"Who told you, sir, that I was one in any department?" She looked up
suddenly, with flashing eyes.
"There is no need to be told. I can readily perceive it."
"Your penetration is at fault, then. Of all others, the charge of
pyrrhonism is the last I merit."
He smiled, and said quietly: "What, then, is your aesthetic creed, if I may inquire?"
"It is nearly allied to Cousin's."
"I thought you had abjured eclecticism; yet Cousin is its apostle.
Once admit his theory of the beautiful, and you cannot reject his
psychology and ethics; nay, his theodicea."
"I do not desire to separate his system; as such I receive it."
Beulah compressed her lips firmly and looked at her interrogator
half defiantly.
"You deliberately shut your eyes, then, to the goal his philosophy
sets before you?"
"No; I am nearing the goal, looking steadily toward it." She spoke
hastily, and with an involuntary wrinkling of her brow.
"And that goal is pantheism; draped gorgeously, but pantheism
still," answered Mr. Lindsay, with solemn emphasis.
"No; his whole psychology is opposed to pantheism!" cried Beulah,
pushing aside her drawing materials and meeting his eyes fixedly.
"You probably attach undue weight to his assertion that, although
God passes into the universe, or therein manifests all the elements
of his being, he is not 'exhausted in the act.' Now, granting, for
the sake of argument, that God is not entirely absorbed in the
universe, Cousin's pet doctrine of the 'Spontaneous Apperception of
Absolute Truths' clearly renders man a modification of God.
Difference in degree, you know, implies sameness of kind; from this
there is no escape. He says, 'The God of consciousness is not a
solitary sovereign, banished beyond creation, upon the throne of a
silent eternity, and an absolute existence, which resembles
existence in no respect whatever. He is a God, at once true and
real, substance and cause, one and many, eternity and time, essence
and life, end and middle; at the summit of existence and at its
base, infinite and finite together; in a word, a Trinity; being at
the same time God, Nature, and Humanity.' His separation of reason
and reasoning, and the results of his boasted 'spontaneous
apperception,' are very nearly allied to those of Schelling's
'Intellectual Intuition'; yet I suppose you would shrink from the
'absolute identity' of the latter?"
"You have not stated the question fairly, sir. He reiterates that
the absolute belongs to none of us. We perceive truth, but do not
create it!" retorted Beulah.