Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader: Being Selections from the Chief American WritersMartin, Benj. N. (Benjamin Nicholas)
General
Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader: Being Selections from the Chief American Writers
Martin, Benj. N. (Benjamin Nicholas)
American literature
We contend at present only for the position that we cannot have a
science of nature which does not regard the spirit of man as a part of
nature. But is this all? Do man and nature exhaust the possibilities of
being? We cannot answer this question here. But we find suggestions from
the spectrum and the spectroscope which may be worth our heeding. The
materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific
theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and
complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the
laws are so wide-sweeping, and at times so pitiless, the distances are
so over-mastering, even the uses and beauties are so bewildering, that
we bow in mute and almost abject submission to the incomprehensible all;
of which we hesitate to affirm aught, except what has been manifest to
our observant senses and connected by our inseparable associations. We
forget what our overmastering thought has done in subjecting this
universe to its interpretations. Its vast distances have been
annihilated, for we have connected the distant with the near by the one
pervading force which Newton divined. We have analyzed the flame that
burns in our lamp, and the flame that burns in the sun, by the same
instrument,--connecting by a common affinity, at the same instant and
under the same eye, two agents, the farthest removed in place and the
most subtle in essence. As we have overcome distances, so we have
conquered time, reading the story of antecedent cycles with a confidence
equal to that with which we forecast the future ages. The philosopher
who penetrates the distant portions of the universe by the
_omnipresence_ of his scientific generalizations, who reads the secret
of the sun by the glance of his penetrating eye, has little occasion to
deny that all its forces may be mastered by a single all-knowing and
_omnipresent_ Spirit, and that its secrets can be read by one all-seeing
eye. The scientist who evolves the past in his confident thought, under
a few grand titles of generalized forces and relations, and who develops
and almost gives law to the future by his faith in the persistence of
force, has little reason to question the existence of an intellect
capable of deeper insight and larger foresight than his own, which can
grasp all the past and the future by an all-comprehending intelligence,
and can control its wants by a personal energy that is softened to
personal tenderness and love.
[Footnote 19: A Congregational divine, born in Connecticut, long
Professor of Metaphysics in Yale College, and writer of many critical
Essays and Reviews. His treatise on "The Human Intellect," is the most
elaborate American work upon Psychology.]
* * * * *
=_William Henry Milburn,[20] 1823-_=
From "Lectures."
=_54._= THE PIONEER PREACHERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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