when he sees with what varied means and happy appliances every separate circumstance was made so happily focal to the whole, and with what a regular series of gradations he arrived at that which he now is; when he learns to perceive in himself the complete union of cause and effect, of end and means, and, full of the noblest pride of which finite beings are capable, exclaims,
"Hast not thyself accomplished all,
Thou heart with holy ardour glowing?"[1]
how will dark and despairing thoughts—the thoughts of his lonely and unsolaced life—of helplessness, of failing support and consolation, vanish from before him,—thoughts which we are wont to believe mostly to beset those in whose minds the idea of a personal, superintending, rational cause of the chain of finite being is wanting! This constant, ruling self-consciousness, moreover, this living solely in and through himself, need not render the moral man callous and insensible to the lot and happiness of others, or shut out from his heart every loving sympathy and benevolent impulse. This very idea of perfection, towards which all his activity converges as to a grand, sufficient centre, so far from being a mere cold abstraction of the reason, may prove a warm and genial feeling of the heart, and thus transport his existence into the existence of others. For in them too there exists a like capacity for greater perfection, and this latent fitness it may be in his power to elicit and improve. He is not yet penetrated with the loftiest idea of all morality, so long as he can be content to regard himself or others as distinct and isolated—so long as all spiritual existences seem not to him merged and united in the sum of perfection which lies diffused around him. Nay, his union with other beings
- ↑ "Hast du nicht alles selbst vollendet,
Heilig, glühend Herz?"—Goethe, Prometheus, II. 63.
