practical applications.

As I have hinted, in all real contraries it is theoretically possible to
accept either the one or the other. As in mathematics, all motion can be
expressed either under formulas of initial motion (mechanics), or of
continuous motion (kinematics), or as all force can be expressed as
either static or as dynamic force; in either case the other form
assuming a merely hypothetical or negative position; so the logic of
quality is competent to represent all existence as ideal or as material,
all truth as absolute or all as relative, or even to express the
universe in formulae of being or of not-being. This perhaps was what
Heraclitus meant when he propounded his dark saying: "All things are
_and_ are not." He added that "All is not," is truer than "All is."
Previous to his day, Buddha Sakyamuni had said: "He who has risen to the
perception of the not-Being, to the Unconditioned, the Universal, his
path is difficult to understand, like the flight of birds in the
air."[37-1] Perhaps even he learned his lore from some older song of the
Veda, one of which ends, "Thus have the sages, meditating in their
souls, explained away the fetters of being by the not-being."[37-2] The
not-being, as alone free from space and time, impressed these sages as
the more real of the two, the only absolute.

The error of assigning to the one universal a preponderance over the
other arose from the easy confusion of pure with applied thought. The
synthesis of contraries exists in the formal law alone, and this is
difficult to keep before the mind. In concrete displays they are forever
incommensurate. One seems to exclude the other. To see them correctly we
must there treat them as alternates. We may be competent, for instance,
to explain all phenomena of mind by organic processes; and equally
competent to explain all organism as effects of mind; but we must never
suppose an immediate identity of the two; this is only to be found in
the formal law common to both; still less should we deny the reality of
either. Each exhausts the universe; but at every step each presupposes
the other; their synthesis is life, a concept hopelessly puzzling unless
regarded in all its possible displays as made up of both.

This indicates also the limits of explanation. By no means every man's
reason knows when it has had enough. The less it is developed, the
further is it from such knowledge. This is plainly seen in children, who
often do not rest