Now there is nothing, however hidden--nothing, however profound--into which this sensuous principle of knowledge, which investigates all that is earthly, natural or human, and historical, may not attempt at least to penetrate. Only the inquiring senses must not quit their true center. In other words, they ought not to make a hostile attack on the center of the consciousness, which is even the believing soul. They must not, by breaking through it, or passing by it, attempt violently and unduly to ascend to the highest. For in such a case, attempting to create a supreme and highest object of their own, raising it on their own soil, and drawing its materials from their own sources, they will produce nothing but absolutely false and mere nature-gods, or else some historical phantoms, or idols of national recollections and patriotic enthusiasm, such as were enshrined in the heathen worship of antiquity. For even, without material images and altars, such an idolatry may be revived in a scientific form, similar to what we have witnessed, or, if we look around us, may still witness, with our own eyes. And as little can the free spirit of supreme knowledge look down from its own height on this center of the soul, and pay no regard either to faith or love. In the depths of sensuous observation, amid all the rich treasures of physical and historical science, it can not move as sovereign without being first invested with the luminous garment of pure faith and love. Otherwise it only hastens from one error to another to fall from the first abyss into a second and still deeper one.
The pure and living faith of a loving soul abiding permanently in God, is properly the center of the human consciousness--the natural passage of life for the senses as they ascend into the heights, and for the mind or spirit as it penetrates into the depths. It is the connecting mean which not only reconciles and adjusts, joins and combines the two, but also restores them to harmonious unity.
In the preceding Lecture I considered the notion of the truth in which the supreme science and the divine faith coincide, and are at unison in reference to their subject-matter--consequently, as the right notion of Him who is truth itself. Viewing it thus from its objective side principally, I designated it the sum and source of all truth. We have now, in the progress of our speculations, met again with this notion in its subjective aspect. It is chiefly in regard to its form that it is at present to engage our attention. We have, in short, to answer the question how the consciousness must organically be formed and fashioned, and divided, but still harmonized in all its parts, so that in thought and knowledge, in faith, love, and science, in investigating and in learning, it may be well-grounded and find a stable resting-point, and be no longer distracted by dissension and doubt.