again, is strictly analogous to what takes place in the vital
organisation of the individual man. The cerebral system of the
nerves has its correspondent ANTITHESIS in the abdominal system: but
hence arises a SYNTHESIS of the two in the pectoral system as the
intermediate, and, like a drawbridge, at once conductor and boundary.
In the latter, as objectised by the former, arise the emotions, the
affections, and, in one word, the passions, as distinguished from the
cognitions and appetites. Now, the reason has been shown to be
superindividual, generally, and therefore not less so when the form
of an individualisation subsists in the alter than when it is
confined to the idem; not less when the emotions have their conscious
or believed object in another, than when their subject is the
individual personal self. For though these emotions, affections,
attachments, and the like, are the prepared ladder by which the lower
nature is taken up into, and made to partake of, the highest room--as
we are taught to give a feeling of reality to the higher per medium
commune with the lower, and thus gradually to see the reality of the
higher (namely, the objects of reason), and finally to know that the
latter are indeed, and pre-eminently real, as if you love your
earthly parents whom you see, by these means you will learn to love
your Heavenly Father who is invisible;--yet this holds good only so
far as the reason is the president, and its objects the ultimate aim;
and cases may arise in which the Christ as the Logos, or Redemptive
Reason, declares, HE THAT LOVES FATHER OR ANOTHER MORE THAN ME, IS
NOT WORTHY OF ME; nay, he that can permit his emotions to rise to an
equality with the universal reason, is in enmity with that reason.
Here, then, reason appears as the love of God; and its antagonist is
the attachment to individuals wherever it exists in diminution of, or
in competition with, the love which is reason.