Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cunningly
built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein,
however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. _The whole is greater than the
part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors a vacuum_: how exceedingly
false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can act but where it is_: with all
my heart; only, WHERE is it? Be not the slave of Words: is not the
Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it,
Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? But that
same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the first the master-colors of
our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof)
whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not
a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE
and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but
superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern
them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have
not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing
in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now? Think well, thou too wilt find
that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_
no Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating
in the ether of Deity!

"So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our
ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production and
destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy of our
Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living visible
Garment of God_:--

"'In Being's floods, in Action's storm,
I walk and work, above, beneath,
Work and weave in endless motion!