[Sidenote: IN WONDER ALL PHILOSOPHY BEGAN]
Time, space, duration, action, active passion passive, activeness, passiveness, reaction, causation, affinity--here assemble all the mysteries known. All is known-unknown, say, rather, _merely_ known. All is unintelligible, and yet Locke and the stupid adorers of that _fetish_ earth-clod take all for granted. By the bye, in poetry as well as metaphysics, that which we first meet with in the dawn of our mind becomes ever after _fetish_, to the many at least. Blessed he who first sees the morning star, if not the sun, or purpling clouds his harbingers. Thence is _fame_ desirable to a great man, and thence subversion of vulgar fetishes becomes a duty.
Rest, motion! O ye strange locks of intricate simplicity, who shall find the key? He shall throw wide open the portals of the palace of sensuous or symbolical truth, and the Holy of Holies will be found in the adyta. Rest = enjoyment and death. Motion = enjoyment and life. O the depth of the proverb, "Extremes meet"!
The "break of the morning"--and from inaction a nation starts up into motion and wide fellow-consciousness! The trumpet of the Archangel--and a world with all its troops and companies of generations starts up into a hundredfold expansion, power multiplied into itself cubically by the number of all its possible acts--all the potential springing into power. Conceive a bliss from self-conscience, combining with bliss from increase of action; the first dreaming, the latter dead-asleep in a grain of gunpowder--conceive a huge magazine of gunpowder and a flash of lightning awakes the whole at once. What an image of the resurrection, grand from its very inadequacy. Yet again, conceive the living, moving ocean--its bed sinks away from under and the whole world of waters falls in at once on a thousand times vaster mass of intensest fire, and the whole prior orbit of the planet's successive revolutions is possessed by it at once (_Potentia fit actus_) amid the thunder of rapture.
Form is factitious being, and thinking is the process; imagination the laboratory in which the thought elaborates essence into existence. A philosopher, that is, a nominal philosopher without imagination, is a _coiner_. Vanity, the _froth_ of the molten mass, is his _stuff_, and verbiage the stamp and impression. This is but a deaf metaphor--better say that he is guilty of forgery. He presents the same sort of _paper_ as the honest barterer, but when you carry it to the bank it is found to be drawn to _Outis_, _Esq._ His words had deposited no forms there, payable at sight--or even at any imaginable _time_ from the date of the draft.