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I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by
science, disorder is unimaginable. If a being endowed with perfect
intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for
suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost
powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him
to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of
time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry
would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the
logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions
which we call the laws of nature. Such a spectator might well be
filled with that _Amor intellectualis Dei_, the beatific vision of the
_vita contemplativa_, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages,
Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable
eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if
sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the
bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor
mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and
disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.
The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions
which pervades the preacher's utterance, brings me back to the proper
topic of the present essay.
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