CONSENT OF PARTIES TO HUMANITY. 813 



troduced from of old. The vitals also of nature, the nervous suns, 

 enclosed in their rib-work and grate-work of planetary masses, are 

 among outward things most kindred to us, and lend themselves to 

 joy and exhilaration for all that lives. In their other considera- 

 tions, as the mundane system, they offer us great helps of order and 

 law ) and enriching without dissipating our minds, remodel our first 

 notions upon creation, and our faculties rightly applied to the uni- 

 verse, become mightily more human for the process. 



The pure sciences, the abstract truths of the rest, are themselves 

 the laws of mind transplanted into matter ; they are therefore, as 

 we said before, cerebrally human (p. 304), and indeed only true 

 within the sphere of our faculties. There is no escape anywhere 

 from humanity: there we fully agree with the subjective school; 

 but the reason is, that humanity enfolds everything, and not ex- 

 cludes us from, but lets us into, the veriest nature of the world. 

 But it is well to be observed, that there is no Kantian world of 

 " things in themselves," but the world is social to the core. 



In the view we have taken, we have with us the attestations of 

 all parties. The theologians are with us, by the text and scope of 

 their revelations. The superstitious are with us, by their crouch- 

 ing anthropomorphic worship ; by their fear of eclipses, as though 

 their god's eye were black upon them ; by their tremble before all 

 places and natures, lest the . tapestry of their world should open, 

 and stiffen them with some gliding terror. The idealists, or meta- 

 physical ghosts, are with us, by their creed that man cannot travel 

 beyond himself, but that sense and its world is still within the circle 

 of our being. The materialists are with us, by their vaunted alli- 

 ance with the dust; for are they not "spouse of the worm, and 

 brother of the clay V The scientific are with us by the actual 

 order of their sciences, and because they cannot help it. And the 

 practical men, including the rest of the world, are with us, in their 

 own practical way, for not one of them cares a rush for nature ir- 

 relevant to man, and contributing in no sense either to goodness, 

 enjoyment, the pocket, or the person. We now therefore require, 

 that what all have in part, shall be corrected and completed in each, 

 and that the truth of the all-embracing humanity shall be set in 

 that matrix which opens and hungers to receive it. 

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