This must be his calling. Where his being is
indigenous, there his thought must be indigenous also; and the most
truly human view, that which alone befits him, that in which his whole
power of thought is represented, is the view by which he lifts himself
above those limits, by which all that is of the senses is changed for
him into pure nothing, a mere reflection in mortal eyes of the alone
enduring, non-sensuous.
Many have been elevated to this view without scientific thought,
simply by their great heart and their pure moral instinct; because
they lived especially with the heart, and in the sentiments. They
denied, by their conduct, the efficacy and reality of the world of
the senses; and in the shaping of their purposes and measures, they
esteemed as nothing that concerning which they had not yet learned by
thinking that it is nothing, even to thought. They who could say, "our
citizenship is in heaven; we have here no permanent place, but seek
one to come;" they whose first principle was, to die to the world and
to be born anew, and, even here, to enter into another life--they,
truly, placed not the slightest value upon all the objects of sense,
and were, to use the language of the School, practical transcendental
Idealists.
Others who, in addition to the sensuous activity which is native to
us all, have, by their thought, confirmed themselves in the sensuous,
become implicated, and, as it were, grown together with it; they can
raise themselves permanently and perfectly above the sensuous only by
continuing and carrying out their thought.
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