of life, of thought, of language even. What seemed like striking
transformations of matter were in truth only a chapter, a clause, in
the great volume of the transformations of the divine Spirit. The
mystic recognition that all is indeed divine had accompanied a
realisation [149] of the largeness of the field of concrete
knowledge, the infinite extent of all there was actually to know.
Winged, fortified, by that central philosophic faith, the student
proceeds to the detailed reading of nature, led on from point to
point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him by the way,
from the divine intelligence in it, speaking directly,
sympathetically, to a like intelligence in him. The earth's
wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by a whole
generation the Baconian "philosophy of experience": in that, those
bold, flighty, pantheistic speculations become tangible matter of
fact. Here was the needful book for man to read; the full
revelation, the story in detail, of that one universal mind,
struggling, emerging, through shadow, substance, manifest spirit, in
various orders of being,--the veritable history of God. And nature,
together with the true pedigree and evolution of man also, his
gradual issue from it, was still all to learn. The delightful tangle
of things!--it would be the delightful task of man's thoughts to
disentangle that. Already Bruno had measured the space which Bacon
would fill, with room, perhaps, for Darwin also. That Deity is
everywhere, like all such abstract propositions, is a two-edged
force, depending for its practical effect on the mind which admits it
on the peculiar perspective of that mind. To Dutch Spinosa, in the
next century, faint, consumptive, with a naturally [150] faint hold
on external things, the theorem that God was in all things whatever,
annihilating their differences, suggested a somewhat chilly
withdrawal from the contact of all alike. But in Bruno, eager and