What
can the world be to him who lives for thought, if there be no supreme
and perfect Thought,--none but such poor struggles after thought as he
finds in himself? Take the eternal thought from the heart of things, no
longer can any beauty be real, no more can shape, motion, aspect of
nature have significance in itself, or sympathy with human soul. At best
and most the beauty he thought he saw was but the projected perfection
of his own being, and from himself as the crown and summit of things,
the soul of the man shrinks with horror: it is the more imperfect being
who knows the least his incompleteness, and for whom, seeing so little
beyond himself, it is easiest to imagine himself the heart and apex of
things, and rejoice in the fancy. The killing power of a godless science
returns upon him with tenfold force. The ocean-tempest is once more a
mere clashing of innumerable water-drops; the green and amber sadness of
the evening sky is a mockery of sorrow; his own soul and its sadness is
a mockery of himself. There is nothing in the sadness, nothing in the
mockery. To tell him as comfort, that in his own thought lives the
meaning if nowhere else, is mockery worst of all; for if there be no
truth in them, if these things be no embodiment, to make them serve as
such is to put a candle in a death's-head to light the dying through the
place of tombs.
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