4 i2 LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



able and eager to give form and grace to these im 

 pressions by thought reproductive of the Divine idea, 

 in which alone the beauty and order of the universe 

 repose. 



The earliest exercise of these inalienable faculties of the 

 human spirit is childlike, but not therefore weak and 

 childish. All primitive nations are too childlike to act 

 except under the stimulus of imagination or emotion. 

 Intellectual effort therefore is not calm and disciplined, 

 but passionate and absorbing. All thought stands in 

 immediate contact with living impressions and feelings, 

 and so, if incapable of rising to the abstract, is prevented 

 from sinking to the unreal. This indeed is a quality of 

 primitive thought which we moderns are very apt to 

 ignore or to deny. We so uniformly speak of nature in 

 the language of abstraction, inference, scientific theory, 

 that we can hardly conceive that the earliest human 

 speech offers only the direct, and therefore infallible 

 reflection of what is felt. If a Hebrew poet accosts the 

 morning star as &quot; bright-rayed son of the dawn/ we are 

 far likelier to fall into conjectures as to Semitic mythology 

 than simply to accept the perfect image of newborn 

 splendour floating in the lap of the early twilight. The 

 tendency of the modern mind which this instance 

 exemplifies is one that must continually be guarded 

 against in dealing with early Eastern literature, and 

 especially in dealing with the Old Testament. It is 

 this misconstruction which on the one hand produces 

 the Biblical Cosmologies, Biblical Psychologies, Mosaic 

 Astronomies and Geologies that still perplex the unwary ; 

 while on the other hand it has given rise to the funda 

 mental fallacy of the negative criticism, the extraordinary 

 delusion that the Hebrew race is indifferent to objective 

 reality and historic truth. 



To follow out these remarks would carry us too far 

 from our present argument. What we are now to observe 

 is the contrast between the later habit of thought which 



