'Brahma is eternal, the only substantial being, revealing himself in happiness and joy. The universe is his name, his image; this primal existence, containing all in itself, is the only one substantially existing. All phenomena have their cause in Brahma: he is not subjected to the conditions of time and space. He is imperishable; he is the soul of the world; the soul of every individual being. The universe is Brahma—it comes from Brahma—it subsists in Brahma—Bramah, or the sole self-existing being, is the form of all science, the form of systems of worlds, without end forever. The universes of stars are one with him; they have no being but as they exist in the supremacy of his will. This eternal will is the central heart of all that is. It reveals itself in creation, in preservation, in destruction, in motion, in rest, in space, in time.'
Such an absorption of all things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre character of their architectural remains.
'In their subterranean, vast, and dim excavations; in the gigantic proportions of their colossal architecture, always impressing us with sadness and with the nothingness of man; in their long, still, damp, dreary cities of sepulchres; in their half-shrouded and mummy-like statues, which, in their corpse-like immobility, seem struck with eternal death, or in slowly detaching themselves in their vast and unfinished forms from primeval and gigantic rocks, grow into a kind of dull, embryonic, and stagnant life, far more abhorrent than death itself—do we not clearly recognize the idea of the infinite absorbing all things into itself, crushing the soaring spirit of man under a blind fatalism, robbing him of all hope and aim in life, of the dignity of personal effort and moral responsibility, presenting as the only aim of all his glowing desires, the utter absorption of his own individuality in the bosom of the limitless whole—thus reducing the vivid action of his varied life to the stillness of the grave, without its repose?'
It is a strange fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of the East.
What a step from the vague yet crushing, abstract yet deadening dreaming of a fearful and misinterpreted infinite; from the cruel rigors of an unreasoning and implacable fate—to that full revelation that the Infinite is a personal God, cognizant of the human, gifting it with a free will to choose good or evil, and united with it in mercy and love through the mystic life and still more mystic death of the Divine Redeemer!
In sculpture, the thirst for the infinite is manifest in the various statues of the gods which it has given us; in painting, an art more closely related to Christianity, in the numberless figures of angels and heads of cherubs, in the countless pictures upon holy subjects with which it has presented us. The marble speaks, the canvas glows with human aspirations toward the infinite.
It is certainly a very significant fact, too, that there must be a point of escape in every picture, a window to let in the light, a glimpse of the sky: an idea of distance must in some way be given, or the painting will oppress us like a prison. No amount of beauty in a nearer form will make us content to remain with it, so long as we are shut down to it alone, nor is any form so cold but that we may look upon it with kindness, so that it rise against the infinite light of hope beyond. Gaze into Vernet's pictures: always sunrises or sunsets, calms or tempests, nights of moonlight, misty horizons in which it is quite impossible to distinguish the limiting lines—the infinite is always suggested in them: hence their hold upon the popular imagination.
It is really wonderful in how many ways this feeling appeals to us; it seems to be the background of our whole finite being. Saint Pierre says:
'The reason of the pleasure we experience in the sight of an immense tree, springs from the feeling of the infinite which is excited in us by its pyramidal form. The decrease in the different tiers of its branches; the infinitesimal gradations in its shades of green, always lighter at the extremity of the tree than in the rest of its foliage—give it an elevation apparently without limit. We experience the same sensations in the horizontal lines of landscapes, where we see row after row of hills unrolling one behind the other, until the last appears to melt into the blue of the distant heavens. Nature seems to love to produce the same effect upon extended plains or rolling prairies through the means of the mists and vapors so frequently rising from the bosoms of lakes and rivers. Sometimes these mists hang like curtains along the skirts of isolated forests, sometimes they rise like armed columns, and move in serried ranks along the beds of rivers; sometimes they are gray, gloomy, and motionless, sometimes moving with startling rapidity; their sombre hues changing into glowing rose, or penetrated and permeated with the glittering and golden light of the sun. Under all these shifting aspects they open for us perspective after perspective of the infinite into the infinite itself.'
Indeed nature seems never wearied in her varied suggestions of the infinite. Ruskin says, Is not the pleasure we receive from the effects of calm and luminous distance at the hour of sunset and sunrise among the most memorable and singular of which we are conscious; and is not all that is dazzling in color, perfect in form, gladdening in expression, of evanescent and shallow appealing when compared with the still small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet arch of dawn over the dark and troublous edged sea? Almost all poets and painters have depicted sunrises and sunsets; every heart responds—there must then be something in them of a peculiar character, which must be one of the primal and most earnest motives of beauty to human sensation. Do they show us finer characters of form than can be developed by the broader daylight? Not so—for their power is almost independent of the forms they assume or display; it matters little whether the bright clouds be simple or manifold, whether the mountain line be subdued or majestic; the fairer forms of earthly things are by them subdued and disguised, the round and muscular growth of the forest trunks is sunk into skeleton lines of quiet shade, the purple clefts of the hillside are labyrinthed in the darkness, the orbed spring and whirling wave of the torrent have given place to a white, ghastly, interrupted gleaming. Have they more perfection or fulness of color? Not so—for their effect is often deeper when their hues are dim than when they are blazoned with crimson and pale gold; and assuredly in the blue of the rainy sky, in the many tints of morning flowers, in the sunlight on summer foliage and field, there are more sources of mere sensuous color-pleasure than in the single streak of the wan and dying light of sunset. It is not then by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is not by intensity of light, that this strange distant apace possesses its attractive power. But there is one thing which it has or suggests, which no other object of sight suggests in an equal degree, and that is—infinity. It is of all visible things the least material, the least finite, the farthest withdrawn from the earth prison-house, the most typical of the nature of God, the most suggestive of the glory of His dwelling place. For the sky of the night, though we may know it is boundless, is dark; it is a studded vault, a roof that shuts us in and down; but the transparent distance of sunrise and sunset has no limit; we feel its infinity as we rejoice in its purity of light. That this has been deeply felt by artists, is evident in their works.