rried out and embodied in the subtler inquiries. The
bearing upon what constitutes a Mystery, and what constitutes
Explanation, or the accounting for appearances, may be expressed thus:--

In the first place, the Understanding can never pass out of its own
experience--its acquired knowledge, whether of body or of mind. What we
obtain by our various sensibilities to the world about us, and by our
self-consciousness, are the foundation, the ABC of everything that we
are capable of knowing. We know colours, and we know sound; we know
pleasure and pain, and the various emotions of wonder, fear, love,
anger. If there be any being endowed with senses different from ours,
with that being we can have no communion. If there be any phenomena that
escape our limited sensibilities, they transcend the possibility of our
knowledge.

It is necessary, however, to take account of the combining or
constructive aptitudes of the mind. We can go a certain length in
putting together our alphabet of sensation and experience into many
various compounds. We can imagine a paradise or a pandemonium; but only
as made up of our own knowledge of things good and evil. The limits of
this constructive power are soon reached. We are baffled to enter into
the feelings of our own kindred, when they are far removed in character
and circumstances from ourselves. The youth at twenty cannot approximate
to the feelings of men of middle age. The healthy are unable to
comprehend the life of the invalid.

[TIME AND SPACE RELATIVE TO OUR FACULTIES.]

To come to the practical applications. The great leading notions called
Time and Space are known to us only under the conditions of our own
sensibility. Time is made known by all our actions, all our senses, all
our feelings, and by the succession of our thoughts; it is experienced
as a continuance and a repetition of movement, sight, sound, fear, or
any other state of feeling, or of thinking. One motion or sensation is
continued longer than another; or it is more frequently repeated after
intermission, giving the _numerical_ estimate of time, as in the beats
of the pendulum. In these ways we form estimates of seconds, minutes,
hours, days. And our constructive faculty can be brought into play to
conceive the larger tracts of duration--a century, or a hundred
centuries. Nay, by our arithmetical powers we can put down in cipher,
or conceive _symbolically_ (which is the meagrest of all conceptions)
millions of milli