Beulah - Page 296/348

"Who told you, sir, that I was one in any department?" She looked up

suddenly, with flashing eyes.

"There is no need to be told. I can readily perceive it."

"Your penetration is at fault, then. Of all others, the charge of

pyrrhonism is the last I merit."

He smiled, and said quietly: "What, then, is your aesthetic creed, if I may inquire?"

"It is nearly allied to Cousin's."

"I thought you had abjured eclecticism; yet Cousin is its apostle.

Once admit his theory of the beautiful, and you cannot reject his

psychology and ethics; nay, his theodicea."

"I do not desire to separate his system; as such I receive it."

Beulah compressed her lips firmly and looked at her interrogator

half defiantly.

"You deliberately shut your eyes, then, to the goal his philosophy

sets before you?"

"No; I am nearing the goal, looking steadily toward it." She spoke

hastily, and with an involuntary wrinkling of her brow.

"And that goal is pantheism; draped gorgeously, but pantheism

still," answered Mr. Lindsay, with solemn emphasis.

"No; his whole psychology is opposed to pantheism!" cried Beulah,

pushing aside her drawing materials and meeting his eyes fixedly.

"You probably attach undue weight to his assertion that, although

God passes into the universe, or therein manifests all the elements

of his being, he is not 'exhausted in the act.' Now, granting, for

the sake of argument, that God is not entirely absorbed in the

universe, Cousin's pet doctrine of the 'Spontaneous Apperception of

Absolute Truths' clearly renders man a modification of God.

Difference in degree, you know, implies sameness of kind; from this

there is no escape. He says, 'The God of consciousness is not a

solitary sovereign, banished beyond creation, upon the throne of a

silent eternity, and an absolute existence, which resembles

existence in no respect whatever. He is a God, at once true and

real, substance and cause, one and many, eternity and time, essence

and life, end and middle; at the summit of existence and at its

base, infinite and finite together; in a word, a Trinity; being at

the same time God, Nature, and Humanity.' His separation of reason

and reasoning, and the results of his boasted 'spontaneous

apperception,' are very nearly allied to those of Schelling's

'Intellectual Intuition'; yet I suppose you would shrink from the

'absolute identity' of the latter?"

"You have not stated the question fairly, sir. He reiterates that

the absolute belongs to none of us. We perceive truth, but do not

create it!" retorted Beulah.