788 OF THE FUNCTIONS OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 



Holiness and Purity, can only be satisfied by the contemplation of such per- 

 fection as no merely Human being has ever attained; and it is only in the con- 

 templation of the Divine Ideal, that they meet their appropriate object. And 

 the sentiment of Beauty, especially as it rises from the material to the spiritual, 

 passes beyond the noblest creations of art and the most perfect realization of it 

 in the outward life, and soars into the region of the Unseen, where alone the 

 imagination can freely expand itself in the contemplation of such Beauty as no 

 objective representation can embody. And it is by combining, so far as our 

 capacity will admit, the ideas which we thus derive from reflection upon the 

 facts of our own consciousness, with those which we draw from the contempla- 

 tion of the Universe around us, that we form the justest conception of the Divine 

 Nature, of which our finite minds are capable. We are led to conceive of Him as 

 the Absolute, Unchangeable, Self-Existent Infinite in duration Illimitable in 

 space the highest ideal of Truth, Right, and Beauty the All-powerful source 

 of that agency which we recognize in the phenomena of Nature the All- Wise 

 designer of that wondrous plan, whose original perfection is the real source of 

 the uniformity and harmony which we recognize in its operation the All- 

 Benevolent contriver of the happiness of His sentient creatures the All-Just 

 disposer of events in the Moral world, for the evolution of the ultimate ends for 

 which Man was called into existence. In proportion to the elevation of our 

 own spiritual nature, and the harmonious development of its several tendencies, 

 will be the elevation and harmoniousness of our conception of the Divine ; and 

 in proportion, more particularly, as we succeed in raising ourselves towards that 

 ideal of perfection which has been graciously presented to us in the " well- 

 beloved Son of God," are the relations of the Divine Nature to our own felt 

 to be more intimate. And it is from the consciousness of our relation to God, 

 as His creatures, as His children, and as independent but responsible fellow- 

 workers with Him in accomplishing His great purposes, that all those Ideas and 

 Sentiments arise, which are designated as Religious, and which constitute that 

 most exalted portion of our nature, of whose continued existence and yet 

 higher elevation we have the fullest assurance, both in the depths of our own 

 consciousness and in the promises of Revelation. 



817. Upon the Sensational and Intellectual Ideas thus brought under the 

 cognizance of the Mind, all acts of Reasoning are founded. These consist, for the 

 most part, in the aggregation and collocation of ideas, the decomposition of com- 

 plex ideas into more simple ones, and the combination of simple ideas into 

 general expressions j in which are exercised the faculty of Comparison, by which 

 the relations and connections of ideas are perceived that of Abstraction, by which 

 we fix our attention on any particular qualities of the object of our thought, 

 and isolate it from the rest and that of Generalization, by which we connect 

 together those properties which have been thus discovered to be common to a 

 number of objects. These operations, when carefully analyzed, seem capable 

 of reduction to this one expression namely, the fixation of our Attention on 

 some particular classes of ideas, from among those which Suggestion brings 

 before our consciousness ', and this fixation may result, as already shown, either 

 from the peculiar attractiveness which these classes of ideas have for us (the 

 constitution of individual minds varying greatly in this respect), or on the de- 

 termination of our own Will. The foregoing are the purely intellectual pro- 

 cesses chiefly concerned in the simple acquirement of knowledge, with which 

 class of operations the Emotional part of our nature has very little participation ; 

 and there is strong reason to believe that they may be performed automatically 

 to a very considerable extent, without any other than a permissive act of Will. 

 It is clearly by such automatic action that the above-mentioned "fundamental 

 axioms" or "intuitions" are evolved; and there is not one of the operations 

 above described, which may not be performed quite involuntarily, especially by 



