BOOK I.
CH. II.

PART V.

§ 43. Poetry in language.

stance, at the very head of our English literature, the beauty of their language considered, stand the Imaginary Conversations of Walter Savage Landor. Novels sometimes rise into poetry; but their aiming at amusement in the first place, which determines both what incidents are to be described and in what way, renders them essentially inferior to the greater part of poetry written in verse. To expect the finer kinds of poetry, or much of any kind of it, from novels is like expecting to get as beautiful a statue from freestone as from marble; and this not merely because they are written in prose, but also because, aiming chiefly at amusement, they are adapted not to call out the imaginative powers of the reader, but to entertain him with little call on his own mental exertion. The minute description of character and action in the best novels renders them more akin to philosophy than to poetry. Yet there are some which have a distinctly poetical effect; I should name Wuthering Heights as an instance. In Book II. we shall have to enumerate the little group of sciences, relating to the ways and works of man, which have been won from the field once occupied merely by general literature. But while the scientific and literary methods of treating any subject may be distinguished pretty accurately from each other, there are a number of works of different authors which it is impossible to class wholly under the one or the other category; works, for instance, which explain scientific conceptions to the general public, or which mix scientific conceptions and accurate research, in one part of their subject, with purely literary treatment of other portions of it. There are also compositions in verse which yet belong rather to literature than

to poetry. Literature holds a middle position; it cannot indeed pretend to the rank either of pure poetry or pure science; but on the one side it is moulded by principles of Art, on the other it is the expression of the Opinion of powerful minds, that is, of an opinion which is the pioneer of science. As aiming at entertainment it is art, at truth it is knowledge; and it is to the labourers in the field of general literature that is committed the maintenance and advancement of the general or non-technical culture and education of the community.

§ 44. 1. It has been shown in § 38, that the moral sense in its operation subordinates all feelings, and all objects whatever, to two emotions which mutually sustain and interpenetrate each other, love and justice; and that it forms of these an ideal which governs the whole of life. The effecting of this subordination in thought and in act may be called the passion of morality. When this moral ideal has been formed, there arises in it another desire, the desire of feeling it in its greatest intensity, both for the sake of the feeling itself and also in order thereby to effect the subordination of feeling and action, the moral government of life, more thoroughly and securely. These two passions or desires, the one of governing life, the other of intensifying the perception of the governing ideal itself, are inseparable and mutually supporting. This latter passion is Religion; or Religion is the passion of the ideal of the moral sense; and, far from being, as sometimes thought, a mere sentiment, it is a passion which commands action and insists on perfect obedience to its law. But the intensifying of any feeling is also the attentive analysis or knowledge of that feeling; the desire of

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Book I. CH. II. PART V.

§ 43. Poetry in language.

§ 44. The religious emotions.

greater intensity can only be gratified by closer knowledge of its framework. There arises therefore a knowledge of the framework of the ideal, at the same time as the passion for it. It becomes necessary for us, then, to follow this analysis, and see what it is, and how its object is related to the Subject, whose object it is and who feels the passion for it. It is clear that this process is a mode of imagination.

2. It is not here the place to prove that every feeling or conception is real, while it exists as a feeling or conception; that the mere fact of having a particular feeling or notion is the existence of that feeling or notion as an object there and then; this has been done in "Time and Space." The question here is as to the truth of such a conception or imagination; in this case, of the ideal of the moral sense, the object of religion; that is to say, whether this ideal is necessarily permanent in consciousness, so as to arise in all cases where there is a moral sense at all, and in different shapes according to the degree or mode of development of the moral sense. The remarks in the preceding paragraph sufficiently show that some such ideal is a necessary consequence or accompanying feature of a moral sense; those which follow will be an attempt to show that the moral sense, as above described and analysed, must have an ideal of the kind now to be exhibited however feebly and imperfectly.

3. The term Revealed Religion is, as Coleridge truly said, a pleonasm; all religion is revealed. The term revelation means having become self-evident, or evident and incapable of proof. In this sense every immediate feeling, and time and space in all feelings,

This

are revealed. Religion is nothing else than those ul-
timately ideal moral facts, objects, truths, or feelings,
which are revealed in this sense of the term.
may be shown from the common point of view very
simply. Ask any person what he means by revela-
tion, and he will tell you that he understands it to
mean facts, objects, or truths, revealed, i. e. made
known or told to us by God. That is, that there
must be an author of the revelation, a particular
person distinct from the thing which he makes known
to us. But he cannot rest here; for ask him farther,
how the existence of God, the author of the revela-
tion, is made known to us, and he will answer-by
revelation. How so, you reply, when revelation re-
quires an author as well as a thing revealed? O, he
will say, God reveals Himself to us; He is author and
revelation at once. This is precisely what is meant
above. The terms, That which reveals itself, or, He
who reveals himself, are precisely equivalent to the
term self-evident. In revealed religion, therefore, as
well as in revelation generally, the thing revealed is
not distinct from the author of the revelation, except
as we afterwards distinguish these two parts or ele-
ments in the total object. And therefore, when it is
said that things revealed are certain because they are
revealed by God, this means that they are certain be-
cause they form part of a self-evident object. This
object, however, in reflective emotion, is a Person.

4. The Subject, at its very entrance upon the two ways described in the first paragraph of this §, finds its religious ideal distinguished from its moral ideal, and in this way: the moral ideal consists in the perfect government of its world of thought and feeling by its emotions of love and justice; these emo

BOOK I. CH. II. PART V.

$ 44. The religious emotions.

tions are bound to, or are bound up with, a world of actual feelings, thoughts, and actions, which together constitute the mind and its objects; but the religious ideal, consisting in the perfection, imagined as attained, of this government, consists in an image of which nothing is known but the two emotions of love and justice in an intensity of which there has been no other experience than this anticipatory one. The world or body of these two emotions is entirely provisional, because there is no limit to the changes which may be wrought by an infinite perseverance towards the attainment of the moral ideal.

66

The

'body prepared" for the religious ideal is entirely unknown. Hence, while each of the two ideals are objects of the same Subject, they are at an infinite distance from each other; the most ideally perfect man at an infinite distance from God; and yet God is, as an ideal, in the heart of the humblest man. The two ideals are like two roads running in the same direction, and towards the same goal, one of which ends at a certain point, the other continues out of sight; or like a railway and a telegraph, which travel together to the sea, which only the telegraph crosses. The religious ideal forms a part of the Empirical Ego, since it is an object of its Subject, but it is on the extreme verge of its horizon, the ideal completion of that part of it which I have ventured to name the True Ego. This sameness of the Subject of both ideals is the condition or ground of the communion of the soul with God, the act realising which communion is Prayer; the provisional character of the religious ideal is the unsearchability of God; its ideal perfection the awe-inspiring difference between God and man.