Excerpt from The Contemporary Review, Vol. 2: May-August 1866 To gain this knowledge, we must look, it seems, to what follows.
When, says M. Saisset, from the inconceivability of the essence of God, it is concluded that we know nothing at all about God; when, instead of comprising in precise limits the science of things divine, that science is set aside altogether, I can go no further, and I enter my protest in the name of common sense. The heavens declare the glory of God; this is the voice of common sense, and science in the depths of its analysis finds this principle, that the imperfect being has its reason in the perfect Being, and consequently that there must be in the perfect Being something that may be communicated to the imperfect being, and be to it a natural revelation of its principle: True. Thoroughly true, in itself, but in no way contradictory of Hamilton, who has in substance said the same thing Though man be not identical with the Deity, still is he created in the image of God. It is, indeed, only through an analogy of the human with the Divine nature, that we are percipient and recipient of Divinity. Nor can it be said that the analogy or community of nature between God and man is closer and more intimate in the theory of the French philosopher than in that of his antagonist. His own language couples this analogy with a difi'erence as great as possible - an infinite dif ference - a difference not of degree, but of kind. Between the intellects that we possess and the complete intellect, he says, there is the infinite. Our thought, and every imperfect thought, is a power in the way of development; this is its essence and its necessary law. Divine thought is a thought fully developed, which by its essence is anterior to all development. Finite thought implies efi'ort; infinite thought excludes it. Finite thought is displayed under the form of time; infinite thought subsists and is maintained under the form of eternity. It knows none of the conditions of an imperfect intelli gence; nothing of limit, or time, or space, or succession, consequently nothing of memory, or reasoning, or induction, or any of those human intermediaries between an infinite truth and a finite thought nothing of those laborious operations which are the torment and confusion of our reason. It is but the pure essence of thought.
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