complex of
the spheres, exist to me imperfectly as idea alone, nor can I conceive
them any complete existence apart from a kindred but omniscient mind.
Each advance in human knowledge should then be an infinitesimal approach
towards the supreme comprehension; and the aspiring race of man is
justified in that inchoation of long hope which is folly to the single
life.

I would also believe that new relations between things may be detected
not merely by the staid and ordered process of collating abstractions,
which is science, but by swifter and more genial methods of intuition.

"Hurrah for positive science,
Long live exact demonstration!"

cried Walt Whitman, exulting over the filed fetters of mankind; and let
us all echo the cry, nor ever forget the razed Bastilles of
superstition. But there glimmers a wealth of truth in the penumbra
beyond our lanterns to which science will creep too slowly without the
aid of imagination. Yet this truth may be seized by swift sallies into
the darkness, and assured to us as it were by some dim apperception of
the soul, when the whole personality is made tense, and subtly
anticipates the cosmic argument. Life is too short to renounce this
daring: the sense of kinship with the All-Consciousness sanctions if not
commands the right adventure.

It was this feeling which led William Blake to exclaim in his impulsive
way, that to generalize is to be an idiot, that direct perception is
all, and the slow process of the inductive reason a devil's
machination. This method of intuition is to the more sober method of
science as the romantic to the classical spirit in literature,
permitting to the individual mind a licence of noble vagrancy. But it
must be a law for the ordinary intelligence to exercise the two apart,
else it will fall into sick fancies of excitement, and by abuse of wild
analogies lose the vital art of balance and sane comparison. Only the
greatest minds, endowed as it were with some divine genius of
extrication, may dare to practise the two together. So Leonardo da Vinci
drove inference and intuition abreast without disaster, and gathered
from purple distances of thought their wildest and most splendid
flowers. To him, as has been well said, philosophy was something giving
strange swiftness and double sight, clairvoyant of occult gifts in
common or uncommon things. The doom of Phaeton awaits those who now would
follow that marvellous course; but the poetic observation