It is neither entirely this
nor that. It is suggestive and prospective; a body in motion, and not an
object at rest. It draws the soul out and excites thought, because it
is embosomed in a heaven of possibilities, and interests without
satisfying. The landscape has a pleasure to us, because in the mind it
is canopied by the ideal, as it is here canopied by the sky.
The material universe seems a suspense, something arrested on the point
of transition from nonentity to absolute being,--wholly neither, but on
the confines of both, which is the condition of its being perceptible to
us. We are able to feel and use heat, because it is not entirely heat;
and we see light only when it is mixed and diluted with its opposite.
The condition of motion is that there be something at rest; else how
could there be any motion? The river flows, because its banks do not. We
use force, because it is only in part that which it would be. What could
we do with unmixed power? Absolute space is not cognizable to the mind;
we apprehend space only when limited and imprisoned in geometrical
figures. Absolute life we can have no conception of; the absolute must
come down and incarnate itself in the conditioned, and cease to be
absolute, before it comes within the plane of our knowledge. The
unconscious is not knowable; as soon as it is thought, it becomes
conscious.
And this is God's art of expression.
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