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CHAPTER III. - THE SPIRITUAL FEELINGS.

Lesson 75 - 1. What these are Their divisions Truth - p.337

1. THE spiritual feelings are so called because they belong peculiarly to our higher nature. Intellectual action is spiritual action: yet that which gives guidance and government to our interior, hidden life, is found in our intuitions. The intellect is instrumental under these, and, as in the brute, is simply a means to safety and gratification. Our spiritual feelings spring up, then, in direct connection with our intuitions; those mental elements which make our life truly rational, which give to us a choice of ends, and liberty in the pursuit of them. The only intuitions which draw forth directly feeling, are those of truth, beauty and right. There is in the emotions connected with these regulative ideas the action of the intellect, yet an action different from that presented by the last class of feelings. In these, it was the observed relation of things to our enjoyments which was the ground of desire, with the attendant sensibilities. The mental action intervened between the remote appetites, tastes, passions, and pointed out the means of gratification, and called forth a variety of emotions in prosecuting the labor presented. In the present case, the intellectual action precedes the intuition. Patient inquiry reveals the grounds of belief, the truth: a careful discrimination of qualities, of the symbols of expression, of complex relations, discloses the conditions of beauty: a thorough inquiry into the nature and results of action, its reflex and progressive effects, lays open its true character, and then