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                                  THE
                          PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE,
                                  AND
                        PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE,
                                  IN A
                         _Course of Lectures_.

                       BY FREDERICK VON SCHLEGEL.

                       TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN

                  BY THE REV. A. J. W. MORRISON, M.A.

                               NEW YORK:
                     HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
                            82 CLIFF STREET.
                                 1848.




CONTENTS.

  PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.

  LECTURE I.                                                        Page
  Of the thinking Soul as the Center of Consciousness, and of the false
  Procedure of Reason                                                  7

  LECTURE II.
  Of the loving Soul as the Center of the moral Life; and of Marriage 28

  LECTURE III.
  Of the Soul’s Share in Knowledge, and of Revelation                 48

  LECTURE IV.
  Of the Soul in relation to Nature                                   70

  LECTURE V.
  Of the Soul of Man in relation to God                               95

  LECTURE VI.
  Of the Wisdom of the divine Order of Things in Nature, and of the
  Relation of Nature to the other Life and to the Invisible World    115

  LECTURE VII.
  Of the divine Wisdom as manifested in the Realm of Truth, and of
  the Conflict of the Age with Error                                 141

  LECTURE VIII.
  Of the divine Order in the History of the World and the Relation of
  States                                                             162

  LECTURE IX.
  Of the true Destination of Philosophy: and of the apparent Schism
  but essential Unity between a right Faith and highest Certainty, as
  the Center of Light and Life in the Consciousness                  185

  LECTURE X.
  Of the twofold Spirit of Truth and Error in Science; of the Conflict
  of Faith with Infidelity                                           206

  LECTURE XI.
  Of the Relation of Truth and Science to Life, and of Mind in its application
  to Reality                                                         232

  LECTURE XII.
  Of the symbolical Nature and Constitution of Life with reference to
  Art and the moral Relations of Man                                 256

  LECTURE XIII.
  Of the Spirit of Truth and Life in its application to Politics, or of the
  Christian Constitution of the State and the Christian Idea of Jurisprudence
                                                                     277

  LECTURE XIV.
  Of the Division of Ranks, and of the reciprocal Relations of States,
  according to the Christian Idea. Of Science as a Power; of its Constitution,
  and of the right Regulation of it                                  301

  LECTURE XV.
  Of the true Idea of a Theocracy; of the Might of Science, and of the
  final Restoration and Perfection of the human Consciousness        320


  PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.

  Preface of the German Editor                                       341

  LECTURE I.                                                         343

  LECTURE II.                                                        364

  LECTURE III.                                                       382

  LECTURE IV.                                                        402

  LECTURE V.                                                         424

  LECTURE VI.                                                        444

  LECTURE VII.                                                       469

  LECTURE VIII.                                                      493

  LECTURE IX.                                                        514

  LECTURE X.                                                         537




PREFACE.


These fifteen Lectures on the Philosophy of Life are intended to give,
as far as possible, a full and clear exposition of the most interesting
topics that can engage human attention. In the opening they treat of the
soul, first of all as forming the center of consciousness, and,
secondly, of its co-operation with mind or spirit in science, that is,
the acquisition of a right knowledge of man and nature, and of their
several relations to the Deity. These matters occupy five Lectures of
the whole series. The next three treat of the laws of divine wisdom and
providence, as discernible in outward nature, in the world of thought,
and in the history of mankind. The last seven contain an attempt to
trace the development of man’s mind or spirit, both within himself and
in science and public life. Tracing its gradual expansion, as unfolded
either by the legitimate pursuit of a restoration to original
excellence, or by the struggle with the opposing spirit of the times,
they follow the human race through its progressive gradations, up to the
closing term of perfection.




PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.




LECTURE I.

OF THE THINKING SOUL AS THE CENTER OF CONSCIOUSNESS, AND OF THE FALSE
PROCEDURE OF REASON.


“There are,” says a poet as ingenious as profound,[1] “more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.” This sentiment,
which Genius accidentally let drop, is in the main applicable also to
the philosophy of our own day; and, with a slight modification, I shall
be ready to adopt it as my own. The only change that is requisite to
make it available for my purpose would be the addition--“and also
between heaven and earth are there many things which are not dreamt of
in our philosophy.” And exactly because philosophy, for the most part,
does nothing but dream--scientifically dream, it may be--therefore is it
ignorant, ay, has no inkling even of much which, nevertheless, in all
propriety it ought to know. It loses sight of its true object, it quits
the firm ground where, standing secure, it might pursue its own
avocations without let or hinderance, whenever, abandoning its own
proper region, it either soars up to heaven to weave there its fine-spun
webs of dialectics, and to build its metaphysical castles in the air, or
else, losing itself on the earth, it violently interferes with external
reality, and determines to shape the world according to its own fancy,
and to reform it at will. Half way between these two devious courses
lies the true road; and the proper region of philosophy is even that
spiritual inner life between heaven and earth.

