Limitlessness

The limitlessness of the heavens awes us.

In other respects time has the same characters as space; the character of self-limiting limitlessness : of bounds set only to be overleapt; and overleapt only to be set again.

The finite self-variations of the Self in which the mind losing self-knowledge is caught and dispersed among the variations, are yet not the denials but the endless expression of the Infinite and have no other meaning or reason for existence: the Infinite too, while it possesses its delight of limitless being, finds also the joy of that very limitlessness in its infinite self-definition in the universe.

in their light and block the path of reform. They fail to see that as regards them a very large proportion of the needed reform must be self-reform, self-wrought, and involving self-sacrifice. They have a perniciously misleading notion of the limits — or rather of the limitlessness — of the functions and capacities of governments, which causes them to overlook or neglect substantial and obtainable things, while wasting their energies, embittering their spirits, and weakening their position, in pursuit of political will-o'-the-wisps.

There is the sublime of Time. When we try to represent time — to embody it in successive imaginative forms, however great, vast, or long — we always find a time beyond, — a transcendent time. Every attempt to realise time as a whole is baffled, and each effort but results in realising more and more the limitlessness of Eternity. This is the Sublime of Duration. With this element we naturally connect the effects of Power — of the great limitless forces which have been at work during the past ages ; at work in making and constituting, in modifying, changing, and destroying. And these conceptions of the march of irresistible Power, the passing, fading away of individuals before it, its unceasing ongoing, its indifference, and in some respects its mercilessness — fill, rouse, and appal imagination and thought, and thus produce the mixed emotion of sublimity, — the sublimity of omnipotence joined to limitlessness. In this there is the element of suggestion of what is beyond the senses, in its highest, strongest form.

The mind of man can not so much as grasp this. It is, indeed, as when we try to think of the distant universes, the countless suns, the limitlessness of space.