so large a promise of the knowledge of it as it really is. The eyes
that had not been wanting to visible humanity turned with equal
liveliness on the natural world in that region of his birth, where
all its force and colour is twofold. Nature is not only a thought in
the divine mind; it is also the perpetual energy of that mind, which,
ever identical with itself, puts forth and absorbs in turn all the
successive forms of life, of thought, of language even. But what
seemed like striking transformations of matter were in truth only a
chapter, a clause, in the great volume of the transformations of the
Spirit. To that mystic recognition that all is divine had succeeded
a realisation of the largeness of the field of concrete knowledge,
the infinite extent of all there was actually to know. Winged,
fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to
the reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights,
which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence in
it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him.
The earth's wonderful animation, as divined by one who anticipates by
a whole generation the "philosophy of experience:" in that, the bold,
flighty, pantheistic speculation became tangible matter of fact.
Here was the needful book for man to read, the full revelation,
the detailed story 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