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For all negations- and they are the only predicates by means of which all other things can be distinguished from the ens realissimum are mere limitations of a greater and a higher nay, the highest reality; and they consequently presuppose this reality, and are, as regards their content, derived from it.
There is, of course, no limit to the variety and adaptiveness of nature taken as a whole, but each species is hedged about by impassable limitations. The ouzel is akin to the thrushes, and yet it lives along and in the water. Does it ever take to the fields and woods, and live on fruit and land-insects, and nest in trees like other thrushes? So with all birds and beasts.
Mistakes, disappointments, crudities, infidelities? Yes, but the mistakes, disappointments, crudities, failures of youth youth of strong passions and love of play but of a masterful will that a generous nature has so much encouraged and aided as to obscure its limitations.
Such potent geniuses as a Galileo, a Newton, and a Leibnitz never supposed for an instant that the truth of such dogmas could be called in question. Nothing can be more typical than this fact of the hypnotising effect of general beliefs, but at the same time nothing can mark more decisively the humiliating limitations of our intelligence. Barbarous, philosophically speaking, I mean.
But if, on the contrary, through the sufferings and losses, the deficiencies and limitations of life, we have been led to make God our dearest friend, if we have been taught, by the coldness and harshness of men, to take refuge in His love, how blessed are we! how cheaply the purchase has been made, even though it has meant the loss of every passing good, of all that the world can give, even the pouring out of our own life’s blood!
Hence the smallness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find equal although unsimilar limitations in works inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despicable taste for high society. So that the first duty of any man who is to write is intellectual.
And there are tales of conscience, of which "The Black Cat" is the most fearful and "William Wilson" the most subtle; and there are landscape sketches and fantasies and extravaganzas, most of these poor stuff. It is ungrateful and perhaps unnecessary to dwell upon Poe's limitations. His scornful glance caught certain aspects of the human drama with camera-like precision.
'Every man hath his own proper gift of God, one after this fashion and another after that, and we shall be true to the boundlessness of the gift and to the limitations of our own possession of it, in the measure of which we combine obedience to the light which shines in us, with thankful recognition of that which is granted to others.
Now, there are a great many things which are sins that are not crimes; and, with due limitations, I might venture to say that there are some things which are sins that are not to be qualified as vices. Sin implies God.
And there are times when the very limitations of our individuality necessary limitation's for us prevent our sacrifices from counting. "I was wrong, I grant you, grievously wrong in the course I took, even though it were not consciously deliberate. But if my husband had been an artist I should always have remained separated from his real life by a limitation I had no power to remove.