They will never
understand--these last--that the _panentheism_ of Krause is ten times
more religious than their dogmatic supernaturalism. Their passion for
the facts which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents them from
seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual. They can only adore
what comes to them from without. As soon as their dramaturgy is
interpreted symbolically all seems to them lost. They must have their
local prodigies--their vanished unverifiable miracles, because for them
the divine is there and only there.
This faith can hardly fail to conquer among the races pledged to the
Cartesian dualism, who call the incomprehensible clear, and abhor what
is profound. Women also will always find local miracle more easy to
understand than universal miracle, and the visible objective
intervention of God more probable than his psychological and inward
action. The Latin world by its mental form is doomed to petrify its
abstractions, and to remain forever outside the inmost sanctuary of
life, that central hearth where ideas are still undivided, without shape
or determination. The Latin mind makes everything objective, because it
remains outside things, and outside itself. It is like the eye which
only perceives what is exterior to it, and which cannot see itself
except artificially, and from a distance, by means of the reflecting
surface of a mirror.
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