With the creation we are in contact through the
intellect. Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that
are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations;
the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created
things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,--these the
intellect gathers in its grasp. But with the Creator we are in
communication only through feeling. The presence, the existence of God
cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated: it must be felt in order to
be proved. The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature
the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that
incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks
out from every object and every fact,--of the range and pitch of whose
power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,--of
this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the
intellect alone. Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered
the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets: not Davys, but
Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths. It is a common belief,
indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting
than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief
pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,--
"Physician art thou? one all eyes,
Philosopher! a fingering slave,
One that would peep and botanize
Upon his mother's grave?"
This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one,
"An undevout astronomer is mad.
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