THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 31? 



paints after the Highest he has yet learned to know, after 

 the Best, the Wisest of Men, and delivers into the hands 

 of this Power, as yet, only the Lordship over the phenomena 

 in which he first learned to fear Accident and Fate, that is, 

 over the play of the Forces of Nature. But Man, with his 

 conceptions of God, ever remains within the circle of the 

 Human, and therefore he always feels sufficiently allied to 

 this God of his own creation, to claim, when not for 

 himself, yet for his happier forefathers, a direct descent 

 from or immediate intercourse with the gods. 



The farther Man now progresses in his perfection and 

 development, the clearer, the more transparent, more 

 comprehensible becomes Nature to him, but so much the 

 farther does he become removed from God, and the more 

 incomprehensible does He become to him. To the most 

 highly cultivated man is God the most inconceivable, since 

 he knows that no conception, be it what it may, which he 

 attempts to form of the highest Being, can in any way 

 correspond to Him ; but only few attain this stage of culti- 

 vation, only few really so truly understand themselves, that 

 they calmly allow that human knowledge reaches not to 

 where God and Immortality have their dwelling. Oh ! the 

 foolish pride of Man, which, that it may not find itself too 

 little, would drag down the Highest Being into the dust of 

 human intelligibility ! 



But how shall we find our way again, and to our proper 

 subject? I think, in this manner. All Nature shows 

 itself to us, bound up in Space and Time, and even for that 

 reason, necessarily appears empty and valueless. In our 

 very hearts lives the desire, which cannot be repelled, toward 

 something Complete, Unchangeable ; we feel justified in the 

 expression : " only the Perfect actually exists ;" but that 

 which is in Space, is also, like Space itself, without limits, 



