Page:The spirit of the Hebrew poetry 1861.djvu/30

 lates of Speculative Thought. Indispensable, for instance, to the healthful energy of the religious life is an unsophisticated confidence in what is termed the omnipresence and omniscience of God, the Father of spirits; but on this ground, where the Hebrew writers are clear, peremptory, unfaltering, and unconscious of perplexity. Speculative Thought stumbles at its first attempts to advance; and as to that faculty by aid of which we realize, in some degree, an abstract principle, and bring it within range of the imagination, it is here utterly baffled. The belief in this doctrine is simple;—we may say it is natural:—but as to an intellectual realization of it, this is impossible; and as to a philosophic expression of such a belief in words, the most acutely analytic minds have lost their way in utter darkness; or they have landed themselves in Pantheism; or they have beguiled themselves and their disciples with a compage of words without meaning. The power of the human mind to admit simultaneously a consciousness of more than one object is so limited, or it is so soon quite exhausted, that a doctrine which we grant to be incontestably certain, refuses more perhaps than any other, to submit itself to the conditions of human thought:—it is never mastered. Aware, as every one who thinks must be, of this insurmountable difficulty, we ought not to except against that mode of overleaping the obstruction which the Hebrew writers offer to our acceptance:—figurative in phrase, and categorical