and the mind to the world, and that we must suppose a common or correlative
growth in them, we shrink from saying that this complex nature can contain,
even in outline, all the endless forms of Being and knowledge. Are we not
'seeking the living among the dead' and dignifying a mere logical skeleton
with the name of philosophy and almost of God? When we look far away into
the primeval sources of thought and belief, do we suppose that the mere
accident of our being the heirs of the Greek philosophers can give us a
right to set ourselves up as having the true and only standard of reason in
the world? Or when we contemplate the infinite worlds in the expanse of
heaven can we imagine that a few meagre categories derived from language
and invented by the genius of one or two great thinkers contain the secret
of the universe? Or, having regard to the ages during which the human race
may yet endure, do we suppose that we can anticipate the proportions human
knowledge may attain even within the short space of one or two thousand
years?

Again, we have a difficulty in understanding how ideas can be causes, which
to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion of a creator
artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods' (Plato, Tim.), or
with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the circumference of the
universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how the idea in the mind of an
inventor is the cause of the work which is produced by it; and we can dimly
imagine how this universal frame may be animated by a divine intelligence.
But we cannot conceive how all the thoughts of men that ever were, which
are themselves subject to so many external conditions of climate, country,
and the like, even if regarded as the single thought of a Divine Being, can
be supposed to have made the world. We appear to be only wrapping up
ourselves in our own conceits--to be confusing cause and effect--to be
losing the distinction between reflection and action, between the human and
divine.