Article March 26, 1910 Issue

THE LAW OF OPPOSITES

WILLIAM HALL ROBERTSON.

There is no mortal law to which the world holds more rigidly than the supposititious law of opposites. The world has said that there's never an up but there's a down; and going on, the world has enlarged upon this to say that it is impossible to perceive the one without perceiving the other, at some time or in some way. From this line of theory comes the next statement in the order of human reasoning, which is, that it is impossible that one should experience the "ups" without also experiencing the "downs;" and thus it is that the human scale of living has been drawn whereby all men accept as a common factor of existence the proposition that life is but an experience of joys and sorrows, sickness and health, wealth and want.

Now we can allow this law of opposites to carry us as far as we will, but it is a desperate delusion, because, even granting that you travel all "down" one side of life and expect to enter into the joys of the "up" side, you are disappointed to find that even the "up" side in human experience falls far short of your expectations, and that the "ups" after all are only another presentation of "downs," for we read in the Scriptures that "if a kingdom be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand." He who accepts the law of opposites as an inevitable rule of existence has adopted a mistaken theory, and finds himself involved in a sort of treadmill existence, wherein the little he seems to gain is more than balanced by the counteraction, which is really an incessant action of loss. It is evident there can be no law of opposites where the ever-presence of good is the perpetual fact, the very Science of being.

This so-called law of opposites also suggests the thought, that if good is going on somewhere for somebody; its opposite, bad, is also going on somewhere for somebody; that if joy is mine, sorrow is, must be, present somewhere for somebody, so that all freedom of health is even suppressed by the consciousness that these very statements, if true, prove that there is sickness, sorrow, and evil somewhere for somebody. No wonder that human attainments fall far short of desire.

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