mode of thought, that which alone is worthy of him, that in which his whole spiritual strength is manifested, is that whereby he raises himself above those limitations, whereby all that pertains to sense vanishes into nothing,—into a mere reflection, in mortal eyes, the One, Self-existent Infinite.
Many have raised themselves to this mode of thought without scientific inquiry, merely by their nobleness of heart and their pure moral instinct, because their life has been preeminently one of feeling and sentiment. They have denied, by their conduct, the efficiency and reality of the world of sense, and made it of no account in regulating their resolutions and their actions; whereby they have not indeed made it clear, by reasoning, that this world has no existence for the intellect. Those who could dare to say, “Our citizenship is in heaven; we have here no continuing city, but we seek one to come;”—those whose chief principle it was “to die to the world, to be born again, and already here below to enter upon a new life,”—certainly set no value whatever on the things of sense, and were, to use the language of the schools, practical Transcendental Idealists.
Others, who, besides possessing the natural proneness to mere sensuous activity which is common to us all, have also added to its power by the adoption of similar habits of thought, until they have got wholly entangled in it, and it has grown with their growth, and strengthened with their strength, can raise themselves above it, permanently and completely, only by persevering and conclusive thought; otherwise, with the purest moral intentions, they would be continually drawn down again by their understanding,
