58 PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 



intuition, or constructive imagination ; because we cannot 

 organize for him an eye that can see, an ear that can listen 

 to, or a heart that can feel, the harmonies of Nature, or 

 recognise in her endless forms, the thousand-fold realiza- 

 tion of those simple and majestic laws, which yet in their 

 absoluteness can be discovered only in the recesses of his 

 own spirit, not by that man, therefore, whose imagina- 

 tive powers have been ossified by the continual reaction 

 and assimilating influences of mere objects on his mind, 

 and who is a prisoner to his own eye and its reflex, the 

 passive fancy ! not by him in whom an unbroken fami- 

 liarity with the organic world, as if it were mechanical, 

 with the sensitive, but as if it were insensate, has engen- 

 dered the coarse and hard spirit of a sorcerer. The former 

 is unable, the latter unwilling, to master the absolute pre- 

 requisites. There is neither hope nor occasion for him "to 

 cudgel his brains about it, he has no feeling of the busi- 

 ness." If he do not see the necessity from without, if he 

 have not learned the possibility from within, of interpene- 

 tration, of total intussusception, of the existence of all in 

 each as the condition of Nature's unity and substantiality, 

 and of the latency under the predominance of some one 

 power, wherein subsists her life and its endless variety, as 

 he must be, by habitual slavery to the eye, or its reflex, 

 the passive fancy, under the influences of the corpuscu- 

 larian philosophy, he has so paralysed his imaginative 

 powers as to be unable or by that hardness and heart- 

 hardening spirit of contempt, which is sure to result from 

 a perpetual commune with the lifeless, he has so far 

 debased his inward being as to be unwilling to compre- 

 hend the pre-requisite, he must be content, while standing 



