This shall perhaps be my subject
for my summer lectures. How much is contained in it! the whole domain of
inner education, all that is mysterious in our life, the relation of
nature to spirit, of God and all other beings to man, the repetition in
miniature of the cosmogony, mythology, theology, and history of the
universe, the evolution of mind, in a word the problem of problems into
which I have often plunged but from which finite things, details,
minutiae, have turned me back a thousand times. I return to the brink of
the great abyss with the clear perception that here lies the problem of
science, that to sound it is a duty, that God hides Himself only in
light and love, that He calls upon us to become spirits, to possess
ourselves and to possess Him in the measure of our strength and that it
is our incredulity, our spiritual cowardice, which is our infirmity and
weakness.
Dante, gazing into the three worlds with their divers heavens, saw under
the form of an image what I would fain seize under a purer form. But he
was a poet, and I shall only be a philosopher. The poet makes himself
understood by human generations and by the crowd; the philosopher
addresses himself only to a few rare minds. The day has broken. It
brings with it dispersion of thought in action.
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