The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

BOOK II MAGICAL MYSTERIES CHAPTER I THEORY OF THE WILL Human life and its innumerable difficulties have for object, in the ordination of eternal wisdom, the education of the will of man. The dignity of man consists in doing what he will, and in willing the good, in conformity with the knowledge of truth. The good in conformity with the true, is the just. Justice is the practice of reason. Reason is the word of reality. Reality is the science of truth. Truth is idea identical with being. Man arrives at the absolute idea of being by two roads, experience and hypothesis. Hypothesis is probable when it is necessitated by the teachings of experience; it is improbable or absurd when it is rejected by this teaching. Experience is science, and hypothesis is faith. True science necessarily admits faith; true faith neces- sarily reckons with science. Pascal blasphemed against science, when he said that by reason man could not arrive at the knowledge of any truth. 234