Microcosmus : An Essay Concerning Man and His Relation of the World PDF

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Between spiritual needs and the results of human science there is an unsettled dispute of long standing.

In every age the first necessary step towards truth has been the renunciation of those soaring dreams of the human heart which strive to picture the cosmic frame as other and fairer than it appears to the eye of the impartial observer. And no doubt that which men are so ready to set in opposition to common knowledge as being a higher view of things, is but a kind of prophetic yearning, which, though well aware of the limits that it seeks to transcend, knows but little of the goal that it would reach.

Such views, indeed, though they have their source in the best part of our nature, receive their distinctive character and colouring from very various influences.

Fed by many doubts and reflections concerning the destinies of life and drawn from a range of experience that at the best is limited, they neither escape the influences of transmitted culture and temporary tendencies, nor are they even independent of those natural changes of mental mood which take place in men, and are different in youth from what they are after the accumulation of manifold experiences.

It cannot be seriously hoped that such an obscure and unquiet movement of men's spirits should furnish a juster delineation of the connection of things than the careful investigations of science, in which that power of thought which all share in is brought into action.

Though we cannot command the heart to suppress its questionings and longings, we yet hold that it can expect a response to them only as an incidental result of knowledge which starts from a less emotional and therefore a clearer point of view.