On both sides, many and manifold errors were committed even in the
earlier and better days of enlightened antiquity. Plato himself, the
greatest of the great thinkers of Greece, set up in his Republic the
model of an ideal polity, which, in this respect, can not bear the test
of examination. His design indeed finds, in some measure, its apology in
the disorders and corruption which, even in his day, had infected all
the free states of Greece, whether great or small. His work, too, by the
highly-finished style of the whole, the vivid perspicuity of its
narrative, its rich profusion of pregnant ideas and noble sentiments,
stands out in dignified contrast to the crude and ill-digested schemes
of legislation so hastily propounded in our own day. Still, it will ever
remain the weak point of this great man. One needs not to be a Plato to
see how absolutely unfeasible, not to say practically absurd, are many
of the propositions of this Platonic ideal. Accordingly, it has ever
been the fruitful occasion, not only among cotemporaries, but also with
posterity, of ridicule to the ignorant and of censure to the wise. In
this respect it can not but excite our regret that such great and noble
powers of mind should have been wasted in following a false direction,
and in pursuit of an unattainable end. The oldest philosophers of
Greece, on the other hand--those first bold adventurers on the wide
ocean of thought--combined together the elements of things, water, or
air, or fire, or atoms, or, lastly, the all-ruling intellect[2] itself,
into as many different systems of the universe. If, however, each in his
own way thus set forth a peculiar creed of nature, we must ever bear in
mind that the popular religion, with its poetical imagery, and the
fabulous mythology of antiquity, as affording not only no sufficient,
but absolutely no answer to the inquiring mind, as to the essence of
things, and the first cause of all, could not possibly satisfy these
earlier thinkers. Consequently, they might well feel tempted to find,
each for himself, a way to honor nature, and to contemplate the supreme
Being. Since then, however, the world has grown older by nearly
twenty-five centuries, and much, in the mean while, has been
accomplished by, or fallen to the share of, the human race. But when
philosophy would pretend to regard this long succession of ages, and all
its fruits, as suddenly erased from the records of existence, and for
the sake of change would start afresh, so perilous an experiment can
scarcely lead to any good result, but in all probability, and to judge
from past experience, will only give rise to numberless and interminable
disputes. Such an open space in thought--cleared from all the traces of
an earlier existence (a smoothly-polished marble tablet, as it were,
like the _tabula rasa_ of a recent ephemeral philosophy)--would only
serve as an arena for the useless though daring ventures of unprofitable
speculation, and could never form a safe basis for solid thought, or for
any permanent manifestation of intellectual life.

In itself it is nothing surprising if young and inexperienced minds,
occupying themselves prematurely, or in a perverted sense, with the
grand ideas of God and Nature, liberty and the march of thought, should
be wholly overmastered and carried away with them. It has often happened
before now, and it is no new thing if youthful and ardent temperaments
should either yield to the seductive temptation to make, not to say
create, a new religion of their own; or else feel a deceitful impulse to
censure and to change all that is already in existence, and, if
possible, to reform the whole world by their newly-acquired ideas.

That this twofold aberration and misuse of philosophical thought must
prove universally injurious, and prejudicial both to education and the
whole world, is so evident that it can scarcely be necessary to dwell
upon it. Its effect has been to cause men, especially those whose minds
have been formed in the great and comprehensive duties of practical
life, to view the thing altogether in an evil light, although it must be
confessed there is much injustice in this sweeping condemnation. In
several of the great statesmen of Rome we may observe a similar contempt
for Grecian philosophy as useless and unprofitable. And yet, as is
happily indicated by its Greek name, this whole effort was assuredly
based upon a noble conception, and, when duly regulated, a salutary
principle. For in this beautiful word, according to its original
acceptation, science is not regarded as already finished and mature, but
is rather set forth as an object of search--of a noble curiosity and of
a pure enthusiasm for great and sublime truths, while at the same time
it implies the wise use of such knowledge. Merely, however, to check and
to hinder the aberrations of a false philosophy, is not by itself
sufficient. It is only by laying down and leveling the right road of a
philosophy of life, that a thorough remedy for the evil is to be found.
True philosophy, therefore, honoring that which has been given from
above and that which is existent from without, must neither raise itself
in hostility to the one, nor attempt to interfere violently with the
other. For it is exactly when, keeping modestly within its proper limits
of the inner spiritual life, it makes itself the handmaid neither of
theology nor of politics, that it best asserts its true dignity and
maintains its independence on its own peculiar domain. And thus, even
while it abstains most scrupulously from intermeddling with the positive
and actual, will it operate most powerfully on alien and remote branches
of inquiry, and by teaching them to consider objects in a freer and more
general light, indirectly it will exercise on them a salutary influence.
Thus, while it proceeds along its appointed path, it will, as it were
without effort, disperse many a mist which spreads its dangerous
delusion over the whole of human existence, or remove, perhaps, many a
stone of stumbling, which offends the age and divides the minds of men
in strife and discord. In this manner, consequently, will it most
beautifully attest its healing virtue, and at the same time best fulfill
its proper destination.

