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bility of thinking and doing, even downward in the scale to the low grade of a mere instinctive consciousness of bare existence, and down to that narrow sphere of liberty, which is given, say, to the crinoid star-fish, fixed by his stem to the bottom of the ocean. Growth and development of body and increase of the power of the soul in the ascending scale of types of organization, experience, discipline, practical skill, knowledge, wisdom, culture, insight, may follow, in their degrees, even up to the highest human wisdom and intelligence, wherein is the divine light of the soul. But the thought, which this special soul will have, must depend upon what it acts against and perceives, or what it acts upon and creates within itself as conceptions of its own; and its acts and doings will depend upon the thought and the direction taken by the power of the soul; and all its knowledge, wisdom, and culture must be acquired. But the fundamental power to perceive, conceive, think, understand, judge, and know, and do, is given, in whatever swelling measure, and is not acquired; though acquired skill, in many things, may be equivalent in practical effect to an increase of power. We have, in the "Cymbeline," some illustration of this kind of power and the degree of faculty and difference of quality, which Nature may give, with the birth of the individual. The two sons of the king are stolen from their cradle by Belarius, and brought up in a forest cave that was "a cell of ignorance" as hunters, knowing nothing of their origin. And when Imogen appears at the cave in the disguise of an unknown boy, the brothers conceive a greater liking for him than they have for their supposed father, Belarius:

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O worthiness of nature! breed of greatness!
Cowards father cowards, and base things sire base:
Nature hath meal and bran; contempt and grace.
I am not their father; yet who this should be,

Doth miracle itself, lov'd before me.

O thou goddess,

Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon'st
In these two princely boys! They are as gentle
As zephyrs, blowing below the violet,

Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,
Their royal blood enchaf'd, as the rud'st wind,
That by the top doth take the mountain pine,
And make him stoop to th' vale. 'T is wonder
That an invisible instinct should frame them
To royalty unlearn'd, honor untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valour

That wildly grows in them, but yields a crop
As if it had been sow'd!"

Act IV. Sc. 2.

Thus is the soul constituted a special thinker and creator by itself, under a special consciousness of its own; and all its perceptions, conceptions, thought, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, culture, and insight, even to a knowledge of God and the universe and the order of his providence in it, must be exclusively its own, and arise out of its own special activity as such given power of thought, with whatever helps it may have. All the while, man must remember, that he lives in a world-prison as close as that in which the fallen King Richard meditated:

"K. Rich. I have been studying how I may compar
This prison, where I live, unto the world:
And, for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet still I'll hammer 't out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul;
My soul, the father; and these two beget
A generation of still breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world;
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples, and do set the Word itself
Against the Word:

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Nor I, nor any man, that but man is,

With nothing shall be pleas'd till he be eas'd

With being nothing." - Rich. II., Act V. Sc. 5.

What is given, here, from the original fountain of all existence being a thinking power, all its thinking, its special consciousness, its identity and personality, its ideas, thoughts, knowledge, wisdom, and culture, and all its acts and doings, must necessarily be the effect, work, and result of the activity of the power as original cause, under the whole special constitution of the soul as such. In like manner, the thought of God must be the work and effect of the activity of the divine power of thought in its whole unity and totality; and his thought, knowledge, and purposes must exist under the divine consciousness alone, being as boundless as the universe and himself. His thought and action, being the actual universe, is presented as such effect and as reality directly to the fore-front view of this special thinker, seer, knower, and doer, whether he shall see much or little of it, whether he shall heed, or not, its laws, facts, and lesBut, to suppose the thought, ideas, knowledge, or purposes of the divine mind, could be directly made known, immediately imparted, to this special thinker from behind, underneath, and beyond the origin and source of the soul itself, as so constituted, by any conceivable sort of direct illumination, inspiration, or other kind of spiritual communication, angelic, dæmoniac, or super-telegraphic, would be in effect, either to imagine an inconceivable and absurd impossibility, or to suppose the soul to lose its specializa

sons.

tion and to fall back (as a wave falls to the level of the sea) into total identity with the "oversoul," the Greater Providence itself; a supposition, which would necessarily involve the logical and inevitable destruction and utter extinction of the special soul, as such; and it would vanish into silence and oblivion. True, this might happen, or it might not, at the will of the Creator: if the ocean covered the globe, a wave might roll eternally on a given circle. Says Jean Paul Richter, "I believe in a harmonious, an eternal ascent, but in no created culmination." 1

§ 4. THE LESSER PROVIDence.

Returning to the question of the origin and nature of the Lesser Providence, it is to be considered that the soul, so constituted, must exist as an object and a fact of the divine consciousness, in like manner as the body. The power given and specialized in that particular way in the creation of the soul in the universal distribution of variety in the totality of the universe, under that consciousness, must depend, always, for the amount of power, on the divine power in its freedom as self-acting and self-directing cause in the whole providential order and plan of the divine thought; and so, the capability of any soul to think-to perceive, conceive, see, understand, judge, know, and do, must depend at bottom upon the amount of power so given; and just so, from the lowest self-conscious animal up to the highest human intelligence. But nothing but the power and the specialization of it are given from that direction. and on that side. Identity with the divine Existence extends no further than to this fundamental essence of the soul as a finite power of thought. By virtue of that identity it is power in fact of the nature of the power of thought, in a state of activity, and that "sparkle of our creation light whereby men acknowledge a Deity burneth still within," and, as such, self-acting, self-directing cause so far. Dif

1 Kampaner Thal, Werke, XIII. 44.

ference from the universal soul consists in the special constitution of the finite thinking sphere, so far as the specialization goes; and it embraces the whole specialization and no more, the limitations being, on one side, the physical organization and the outward world, and on the other, the given amount of power and the necessary laws of thought; and between the two sides or halves of the sphere (as it were) is, in fact, not a hollow sphere, nor a blank-sheet sensorium, but only that invisible sheet-plane which is yet neither a substance, nor a space, but a mere region of pos sibility of thinking, action, and sense-perception, and that same All Possibility in which God himself exists and creates the universe as His thought. In this unbounded possibility, in which lies the whole outer world and field of sensible experience, however undiscoverable its limits to us, as well as our own inner world of intellectual conception, there is no end to the creations of God and man: art and science have no bounds in this direction, being limited, in this respect, in man, or animal, only in the exhaustion of his power to act, to discover, and to create, but being, in God, as boundless as all the worlds of his creation, that are, or have been, and as inexhaustible as the eternal continuity of his existence and power to think and create.

But it is in the special constitution and by virtue of the specialization, only, that special thinking and a particular consciousness arise. The whole individual identity of the soul as a thinking personality depends upon the specialties, and it must cease if and when they cease. The soul so specialized, and bounded like a wave out of the whole ocean of soul, stands as a created object and a thought in the divine consciousness, in the same manner as a tree, or a microscopic cell of a tree; but while it is such object in the divine mind, it is also a special subject for itself. But a tree, or a cell, is not, any more than is a body without a soul. The inner powers active in a cell are in motion under the divine consciousness alone, like all the powers of phys

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