle !—for thine own venerable Yoni. Aum !” S. I am touched by your eloquence; but Science has not said its last word on Saba- paty Swami and his application of Prana- yama to the aberrations of the evolutionary retrocessions—flexomotor in type, yet sensorial in function—of the Sahasrara-Chakra, as you urged yesterday. fe , AM. I will not press it. But in the so- affected ambulatory vibrations (as I must insist, and you practically agreed) of the lower chakras may yet be found to lie the solution of our primordial dilemma. What is the divided middle? Test enthymeme ruin our exegesis ere it be fairly started. S. I will answer you without further -cir- curnlocution. The laws of Thought are reducible to three: that of identity, 4 is 4 ; that of contradiction, 4 is not mof-A ; and 1 This is the invariable invocation used. by the pious Hindu before any meditation or holy conference.