Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/27

 —its brightness, its darkness:—whatever is life-like in man, and whatever portends death. Although the two systems possess in common whatever is true concerning God, everything within each wears an aspect widely unlike the aspect which it presents in the other.

The instinctive tendency of the human mind (or of a certain class of minds) to generalize, and to pursue, to their end, the most abstract forms of thought, is not in itself blameworthy, nor must it be charged with the ill-consequences and the failures which often are its fruit. Where there is no generalization there will be no progress: where there is no endeavour to pass on from the concrete to the abstract, men individually, and nations, continue stationary in a rude civilization:—there may be mind; but it sleeps; or it is impotently active:—it is busy, but it does not travel forward. Yet it is only within the range of earth, or of things that are indeed cognizable by the human mind, that this power of abstraction—the highest and the noblest of its powers—can be productive of what must always be its aim and purpose, namely, an absolute philosophy; or a philosophy which shall be coherent in itself, and shall be exempt from internal contradictions.

It is on this ground, then, that the Hebrew writers, in their capacity as teachers of Theology, occupy a position where they are broadly distinguished from all other teachers with whom they might properly be compared, whether ancient or