ect, like its hostile nature, can have the effect of making the
mind recoil upon itself. Infinity, like hostility, removes us from
things, and makes us conscious of our independence. The
simultaneous view of many things, innumerable attractions felt
together, produce equilibrium and indifference, as effectually as
the exclusion of all. If we may call the liberation of the self by the
consciousness of evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may
assert that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which consists in
liberation by equipoise. Any wide survey is sublime in that fashion.
Each detail may be beautiful. We may even be ready with a
passionate response to its appeal. We may think we covet every
sort of pleasure, and lean to every kind of vigorous, impulsive life.
But let an infinite panorama be suddenly unfolded; the will is
instantly paralyzed, and the heart choked. It is impossible to desire
everything at once, and when all is offered and approved, it is
impossible to choose everything. In this suspense, the mind soars
into a kind of heaven, benevolent but unmoved.

This is the attitude of all minds to which breadth of interest or
length of years has brought balance and dignity. The sacerdotal
quality of old age comes from this same sympathy in disinterestedness.
Old men full of hurry and passion appear as fools, because
we understand that their experience has not left enough
mark upon their brain to qualify with the memory of other
goods any object that may be now presented. We cannot venerate
any one in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And
this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon
any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the
gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a
natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on
no other model.

When the pantheists try to conceive all the parts of nature as
forming a single being, which shall contain them all and yet have
absolute unity, they find themselves soon denying the existence of
the world they are trying to deify; for nature, reduced to the unity it
would assume in an omniscient mind, is no longer nature, but
something simple and impossible, the exact opposite of the real
world. Such an opposition would constitute the liberation of the
divine mind from nature, and its existence as a self-conscious
individual. The effort after comprehensiveness of view reduces
things t