Thus, then, do we every where observe a strange internal correspondence and affinity between the several aberrations of our age. Here the remotest mental extremes, which externally seem to repel each other, suddenly converge at the same point of delusive light, or rather of brilliant darkness. Instances of this correspondence startle us where we least expect to meet with them. An English poet,[10] perhaps the greatest, certainly the most remarkable poet of our age, in his tragic delineation of the oldest fratricide, has portrayed the prime mover of this deed, the enemy of the human race, and the king of the bottomless pit, as the bold censurer of the divine order of things, and the head of all discontented spirits, and leader of the opposition of the whole creation. In this light he has painted him with unparalleled boldness, and with such moving and astonishing truthfulness, that all previous descriptions by the greatest poets seem but arbitrary and unreal phantoms when compared with this portrait, which was evidently a favorite sketch, for the author’s secret partiality betrays itself in the skill and pains with which he has lavished on this dark figure all the magic colors of his fancy. Thus, then, in this poetic creation, the same hostile principle--the same absolute, _i.e._, evil spirit of negation and contradiction that forms the consummation of the errors of German philosophy, notwithstanding its abstract unintelligibility--is enthroned amid the disordered system. And so, by a strange law of “pre-established harmony,” the anti-Christian poet and these anti-Christian thinkers unexpectedly meet together at the point of a spurious sublimity. In any case, however, this last instance forms the third stage of idealistic confusion, and certainly the last grade of scientific atheism.