“Well, when first we realize that there is no such thing, properly speaking, as existence, and no such thing, as truth, we feel, for a time, unmanned. We are like aviators plane-wrecked on some little island far from all help, with nothing around us but sea and air. And we naturally ask ourselves, do we not, what have we saved from the wreck? If we are no longer allowed to say, ‘This exists,’ or ‘This is true’—or, at any rate, not allowed to say it without a great deal of qualification, a very great deal of qualification—what can we say? Oh, it is all right, my dear sisters and brothers, we have just one little plank saved to us from the wreck. And what is that plank? Why, we can still say, ‘This is thinkworthy.’ Oh, beautiful word, thinkworthiness! And beautiful thing, thoughtworthiness, I mean think—thoughtthinkiness, no, I don’t mean that (here the record is somewhat blurred, and it would appear as if Bishop Dives must have blown his nose). Oh, beautiful thing, thinkworthiness! If indeed thinkworthiness can be called a thing, and in so far as it is right to do so.
“It is thinkworthy, my dear sisters and brothers, that two and two make, or rather, in a phrase of less apparent grammar but more spiritual meaning, makes, four. It is thinkworthy that any two sides of a triangle are greater than the third. It is thinkworthy that thinks which are equal to the same think—I mean, things which are equal to the same thing, are equal to one another.
“Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our day. We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We can no longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our thinkage, to simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that if that thing which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that thinkworthiness is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few times, and you will find it quite easy. And do not suppose that because such a formula as that has a less absolute and a less defiant ring about it than our old formula, ‘The soul exists after death,’ therefore we have lost something, and are poorer than our forefathers. No, oh no, quite the contrary. For we know now, what they did not know, that thingness and thinkworthiness are one. It cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a thing we thing it: our thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful thoughtage!—thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often repeated, the man who thinks things things things!