Page:Edgar Poe and his critics.djvu/68

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Edgar Poe and his Critics.

arrives at a form of unbelief far more appalling than that expressed in the gloomy Pantheism of India, since it assumes that the central, creative Soul is, alternately, not diffused only, but merged and lost in the universe, and the universe in it: “A new universe swelling into existence or subsiding into nothingness at every throb of the Heart Divine.” The creative Energy, therefore, “now exists solely in the diffused matter and spirit, of the existing universe.” The author assumes, moreover, that each individual soul retains in its youth a dim consciousness of vast dooms and destinies far distant in the bygone time, and infinitely awful; from which inherent consciousness the conventional “World-Reason” at last awakens it as from a dream. “It says you live, and the time was when you lived not. You have been created. An Intelligence exists greater than your own, and it is only through this Intelligence that you live at all.” “These things,” he says, “we struggle to comprehend and cannot: cannot, because being untrue, they are of necessity incomprehensible.