223
Article X.
The Kingdoms of Nature, their Life and Affinity; by Dr. C. G. Carus.
From the Zeitschrift für Natur und Heilkunde, Band i. Hefte i. Dresden, 1819.
When man awakes from that state in which he is but the passive recipient of impressions from the external world, and when therefore, instead of reposing in the consciousness of his increasing in strength and stature and exhibiting a reciprocity of bodily action of various kinds with surrounding objects, he feels the spirit, the infusion of the breath of God, in motion within him, he is powerfully impelled to endeavour, by bringing the relations between the spirit within and the phænomena without into a clear point of view, to obtain a clearer knowledge of himself. This desire has its origin in a most distinct conviction that without such knowledge no real harmony, no true internal equilibrium can be conceived to exist in man, and that nature and he must therefore stand as two eternally separated beings. But a feeling that things are separated which at the same moment exist in and through each other, is totally incompatible with that internal repose which, as we ourselves are one, is to be found not in the sense of separation but in the consciousness of unity. In this fact we clearly see what it was that gave birth to those speculations, by means of which it was sought for so many ages, sometimes with more and sometimes with less sincerity and freedom, to ascertain the relations between the phænomena of nature and the laws of mind. In those speculations, however, we have occasion to observe, how frequently that which stands forth in us most plainly and undisguisedly, and which for that reason should be supposed discernible and known at the very first, was exactly the least heeded and last discovered. It was, no doubt, owing to this circumstance, that many a truth which presented itself almost unveiled to the pure and unsophisticated feeling of the genuine children of nature remained a hidden mystery to the sages of mankind.
In order to avoid such errors it is particularly important that we should give a general and exact definition of the terms proof and explanation. Now to explain is but to consider a phænomenon in the clearness of a superior light, and to prove is but to trace a subordinate proposition up to a higher, or rather to a primary truth. The supreme and one, which is alike the foundation of nature and mind, can therefore no more be proved or explained than the splendour of the sun can be increased by means of some terrestrial light. On the contrary, the
