* that man in retracing the steps of material nature, will come nearer, at every ascending stage of his inquiries, to the region of mathematical truth. A fact which illustrates Bacon's proposition, that "all natural inquiries succeed best, when a physical principle is made to terminate in a mathematical operation." For, in proportion as man returns to the inorganic forms, and forces, and elementary principles, which characterized the first stage of the Divine Manifestation, he is approaching the region of purely intellectual truth. 39. It follows, also, that in proportion as man reascends, he will find nature becoming more and more simple, and the principles of nature fewer and more general. Accordingly, "as philosophy advances, the properties of matter are found to be fewer and simpler; which the Creative Wisdom so combines and directs as to produce the most diversified, and, at first sight, opposite results." And this fact admirably harmonizes with the progressive character of Creation; in which we have seen Wisdom combining the productions of power, and Goodness taking the results of both, and further complicating them for her own advanced purposes. In the light of this truth, we can interpret and qualify that remark of Laplace, in which a fatal heresy has been supposed, and perhaps justly supposed, to lurk -that, as science advances from point to point, final causes recede before it, and disappear one after the other. If we regard Creation as the progressive development of a Divine Manifestation, the fact is explained; man is receding from final causes; for, in returning towards the first stage of that process, we are necessarily leaving a final cause behind us at every step. The progress of science is retrogressive to nature. If we read Euclid backwards, and leave a problem behind us at every page, we shall at length reach the postulates and axioms of the first page, on which all the book depends. But who would, on this account, withhold his admiration from the intellect and design displayed in the subsequent development of those axioms? And who that glances at the subtle, complicated, endless application, of even mathematical laws to the great system of external nature, but must feel his amazement augmented in exact proportion as he contrasts the generality of these laws with the inexhaustible particularity of their application, and the variety of their results. 40. It may be expected, also, that in proportion as man *Nov. Org. lib. iii. ascends nearer to the region of necessary truth, he will find himself drawing nearer to the Great Reason and Principle of the Whole. "Every true step in this philosophy," says Newton,* "brings us not immediately to the knowledge of the First Cause, yet it brings us nearer to it, and is on that account to be highly valued." And because the course of human inquiry thus leads from the particular to the universal, the science of universals obtained the name of metaphysics. 41. It may be further expected that the higher we ascend towards the Great Source, and the more general the law on which we obtain a footing, the greater will become our power of deductive reasoning and prophetic anticipation. "In particulars our knowledge begins, and so spreads itself by degrees to generals; though afterwards the mind takes the quite contrary course, and having drawn its knowledge into as general propositions as it can, makes those familiar to its thoughts, and accustoms itself to have recourse to them, as to the standards of truth and falsehood." † And all reasoning in natural philosophy, says Bacon," is ascendant and descendant, from experiments to axioms, and from axioms to new discoveries." Accordingly, science is now regarded as having reached that height from which the Deductive method is henceforth to predominate. Without becoming less inductive, only less experimental, the tendency of all sciences is to acquire an ever-enlarging deductive power. "A revolution is peaceably and progressively effecting itself in philosophy, the reverse of that to which Bacon has attached his name;" (and, it might be added, in consequence of that,) "that great man changed the method of the sciences from deductive to experimental, and it is now rapidly reverting from experimental to deductive." § 42. In these sections on man considered as an intellectual being, or as constituted to know creation as a manifestation of the Deity, we have regarded him as endowed with the threefold power of sensational perception, of reflective understanding, and of rational ideas or primary beliefs. By the first, we have found him made cognizant of the separate objects and events of external nature; by the second, capable of tracing the relations of these objects and events to each other and to himself; and by the third, of referring both himself and nature to that all *Optics, Query 28, p. 34. † Locke's Essays, B. iv. c. 7, § 2. Nov. Org. lib. i. aph. 104, and De Augm. Scient., lib. iii. cap. 3. comprehending Personal Reason in whom Truth and Being are one and infinitely perfect the Eternal God. The first discloses to him an external and material universe; but in doing so, reveals and presupposes the second, or that reflective power which, as directly subservient to the will, distinguishes the finite mind; while both presuppose and point to their Infinite Author, God: thus indicating the three great elements of human knowledge-nature, man, and God. The first we have spoken of as conversant with facts which are merely conditional or contingent; the second, or the conceptive understanding, receives these, and brings them under laws which are conditionally necessary, its occupation consisting in discovering and generalizing the relations of the conditional to the necessary; and the third, as the utterer of necessary truths, guiding the operations of the understanding, and authenticating its legitimate conclusions. Reason, therefore, is to be regarded strictly as giving us Philosophy, being simply conversant with principles; the understanding gives us Science, but only as it succeeds in reducing phenomena under the principles of reason; the phenomena or materials of the science being supplied primarily by the senses. As to their respective methods, reason gives us the Deductive, by which we proceed from the universal to the particular; the understanding is inductive, proceeding from the particular to the general; while sense gives the experimental particular itself, proceeding only by single and separate steps. When viewed in relation to Evidence, then, reason alone is conversant with the metaphysically certain; while the understanding supplies the physically and conditionally certain, and all that lies between it and the single notices of sensational perception. Regarded in this light, sensational perception may be described as related to that which is, or the material existent; the conceptive understanding, presupposing that which is, starts in its inquiries from that which may be, or the probable, and ever aims at the goal of certainty; while the peculiar province of the reason is that which must be, or the necessary. 