When, however, in epochs pre-eminently devoted to science, and possessed of a true or false scientific enlightenment, we look to the whole age and its general tone, this philosophical error of an exclusive materialism, and of a scientific deification of nature, does not appear to be the most universally prevalent. It occurs rather as an episode and an exception, and, in a certain limited degree, as an opposition to another error, which, as it is received far more generally, so it exercises a still more despotic authority over the minds of men. I mean rationalism; this is properly the new heathenism of scientific times. Here, in the infinity of dialectics, and the endless dialectical disputes of an abstract and empty thinking, as well as in the false semblance of a logical necessity which prevails in these logical disputations, lies the source of the second leading error of philosophy. All erroneous systems, whether of philosophy or religion, lie somewhere between these two extremes of false thought. Every species of theoretical or practical unbelief or erring faith, or even of a scientific superstition, either approximates, on the one hand, to naturalism, whether under the garb of a poetical symbolism, or the scientific form of a dynamical theory, or, on the other, to the absolutism of the reason, with its dead formularies. Every religious and every philosophical error is either a subordinate or a distorted species of one or the other--or, it may be, a mixture--a mean compounded of both. Manifold, however, or, rather, innumerable, are the several changes and combinations into which these two elements of infidelity and an erring faith may, and, indeed, actually do, enter. These, then, are the two principal elements out of which all the other forms of error are produced. Reason, therefore, and fancy must be looked upon as their true roots and sources in the human consciousness. They spring either from the scientific productive faculty of imagination, as the unpurified sense of nature before the Spirit of God has moved on the face of these waters of infinite life, or from the mere subjective reason, which, in its pursuit of the absolute, thinks only and knows only its own Me. It is on this soil also that philosophical error first assumes a systematic shape and development.