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There remained around him only a select circle, shrewd, hard thinkers, who delighted in metaphysical subtilties, deep-hearted, devoted natures, who sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his active philanthropy and untiring benevolence, courageous men, who admired his independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinion, and those unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to church anywhere as convenience and circumstance may drift them, people who serve, among the keen feeling and thinking portion of the world, much the same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a soft cushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.
When all the faculties are wide-awake in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are oftentimes clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illustrated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story where Hester walks forth to meet her punishment.
It is 'metaphysical aid' that he offers us; it is magic, but, 'magic lawful as eating'; it is a priestly aid that he offers us, the aid of one who has penetrated to the inner sanctuary of the law, the priest of nature, newly instructed in her mind and will, who comes forth from his long communing with her, with her own 'great seal' in his hands with the rod of her enchantments, that old magicians desired to pluck from her, and did not with the gift of the new and nobler miracles of science as the witness of his anointing with the reading of 'God's book of power' with the alphabet of its mystery, as the proof of his ordaining with the key of it, hid from the foundation of the world until now.
But it is not astonishing that M. Troplong rejects the third class of actions possessoires, when we consider that he rejects possession itself. This could be easily proved, were it not too tedious to plunge into these metaphysical obscurities. As an interpreter of the law, M. Troplong is no more successful than as a philosopher. One specimen of his skill in this direction, and I am done with him:
We," said Luther to Bullinger, "will not endure these your metaphysical and philosophical distinctions and differences, which merely are spun and hammered out of human and natural sense and reason.
This passage, like a proffered dish full of rare fruit, tempts the metaphysical appetite by the wealth and variety of its appeal; but not to weary the reader, the author will content himself by the abstraction of a single plum.
From hence in my opinion arises that common prejudice against metaphysical reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those, who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature.
The forces of Nature are ever ready to react to persistent, systematic effort in the right direction and when there is enough vitality to keep alive there is likely to be enough to purify and reconstruct the organism and in time to bring about improvement and cure. This, then, explains why, in the organic types of diseases, metaphysical methods of treatment alone are insufficient.
More addicted to physics than to metaphysical research, he alarmed the national superstition by explaining on physical principles the formation even of the celestial bodies. According to him, the sun itself that centre of divine perfection with the Pythagoreans was ejected from the earth and heated into fire by rapid motion.
Some men are of a metaphysical turn of mind, and not only their thoughts but all their emotional experience, all that directs their purpose and animates their feeling, is cast in the mould of highly abstract ideas. They express themselves in phrases which to most people seem cold or meaningless, an empty substitute for the warmth of religious life.
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