Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1816 edition. Excerpt: ... of Oneness and Allness as its two elements or primary factors. In the language of the old schools, Unity ] Omneity Totality. The Reason first manifests itself in man by the tendency to the comprehension of all as one. We can neither rest in an infinite that is not at the same time a whole, nor in a whole that is not infinite. Hence the natural Man is always in a state either of resistance or of captivity to the understanding and the fancy, which cannot represent totality without limit: and he either loses the One in the striving after the Infinite, (i. e. Atheism with or without polytheism) or the Infinite in the striving after the One, (i. e. anthropomorphic monotheism.) The rational instinct, therefore, taken abstractedly and unbalanced, did in itself, (' ye shall be as gods! Gen. iii. 5.) and in its consequences, (the lusts of the flesh, the eye, and the understanding, as in verse the sixth, ) form the original temptation, through which man fell: and in all ages has continued to originate the same, even from Adam, in whom we all fell, to the atheists who deified the human reason in the person of a harlot during the earlier period of the French revolution. To this tendency, therefore, Religion, as the consideration of the Particular and Individual (in which respect it takes up and identifies with itself the excelr lence of the Understanding) but of the Individual, as it exists and has its being in the Universal (in which respect it is one with the pure Reason, )--to this tendency, I say, Religion assigns the due limits, and is the echo of the 'voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.' Hence in all the ages and countries of civilization Religion has been the parent and fosterer of the Fine Arts, as of Poetry, Music, Painting, &c. the.