“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.

“You will perhaps remember his saying explicitly that we can comprehend the Absolute?”

“Yes; I recollect; and, moreover, he declares that ’we are conducted to God by a ray of his own being.’”

“Can limited faculties comprehend the infinite and eternal creator?”

“We do not attain a knowledge of him through finite channels.  Cousin contends that it is by means of relation to the absolute that we know God.”