I have already referred to the fact, that man beholds and believes in God by intuition, and tried to discover the rational ground of that immediate insight. The equally patent facts, that man intuitively sees and believes in the world of sensation, and that he immediately refers that world to God as its continual Creator, have also just been expounded; and I shall now explore the rational grounds of these two fundamental beliefs of the race.

I. God and He once evolved from the primeval selfconsciousness of man, He and his sensations, that is to say He and Nature, are yet one before God. They are the finite-I in the presence of the Infinite-Thou. The second spontaneous analysis is that of this original finiteI it consists in the separation between man and his sensations; it ends in the evolution of Nature from his proper humanity. Be it repeated, however, that man intuitively perceives his sensations, that is, Nature, in our signification of the word, to be other than himself. It is the rational ground of this perception I now wish to set forth. In the first-born Ego of man there is derivative personality, finity, multiplicity, over against the unity, infinity, and underived personality of God. But this first-born Ego comprises Man and Nature in one: Man that is, and his sensations. The first part of the process which separates his sensations, or Nature, from him, is the instantaneous experience that the totality of these sensations, or Nature, changes without him, and even against him. This part of the process, however, would only have tortured him with the sense of slavery to some dire necessity or fate, but that the knowledge of God at once enables him to refer the mutable phenomena of sensation to another than himself. That

other, however, is not God, for Nature is not seen to be infinite, but God is infinite. It is another finite than himself.

Multiplicity is involved in Unity. The number Three is multiplex in a manner, but is not therefore involved in unity. The antithesis of unity is the idea-common of all possible numbers except One. Three is a quasiantithesis of unity simply and solely in its definition as not-unity. In a word, the ideal relation of unity and multiplicity renders the quasi-multiplicity Three intelligible. Three does not represent the pure idea of multiplicity the opposite of unity. In strictness of philosophical language, in truth, it is not multiplex, inasmuch as it is not the polar reverse of that which is truly One.

In like manner, Infinity is involved in Finity. Nature is not known to be finite, but it is not, therefore, involved in the Finite-I. Nature, then, is the opposite of the Finite-I, solely as not-finite, or rather as being discovered not to be known to be finite. In a word, the ideal relation of the Finite-I to the Infinite-Thou renders the quasiinfinite (or the indefinite) Nature apprehensible, the instant it is dislodged from the Finite-I by the experience of the involuntary mutations of sensation. Nature, not known to be finite, does not present the pure idea of Infinity, the opposite of the Finite-I. In strictness of philosophical language, in fact, it is not infinite, inasmuch as it is not the polar reverse of that which is truly finite, namely, human self-consciousness, the Ego of Man.

Nature is thus taken out of man, first by the empirical observation that its mutations are independent of him; and, secondly, by the knowledge of God rendering its alterity at once conceivable. These steps are simultaneous, and they are both essential.

VOL. II.

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II. Beholding his God face to face, and perceiving the lustrous figure of Nature by his side, it is with equally swift and infallible instinct that the son of Man knows that God did once begin and still continues to create the sensuous world. It cannot have been eternal, nor can it be self-subsistent, for one infinite excludes another, and the Infinite-Thou is already seen and known.

NATURE AND MAN.

A MAN is the centre of innumerable circles of unresting appearances. One sphere of external objects is drawn beyond another in endless succession around him. That which seems the last is so remote and undefined that it feels as if it were infinitely vast in its awful sweep; while imagination transcends the pale of sense, and may expatiate for ever through the swelling deeps of a truly immeasurable abysm.

The first of the spheres which thus envelope the immortal denizen is the intimate little round of his body, a frame so full of quivering sensitivity as constantly to be the object of its own sensations, and so flexile to the movements of the spirit it indues, that he fondly takes it for his own. Then come the familiar forms of women and of men-folding, sustaining, embracing, accompanying, counteracting, always helping, and otherwise traversing him on his way. Next are all those animated shapes, which seem to have heralded his own descent upon the earth, and to caricature his imperfections now he is arrived; from the contractile sponge upon its rock, which ridicules the comedy of isolation, up to the spurning horse of the wilderness, once winged by the creative fancy of the Greek, and still the vaulting Pegasus of the world. There are meats,

and drinks, precious stones and gold, tools and engines, statues and pictures, houses and churches, palaces and cities, murmuring fields and sounding forests, counties and countries, rivers and seas, the continents and the ocean, the globe itself, on a little segment of which he hastens to and fro till it have run its larger revolution some sixty times or more, the air in which he cools his inquiring head, the sky to which he looks in vain for a response, the sun, the stars, the firmament on firmament of sun-stars, the nebulæ after nebulæ curdling amain into new worlds on the dilating verge, and whatsoever else exists within immensity. These are the parts of nature, and nature is the sensible world of the universe; but there is a greater world, and it is the soul of man.

To some great men, indeed, nature has seemed so paltry in comparison with their own unfathomable world within, that they have refused it the reality of an outstanding existence, and even treated it with some show of contempt as an ideal pageant for the education and entertainment of the mind. Plato, Plotinus, Swedenborg, Spinoza, Berkeley, Fichte, Cousin, and many other the loftiest characters the world ever saw, have all exhibited some such view of the universe, either expressly or by corollary from explicit tenets. Above all, this high strain of idealism implicitly, but only implicitly, pervaded the practical teaching of the Saviour Jesus Christ. If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place, and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible to you.' In opposition to these sublime sceptics, many sincere investigators have been so overborne and compressed by the tides of sensation rushing on them from the crowded and whirling space without, that they have been driven to the denial, not only of God over all, but of themselves,