organs of the mind. Their general doctrine is, that God is an abstraction;—an abstraction one and infinite; force, substance, mind, intelligence, wisdom, love,—what you please; but all these abstractions still, allied to no form, and barely allowed to be or exist. Where theology commits suicide, philosophy is its unhappy ghost; a thing with no power of embodiment; haunting the world, not dwelling in it; and disturbing the business of life, without aiding to bear and lighten its real burdens. Nevertheless, philosophy contains the shells of truth, and the general principle of correspondence. For force and substance answer to their peculiar manifestations; mind, intelligence, wisdom, love, infinite as well as finite, correspond to their own appropriate means, adaptations, ends, and delights. All this, philosophy recognizes, and produces even the general formula, that the human mind is the image of the Divine, and that man is the mirror of the universe. But the mischief lies here, that these philosophical principles are confirmed abstractions, or closed ideas, containing no internal series, and incapable of tallying with the indefinite multiformity of men and things. For where an indivisible unity, like the God of the metaphysician, or the blank forms of consciousness, is the first degree or term, it is plain that it can correspond to nothing distinct in the second sphere, or the region of causes, and to nothing really various in the third, or the region of effects. Spiritualities, seized upon as a general formula, and carefully emptied of all particulars, can bear no relation to a world like ours, or a creature like man, where, and in whom, parts are distinguished from parts, in form as well as function, to a degree which baffles the most instructed faculty; and where, indeed, succession and detail of things comprise all the means of God. If there be no series, but a blank, in our knowledge of the higher and the highest, if it number none but closed ideas, plainly we cannot apply it to the series of the lower, and see piece for piece in each sphere; or discern the specific wisdom of any given natural form, still less the distinct carrying-out in nature of any spiritual principle of existence. Now, this settled emptiness is the sole attribute of all confirmed abstractions; and philosophy, for the present at least,
