Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/37

21 Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew; The conscious stone to beauty grew." It is a shallow system of thought which cannot sympathize with this conception. Yet it is as true now as it was at any former age in the history of the world that the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and may be stormed with impunity, although it is also true that the weapon of successful attack must be not thought, as opposed to feeling and imagination, but a self-consciousness sensitive throughout its entire compass. He who has now or at any time past realized such a consciousness, is nature's choice, as Darwin might say, or 'the ultimate man,' as Spencer has called him, or a 'clothed eternity' in the words of Emerson; and such a statement seems to me to be quite compatible with the conviction that men of our own day are in conscious possession of the 'Great Enigma' in a sense less true of any earlier time.