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indeed yet unspoken . And first there is thought , and all its various laws . Are they , though invisible , less certain than things visible ? No , they gain as implicit an assent as any facts which our eyes can behold , or our fingers handle . The absurd in idea is as much an object of ridicule as the imperfect or erroneous in vision or in action . We believe in our own minds , we believe
in the succession of ideas in the minds of others , but we neither have seen nor can see them . They are revealed by language ., but they have no resemblance , as far as we can tell , to any earthly thing of which our senses take cognizance : yet we believe Take that wonderful " conception , the belief , the consciousnesscall it what you will—of the Infinite . It surrounds whatever fields of experience we have traversed , it is the gulph in which at last all our other conceptions are swallowed up . We add it to
space , in order to form the idea of immensity—we transfer it to duration , to frame the thought of eternity—we add it to power , and intelligence , and goodness , and so make up the idea of a god . Have we beheld it ?—have we received it through the medium of the eye , or held it in the hollow of our hands ? Yet there it is , in the mind ; the most central , deep , ineradicable of ideas . sThe learned may try to banish it from the province of the sciences : in vain ; it was there before science had begun her
work , it will be there when she has finished ; not even the first elements of geometry can supersede it , for the object of geometry is space , and space , too , is infinite . And the Beautiful—that everflowing spring of pure delights and lofty sentiments ; can our idea of that be explained by the senses ? We see it in nature : we frame the conception of it for ourselves ; but it is not in colour , it is not in forms , nor sounds , nor words
but rather in the connexion of all these things with a hidden spring of thought and feeling . The Beautiful is an invisible privilege of the spirit still more than a quality in surrounding objects . And the emotions of Love—the devotion , the self-subjugation f the spirit of unhesitating sacrifice , the readiness to give up even life
itself—whence , do they spring ? There is no impurity there : on the contrary , wherever they act , their purifying influence is felt . Prom our earthly nature they do not spring , for they war against the passions and appetites , they are the manifestations of a better nature—the advanced guard , if we may so speak , of the powers of an invisible world . If our faith in these divine attributes were
to be less , because we cannot see them ; if we ventured to slight the generous sentiments by which they are revealed to us , because they cannot be the objects of our examination , should we not indeed become contemptible to ourselves , and unworthy of the gift of life ? If these are imaginations , leave them for me , and take-away that which you call reality . And the Conscience I—it is the most powerful voice which
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44 The Visible and the Invisible *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1832, page 44, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1804/page/44/
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