An excellent instance of the abstraction [from objects of the sense] that results from the attention converging to any one object, is furnished by the oily rags, broken saucers, greasy phials, dabs, crusts, and smears of paints in the laboratory of a Raphael, or a Claude Lorraine, or a Van Huysum, or any other great master of the beautiful and becoming. In like manner, the mud and clay in the modelling hand of a Chantrey--what are they to him whose total soul is awake, in his eye as a subject, and before his eye as some ideal of beauty _objectively_? The various objects of the senses are as little the objects of _his_ senses, as the ink with which the "Lear" was written, existed in the consciousness of a Shakspere.
The humming-moth with its glimmer-mist of rapid unceasing motion before the humble-bee within the flowering bells and cups--and the eagle _level_ with the clouds, himself a cloudy speck, surveys the vale from mount to mount. From the cataract flung on the vale, the broadest fleeces of the snowy foam light on the bank flowers or the water-lilies in the stiller pool below.
The defect of Archbishop Leighton's reasoning is the taking eternity for a sort of time, a _baro major_, a baron of beef or quarter of lamb, out of which and off which time is cut, as a brisket or shoulder--while, even in common discourse, without any design of sounding the depth of the truth or of weighing the words expressing it in the hair-balance of metaphysics, it would be more convenient to consider eternity the _simul et totum_ as the _antitheton_ of time.
[Sidenote: THE LITERARY STERILITY OF ISLAMISM]
The extraordinary florency of letters under the Spanish Caliphate in connection with the character and capabilities of Mohammedanism has never yet been treated as its importance requires. Halim II, founder of the University of Cordova, and of numerous colleges and libraries throughout Spain, is said to have possessed a library of six hundred thousand MSS., the catalogue filling forty-four volumes. Nor were his successors behind him in zeal and munificence. That the prime article of Islamism, the uni-personality of God, is one cause of the downfall, say rather of the merely meteoric existence of their literary age, I am persuaded, but the exclusive scene (in Spain) suggests many interesting views. With a learned class Mohammedanism could not but pass into Deism, and Deism never did, never can, establish itself as a religion. It is the doctrine of the tri-unity that connects Christianity with philosophy, gives a positive religion a specific interest to the philosopher, and that of redemption to the moralist and psychologist. Predestination, in the plenitude, in which it is equivalent to fatalism, was the necessary alternative and _succedaneum_ of Redemption, and the Incarnation the only preservative against pantheism on one side, and anthropomorphism on the other. The Persian (Europeans in Asia) form of Mohammedanism is very striking in this point of view.