an otherness in the universe

"It was one of the privileges of the seventeenth century to be able to believe, without any effort and striving, that 'truth' was not all of one order. It would be more accurate to say that this was unconsciously assumed, or felt, rather than consciously 'believed'. Thus however eager one might be for 'exantlation' [act of drawing out; exhaustion; obsolete -- Sir T. Browne] of one kind of truth, the new kind, the old order of numinous truth was still secure in its inviolate separateness. The feeling that there was a divine meaning, an otherness, in the universe, as well as a mechanical order, was still natural and inevitable; it had not, as so often since, to be deliberately worked up or simulated."

-- The Seventeenth Century Background: The Thought of the Age in Relation to Religion and Poetry, Basil Willey, 1935, p. 66.