I imagine, because self-knowledge includes the distinct intelligence of his own good. But he cannot know his own highest good—cannot really understand his happiness, and be ungrateful. How can you to the Giver of Love be ungrateful for the gift of Love?—if you know truly the happiness of love—i. e., know yourself as a Spirit endowed for loving—and know him for the giver? It would be a self-contradiction in Spirit.
SEWARD.
And why do you, the self-knowing, adore and praise? I think that Milton expresses this—
“Thither with hearts and hands and eyes,
Directed in devotion to adore,
Who made him chief
Of all his works.”
NORTH.
As if the discernment of his own constitution as chief of creation peculiarly summoned him to acknowledge with adoration—i. e., with awful ecstasy of admiring—the Constitutor. Is it not a high, solemn, sublime, true thought, that Man’s discernment of his own exaltedness, immediately and with direct impulse, carries him God-ward—as on the summit of a high hill you are next heaven, or seem to be next it?
TALBOYS.