finite

Man's Unhappiness... comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, with which all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite... Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarreling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: It is... the Shadow of Ourselves.

He who ignores the infinite and is devoted to the finite abandons a pleasure-garden and seeks the thorny bush.

Nothing in the matter-of-fact or finite order of experience is directly or obviously grounded in actual authoritative principles; phenomena do not permit us to see through them to their infinite preconditions, and certainly not even to comprehend or conceptualize what kinds of things those preconditions may be. It is only through holistic and variably stressed principles that we can see the formation or architectonics of finite realities, in accordance with those lawful and ordering forces. There is no empirical path to principles, no psychological route to values or ultimate duties or essential character: hundreds of millions of human beings may despair of not having "salvation" who do not and cannot ever comprehend what the issue even is, i.e. the onslaught of the finite order that threatens to make our ambiguously finite/infinite spirit into just another finite particle within the finite world. We have to be always carrying out our self-education dialectically, with one eye on each domain, the finite and the infinite, each of which demands its own peculiar modus of intelligence and insight from us.

It has to be understood that, even though the infinite or intrinsic or essential must be grasped in an "exclusionary" way (cleft apart or distinguished from the finite or extrinsic or accidental), ultimately the two domains belong together as a whole: it is only for the propadeutic purpose of self-clarification or enlightenment that the infinite must be grasped in its relative purity from the finite, a relation of opposition that may mistakenly make the infinite look as finite (oppositional, exclusionary) as the finite (since it is of the essence of the finite to stand in a relation of repellency to its other). The finite excludes everything other, but the infinite HAS no "other." The essential trait of the infinite is its INCLUSIVENESS, its power to embrace all particulars within an organismic whole.