THE VEGETABLE WORLD. 319 



barriers of our human mode of perceiving, will fall and we 

 shall be conscious of that of which we now only have 

 fore-shadowings. 



11 We look now upon a Mirror, an obscure Word ; but 

 then face to face." 



That seemingly so firm, clear mathematical perception 

 of Nature, and with it all Science, consequently, is funda- 

 mentally the poorest, meanest, falsest, because it is merely 

 the humanly limited one. But as the highest Divine 

 world is the foundation of the Nature which appears to 

 Man, so lives in us, in spite of our humanly limited con- 

 dition, the god-like spark, not extinguished, but only 

 covered for a time with dust and ashes. This spark, the 

 longing after the Eternal, Unchangeable, seeks its satisfaction 

 in its like, and looks upon Appearance as the shadow of 

 the Existence, the Mechanism ruled by Natural law of 

 the dead masses, as the fore-shadowing of the free Godlike, 

 and that which Man never can succeed in expressing in 

 clear conceptions, lives nevertheless, as his noblest inheri- 

 tance, in the feelings of his heart. This even it is, which 

 meets him, inexplicable, incomprehensible, in Nature, which 

 withdraws itself from all Scientific treatment, and yet as 

 something Better, Higher, since all Science declares, that 

 this it is which fills us with infinite rapture as the Beauty 

 of Nature, or thrills us with unspeakable, holy trembling, 

 as Sublimity. 



And here the Development closes itself into a ring ; at 

 the highest stage of Culture we again receive with conscious- 

 ness and refined insight, that, with which the unconscious, 

 childish understanding set out. Contemplation of Nature 

 becomes again the worship of God, but only after we have 

 separated all the Ungodly, Human, all the Scientifically 

 explicable, Commonly conceivable, out of Nature, and 



