288 LANDSCAPE 



imaginative reason, which brought him to the stake. Other 

 philosophers of sundry sects and orders, mystics, deists, pro- 

 fessed pantheists, developed it in various ways to suit their 

 several speculations. It was rhymed by Pope in well-turned 

 couplets : 



All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 



Whose body nature is, and God the soul ; 



That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, 



Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame, 



Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 



Glows in the stars and blossoms in the trees, 



Lives through all life, extends through all extent, 



Spreads undivided, operates unspent ; 



Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, 



As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart ; 



As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, 



As the rapt seraph that adores and burns : 



To him, no high, no low, no great, no small ; 



He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all. 



In these meditations of the poets and the sages there 

 inhered an element of visionary unsubstantial rapture. 

 Attractive as the speculation may have seemed to minds of a 

 certain stamp, it rested on no arguments of probability derived 

 from fact. Theology was justified in neglecting such cloud- 

 castles as the dreams of a disordered mind, until the moment 

 when science, steadily accumulating knowledge without 

 prophesying, had prepared a theory of the universe which 

 necessitated either the abandonment of God as the supreme 

 hypothesis, or else the acceptation of the world as God made 

 manifest in fact, co-extensive with infinity. 



It is not needful to pursue this analysis, or to force a con- 

 clusion as to the right way of solving the suggested problem. 

 Else I should have to show to what a large extent the 

 idealists of Germany, from Kant to Hegel, by their methods 

 of criticism and a priori speculation, stimulated the growing 

 conception of inherent spirituality and unity in nature. For 

 the purpose of this essay it is enough to have pointed out how 

 the modern enthusiasm, which we may call cosmic, sprang up 

 in close connection with ideas like these, and how it is related 



