thusiasm. But on looking over it how different seem all
the things treated of! My former views look like the gloomy boarding of
a playhouse when the lights have been removed. My heart sought a
philosophy, and imagination substituted her dreams. I took the warmest
for the truest coloring.

I seek for the laws of spirits--I soar up to the infinite, but I forget
to prove that they really exist. A bold attack of materialism overthrows
my creation.

You will read through this fragment, my dear Raphael. Would that you
could succeed in kindling once again the extinct flames of my enthusiasm,
to reconcile me again to my genius! but my pride has sunk so low that
even Raphael's friendly hand can hardly raise me up again.

THEOSOPHY OF JULILTS.

THE WORLD AND THE THINKING BEING.

The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed
out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its
Creator--permit me to use this human simile--the first duty of all
thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great
reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the
compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure
to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one
appearance in nature--the thinking being. The great compound called the
world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth
symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out
of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of
nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself
understandable to intelligence--the alphabet by means of which all
spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another.
Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they
transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor,
because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let
me perceive my relationship with that Being. A new experience in this
kingdom of truth: gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the natural
system of Linnaeus, correspond essentially in my mind to the discovery of
an antique dug up at Herculaneum--they are both only the reflections of
one spirit, a renewed acquaintance with a being like myself. I speak
with the Eternal through the instrument of nature,--through the world's
history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.