ts we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible;
the elements already exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of
life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement
will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out
of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed. For skepticisms are not gratuitous
or lawless, but are limitations of the affirmative statement, and the
new philosophy must take them in and make affirmations outside of them,
just as much as it must include the oldest beliefs.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have
made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever
afterwards we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not
see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting
these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the
amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative
power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw;
now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all
things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, objects,
successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and
literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is
a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud.
As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery and make them
wait on his guests at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives
off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street,
shopmen or bar-keepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is
threatenable and insultable in us. 'Tis the same with our idolatries.
People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and
the rounding mind's eye which makes this or that man a type or
representative of humanity, with the name of hero or saint. Jesus, the
"providential man," is a good man on whom many people are agreed
that these optical laws shall take effect. By love on one part and
by forbearance to press objection on the other part, it is for a time
settled, that we will look at him in the centre of the horizon, and
ascribe to him the properties that will attach to any man so seen. But
the longest love or aversion has a speedy term. The great and crescive
self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and
ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and lo