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of the various energies, the mutual connection of which it is 
ever attempting to determine, it does not profess to know ; in 
fact it loudly proclaims it unknowable. It is evidently 
quite out of its province to account for the fact that these 
physical laws produce in nature objects of beauty, and that 
our minds have the aspirations and sublime ideas which 
Nature suggests by its various forms, yet does not itself con- 
tain. There is only one possible answer to the question. As 
certainly as it is blindness in him whose view is limited by 
the perceptions of the senses not to recognize the order that 
underlies the things that are seen, and in the scientific mind 
to be incapable of realizing the beautiful and good and noble, 
and of loving it for its own sake, so, and much more, is he 
blinded who does not regard all these things as proceeding 
from God, and subsisting in God. The fact that to some 
minds the religious view of the universe seems unmeaning, 
and perhaps absurd, is no argument whatever against its 
truth, any more than that many are incapable of scientific 
conceptions, and that to others poetic ideas are unintelligible, 
can be admitted as a proof of the unreality of these modes of 
thought. The universal conscience of man has led him in all 
ages and in all nations, with no exceptions but such as prove 
the rule, to regard God as the omnipotent, all -pervading, 
omnipresent Will, “ of Whom are all things, and we by 
Him ; in Whom we live and move and have our being.” To 
the religious mode of regarding the universe it is quite 
unnecessary to define whether we should say that the events 
happen by God’s permission, or by God’s overruling pro- 
vidence, or by God’s appointment, or God’s predestination ; it 
is simply that to exclude God, the sum and source of all 
goodness and all reality, from anything whatsoever in the 
universe, is to the religious mind not only intolerable, and 
more horrible than death itself, but an absolute self-contradic- 
tion and absurdity. 
13. (V.) It might be supposed that when man has attained 
to the religious view of the universe, this must be the highest 
possible region of human thought ; and, indeed, that the mind 
i3 incapable of reaching further, except with the aid of a 
Divine revelation, seems self-evident. But it was a true 
instinct that suggested to Fichte that, in order to exhaust 
every mode of thought, a yet higher sphere is required ; and 
though he calls it the view of science or philosophy, yet his 
language evidently means, that as the religious view regards 
all things as of God, and God in all things, that which the 
mind still demands for its satisfaction, is a knowledge of the 
manner of the relation of God to all existences, and of all these 
to God. But here all speculation must, in the nature of things, 
