Whether it be that the Living Principle, which permeates all things
throughout the physical world, cannot be touched in a single point
without conducting to its centre, its source, and confluence, thus
giving by a part, though obscurely and indefinitely, a sense of the
whole,--we know not. But this we may venture to assert, and on no
improbable ground,--that a ray of light is not more continuously
linked in its luminous particles than our moral being with the
whole moral universe. If this be so, may it not give us, in a faint
shadowing at least, some intimation of the many real, though unknown
relations, which everywhere surround and bear upon us? In the deeper
emotions, we have, sometimes, what seems to us a fearful proof of it.
But let us look at it negatively; and suppose a case where this chain
is broken,--of a human being who is thus cut off from all possible
sympathies, and shut up, as it were, in the hopeless solitude of
his own mind. What is this horrible avulsion, this impenetrable
self-imprisonment, but the appalling state of _despair?_ And what
if we should see it realized in some forsaken outcast, and hear his
forlorn cry, "Alone! alone!" while to his living spirit that single
word is all that is left him to fill the blank of space? In such a
state, the very proudest autocrat would yearn for the sympathy of the
veriest wretch.
It would seem, then, since this living cement which is diffused
through nature, binding all things in one, so that no part can be
contemplated that does not, of necessity, even though unconsciously to
us, act on the mind with reference to the whole,--since this, as we
find, cannot be transferred to any copy of the actual, it must needs
follow, if we would imitate Nature in its true effects, that recourse
must be had to another, though similar principle, which shall so
pervade our production as to satisfy the mind with an efficient
equivalent. Now, in order to this there are two conditions required:
first, the personal modification, (already discussed) of every
separate part,--which may be considered as its proper life; and,
secondly, the uniting of the parts by such an interdependence that
they shall appear to us as essential, one to another, and all to each.
When this is done, the result is a whole. But how do we obtain
this mutual dependence? We refer the questioner to the law of
Harmony,--that mysterious power, which is only apprehended by its
imperative effect.
But, be the above as it may, we know it to be a fact, that, whilst
nothing in Nature ever affects us as fragmentary, no unmodified copy
of her by man is ever felt by us as otherwise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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