43. And as we have advanced in our investigation of man's intellectual constitution, we have found it answering to and fulfilling the various conditions necessary to his knowledge of creation as a manifestation of Deity. From the whole of which, it may be concluded that, to God the entire process of Divine disclosure is, in effect, a sublime syllogism; of which, the least object, and the remotest event, are already included in the major premiss; and the unfolding of which is destined to occupy the coming eternity. While man, appointed to find the sphere of his activity in the vast intermediate space between the Necessary and the purely Conditional, and unable to find intellectual rest but in the felt junction of the two, will derive perpetual accessions of enjoyment as he ascends from the particular to the Infinite, with whom it originated, and in whom it is contained; and will be furnished, as the great process of the manifestation advances from stage to stage, with ever fresh occasion for the adoring exclamation, "Of Him, and to Him, and through Him, are all things; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen." 1. If the actual creation, as known to man through perception, understanding, and reason, have not exhausted the Divine resources, and if it would both exalt his nature and enhance his conceptions of those resources, to be able to imagine phenomena harmonizing with, but superior to, all belonging to the present and the actual, he may be expected to be endowed with a power distinct from any we have yet described, in order to enable him to realize such impossibilities. 2. Now that the universe, as apprehended at any one time, is not the measure, but only a specimen, of the creative resources of the Deity, is evident, both from his infinity, which cannot be exhausted, and from the fact that the actual creation itself is perpetually assuming new forms, and repeating its demands on those resources. Besides which, if parts, at least, of this creation are destined for other worlds, and for unending duration, that which is known of the Divine Resources at any one point of duration can bear no proportion to that which remains to be known, and which only awaits the enlargement of our capacity in order to be revealed. It is, therefore, unnecessary for us now to inquire whether, when the actual universe was called into being, there were not also present to the Divine mind the archetypes or ideas of other worlds-possible creations, and possible varieties of actual existence. It is enough for us to know that there was present to the Creator, because dependent on His purpose, all the philosophy, science, and art, which the actual universe embodies and illustrates. To Him were present for He actually designed them—all the artistic applications, the aesthetic combinations, and the kindling suggestive power of which the natural would be found capable, when sub mitted to the action of the human mind, as He proposed to endow it, as well as all the ideal phenomena of that mind itself. 3. What, then, is the nature of that mysterious endowment by which man is thus admitted to hold intellectual fellowship with his Maker respecting the possible? It is allied indirectly to the sensational part of our nature; deriving its name from the organ of sight through which its principal, though by no. means its only, materials, are supplied; and, if it expresses itself in art, taking pre-existing materials as the means by which to attain its ends. In various respects it is identical with the understanding. As an artist, it can work only according to the constitution of the material with, and on which, it works. That material itself is the production of the Great Artist, and has laws and properties of its own; and it is only as the imagination complies with them that they become its servant; and, like the understanding, it abstracts only that it may generalize, and generalizes only that it may abstract again. In conformity with the reason, also, imagination has its primordial truth; its idea is perfection-the loftiest attributes appropriate to the nature of the object which it contemplates. 4. But from each of these characteristics of the mind, imagination is easily distinguished. It looks on material forms only to transform them to imprint on them images, and to apply them to purposes, unknown before. To the eye of imagination, nature is a great system of symbols, each containing and concealing a hidden truth yearning for sympathetic interpretation. Inorganic nature lives and breathes, and becomes oracular, in fable, emblem, or hieroglyph. Free of all time and space, imagination brings together beings the most widely separated, and has unities of its own. But its highest prerogative is, in a secondary sense, to create. The real creations by which it finds itself surrounded in nature, appeal, as divine provocatives, to its own ideas of order, beauty, and sublimity. Under its plastic hand, the shapeless marble takes a godlike form, and comes forth a Venus di Medici, or an Apollo Belvedere. To its pencil, ordinary colors become "colors dipt in heaven," and a corresponding Transfiguration forthwith glows, and inspires devotion. Out of the common air, it modulates strains to "raise a mortal to the skies," or to "draw an angel down." If it beautifies the earth, it aims at new Edens, and gardens of the Hesperides, Castalian springs, and golden fruits, and amaranthine flowers. If it governs, its domains lie far away - the City |