"A timeless, limitless, perfect unity underlies all our feeling and thought, underlies every form of existence and every part of our self. We know this through a deep, inner awareness for which we can give no explanation or proof, because it is itself the source of all knowledge, proof, and explanation. Depending on our degree of personal development, this awareness in us may be obscure or clear.
In reason and in nature this highest reality appears to us in its internal and external manifestations. We feel ourselves to be a part of this reality. As creatures both of nature and of reason, we constitute an entity which contains both nature and reason , and thus partakes of the divine. This opens two different directions to our mental life. We may, on the one hand, try to reduce the multiplicity and infinity of nature and reason to their original, divine unity. Or we may try to represent the inner creative unity of our selves in an external multiplicity. In doing the latter, we exercise capability, in doing the former, we show insight. Insight produces knowledge and science.
Capability produces art... [Art] owes its existence to the creative activity of the human spirit, and... sprung from a unity, it must itself be a complete, coherent, and quasi-organic whole."
Physiologist / Painter (1789 - 1869)
Nine Letters on Landscape Painting
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