niversality is complete: that only the
complete is the beautiful: that every attempt to achieve beauty is an
attempt to give to the local the attribute of the universal.

By stability, we mean the immovable and the unaffected. But all seeming
things are only reactions to something else. Stability, too, then, can
be only the universal, or that besides which there is nothing else.
Though some things seem to have--or have--higher approximations to
stability than have others, there are, in our experience, only various
degrees of intermediateness to stability and instability. Every man,
then, who works for stability under its various names of "permanency,"
"survival," "duration," is striving to localize in something the state
that is realizable only in the universal.

By independence, entity, and individuality, I can mean only that
besides which there is nothing else, if given only two things, they must
be continuous and mutually affective, if everything is only a reaction
to something else, and any two things would be destructive of each
other's independence, entity, or individuality.

All attempted organizations and systems and consistencies, some
approximating far higher than others, but all only intermediate to Order
and Disorder, fail eventually because of their relations with outside
forces. All are attempted completenesses. If to all local phenomena
there are always outside forces, these attempts, too, are realizable
only in the state of completeness, or that to which there are no outside
forces.

Or that all these words are synonyms, all meaning the state that we call
the positive state--

That our whole "existence" is a striving for the positive state.

The amazing paradox of it all:

That all things are trying to become the universal by excluding other
things.

That there is only this one process, and that it does animate all
expressions, in all fields of phenomena, of that which we think of as
one inter-continuous nexus:

The religious and their idea or ideal of the soul. They mean distinct,
stable entity, or a state that is independent, and not a mere flux of
vibrations or complex of reactions to environment, continuous with
environment, merging away with an infinitude of other interdependent
complexes.

But the only thing that would not merge away into something else would
be that besides which there is nothing else.

That Truth is only another name for the positive state, or that the
quest for Tr