nite things. For
definition means the placing of bounds, and that which is infinite can
have no bounds. The man, therefore, who seeks to bound what has no
bounds, endeavours to define what is, by its nature, undefinable; and
finding that the one poor means which he has of conveying fallacious
impressions of illusory things to his mind through his deadened senses,
is utterly insufficient to give him an idea of what alone is real, he
takes refuge in his crass ignorance and coarse grossness of language,
and asserts boldly that the human mind is too limited in its nature to
conceive of infinite space, or of infinite time.

Not only is the untrammelled mind of man capable of these bolder
conceptions, but even the wretched fool who sees in the material world
the whole of what man can know, could never get so far as to think even
of the delusive objects on which he pins his foolish faith, unless the
very mind which he insults and misunderstands, had by its nature that
infinite capacity of comprehension which, he says, exists not. For
otherwise, if the mind be limited, there must be a definite limit to its
comprehensive faculty, and it is easy to conceive that such a limit
would soon become apparent to every student; as apparent as it is that a
being, confined within three dimensions of space, cannot, without
altering his nature, escape from these three dimensions, nor from the
laws which govern matter having length, breadth and thickness alone,
without the external fourth dimension, with its interchangeability of
exterior and interior angles.

The very thought that infinite space cannot be understood, is itself a
proof that the mind unconsciously realises the precise nature of such
infinity, in attributing to it at once the all-comprehensiveness from
which there is no escape, in which all dimensions exist, and by virtue
of which all other conceptions become possible; since this infinite
space contains in itself all dimensions of existence--transitory, real
and potential; and if the capacity of the mind is co-extensive with the
capacity of infinite space, since it feels itself undoubtedly capable of
grasping any limited idea contained in any portion of the illimitable
whole, it follows that the mind is of itself as infinite as the space in
which all created things have their transitory form of being, and in
which all uncreated truths exist eternally. The mind is aware of
infinity by that true sort of knowledge which is an inti