This divine image implanted in the human breast is not an isolated thought--a transient flash of light, like the kindling spark of Prometheus: nor is it a mere Platonic resemblance to the Deity--an ideal speculation of the human mind, soaring beyond the range of vulgar conception. But, as this likeness to God forms the fundamental principle of human existence, it is interwoven with the internal structure of human consciousness; and the triple nature of the soul is intimately connected with the principle of the divine resemblance. In its state of discord, the human consciousness, in its external operations, pursues four opposite paths of direction towards reason (vernunft), or imagination (fantasie), or understanding (verstand), or will (wille), so long as these faculties remain disunited. But, when consciousness is restored to its primitive harmony, the internal life of man is three-fold in mind, soul, and sense; and to expound and demonstrate this truth, was the purport and object of the Philosophy of Life, which I treated of in a former course of lectures. And this triple nature of spiritual life, which, among all creatures, characterizes man alone, is most closely allied with the triple energy and personality of the one Divine Being, and constitutes, as far as the immeasurable distance between the creature and Creator will permit, the wonderful analogy between weak, mutable man, and the infinite Spirit of eternal Love. But the original harmony of human consciousness--the triple nature of spiritual life, can be restored in individual man by the following means only:--the soul, previously distracted, can regain its unity, or become again whole, only by a divine illumination;--when this light--the first ray of hope--is humbly received and imbibed by the soul. Enlightened by this first incipient ray, the mind, the living mind, no longer now a cold, dead, abstract understanding, is enabled to embrace with faith the pure word of truth (which is one with love), and to comprehend this word aright, and, by this word, to comprehend the world and its ownself:--while the understanding, in its former isolated and abstract state, was both internally and externally distracted and divided between the phantasmata of nature and the endless sophisms of contentious dialectic. When thus the strong hand of all-guiding love, hath loosed the Gordian knot which bound the human consciousness in inextricable folds;--the third fundamental faculty in man--the sense for divine things--is then awakened and excited. This is now no longer a mere passive feeling for divine things--a will undetermined, or incapable of good: but it becomes an energy acting on life--an energy which is itself life and deed.