The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863Various
History
The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; United States -- Politics and government -- 19th century -- Periodicals
The aspirations of man constantly sigh for the limitless; his soul
contains depths which his reason cannot fathom. How rapidly his surging
ideas come and go! What flashes of supernatural light--what fearful
obscurity! Heaven and Hell war in his soul! Strange visions traverse his
intellect, throwing their lurid light into the vague depths of his
heart. His power to love and feel seems boundless--his power to know
almost at zero. What can he predicate even of himself, with his
boundless desires for he knows not what--his fleeting emotions and
insatiable wishes! Ah! if the language of poetry, of music, of the
arts, came not to gift these passing images with external life, to fix
them in the wildered consciousness, they would surge away almost
unmarked, like lovely dreams, scarcely leaving their dim traces in the
memory. For, with the generality of common minds, the actual is death to
the ideal! But art speaks; spontaneity is justified; our inner being, so
vague before, stands revealed before us; the beautiful must be the true,
the chaos of the moral world is dispelled; we were created to _enjoy_
the attributes of God, which, finitely manifested, are Truth and Beauty;
and His light moves over the perturbed chaos of our dim being! What can
abstract science, with its cold and finite language, do for a soul
athirst for an infinite happiness? Nothing, unless its first postulate
be God! Young people, generally, and women, in whom the love of Beauty
is strongly developed, have almost a repulsion to the study of science.
Wherefore? Because it often seems to exile God from His own creation.
Let Him desert Paradise, and it becomes at once a desert. The Infinite
is the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley! Besides, the
reflective reasoning faculties awaken late with those in whom the
intuitive faculties and sensibilities attain an early development. Let
woman not despair. What use will there be for the reflective reason,
when 'we shall know even as we are known,' and the vision in God shall
make the spontaneous bliss of immortality?
The habit of only seeing, only studying, only analyzing the finite, is
very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all
spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the
Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only
in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic
signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality
of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are
precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques
himself upon the precision of his language, not perceiving it has gained
this boasted prim exactitude at the expense of breadth and depth. All
honor to the savant! but let him keep the lamp of spontaneity ever
burning in his soul. By its light the savage and the woman divine God;
without it, he may weigh creation--and 'find Him not!'
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