The object, therefore, of philosophy is the inner mental life (_geistige
Leben_), not merely this or that individual faculty in any partial
direction, but man’s spiritual life with all its rich and manifold
energies. With respect to form and method: the philosophy of life sets
out from a single assumption--that of life, or, in other words, of a
consciousness to a certain degree awakened and manifoldly developed by
experience--since it has for its object, and purposes to make known the
entire consciousness, and not merely a single phase of it. Now, such an
end would be hindered rather than promoted by a highly elaborate or
minutely exhaustive form, and a painfully artificial method; and it is
herein that the difference lies between a philosophy of life and the
philosophy of the school. If philosophy be regarded merely as one part
of a general scientific education, then is the instruction in method
(whether under the old traditionary name of Logic or any other) the
chief point to be regarded. For such a mere elementary course, passing
over, or at least postponing for a while the consideration of the
matter, as possessing as yet but a very remote interest for the student,
and, in the default of an adequate internal experience of his own,
incapable of being understood by him, concerns itself rather with the
practice of methodical thought, both as necessary for the future, and as
applicable to all matters. But the preliminary exercise in philosophical
thinking is only the introduction to philosophy, and not philosophy
itself. This school-teaching of philosophy might, perhaps, be rendered
productive of the most excellent consequences, if only it were directed
to the history of the human intellect. What could be more interesting
than a history which should enter into the spirit, and distinctly embody
the various systems which the inventive subtilety of the Greeks gave
birth to, or which, taking a still wider range, should embrace the
science of the Egyptians, and some Asiatic nations, and illustrate the
no less wonderful nor less manifold systems of the Hindoos--those Greeks
of the primeval world? But this, perhaps, would be to encroach upon the
peculiar domain of erudition, and might, moreover, fail to furnish equal
interest for all; and, at any rate, the history of philosophy is not
philosophy itself.

Now, the distinction between the philosophy of life and the philosophy
of the school will appear in very different lights, according to the
peculiarity of view which predominates in the several philosophical
systems. That species of philosophy which revolves in the dialectical
orbit of abstract ideas, according to its peculiar character,
presupposes and requires a well-practiced talent of abstraction,
perpetually ascending through higher grades to the very highest, and
even then boldly venturing a step beyond. In short, as may be easily
shown in the instance of modern German science, the being unintelligible
is set up as a kind of essential characteristic of a true and truly
scientific philosophy. I, for my part, must confess that I feel a great
distrust of that philosophy which dwells in inaccessible light, where
the inventor indeed asserts of himself, that he finds himself in an
unattainable certainty and clearness of insight, giving us all the while
to understand thereby that he does see well enough how, of all other
mortals, scarcely any, or, perhaps, strictly speaking, no one,
understands or is capable of understanding him. In all such cases it is
only the false light of some internal _ignis fatuus_ that produces this
illusion of the unintelligible, or, rather, of nonsense. In this pursuit
of wholly abstract and unintelligible thought, the philosophy of the
school is naturally enough esteemed above every other, and regarded as
pre-eminently the true science--_i.e._, the unintelligible.

In such a system a philosophy of life means nothing more than a kind of
translation of its abstruser mysteries into a more popular form, and an
adaptation of them to the capacity of ordinary minds. But even such
popular adaptations, though evincing no common powers of language and
illustration, in spite of their apparent clearness, when closer
examined, are found as unintelligible as the recondite originals. For,
inasmuch as the subject-matter of these abstract speculations was, from
the very first, confused and unintelligible, it was consequently
incapable of being made clear even by the most perspicuous of styles.
But the true living philosophy has no relation or sympathy with this
continuous advance up to the unintelligible heights of empty
abstraction. Since the objects it treats of are none other than those
which every man of a cultivated mind, and, in any degree accustomed to
observe his own consciousness, both has and recognizes within himself,
there is nothing to prevent its exposition being throughout clear, easy,
and forcible. Here the relation is reversed. In such a system the
philosophy of life is the chief and paramount object of interest; while
the philosophy of the school, or the scientific teaching of it in the
schools, however necessary and valuable in its place, is still, as
compared with the whole thing itself, only secondary and subordinate. In
the philosophy of life, moreover, the method adopted must also be a
living one. Consequently it is not, by any means, a thing to be
neglected. But still it need not to be applied with equal rigor
throughout, or to appear prominently in every part, but, on all
occasions, must be governed in these respects by what the particular end
in view may demand.

A few illustrations, drawn from daily experience, will, perhaps, serve
to explain my meaning. Generally speaking, the most important arts and
pursuits of life are ultimately based on mathematics. This science
furnishes them, as it were, with the method they observe; but it is not
practicable, nor, indeed, has man the leisure, to revert on every
occasion, with methodical exactness, to these elements, but, assuming
the principles to be well known and admitted, he attends rather to the
results essential to the end he has in view. The economical management
of the smallest as well as of the largest household, rests, in the end,
on the elementary principles of arithmetic; but what would come of it
if, on every occasion, we were to go back to the simple “one-times-one”
of the multiplication table, and reflected upon and sought for the
proofs that the principle is really valid and can confidently be relied
on in practice? In the same way the art of war is founded on geometry;
but when the general arranges his troops for battle, does he consult his
Euclid to satisfy himself of the correctness and advantages of his
position? Lastly, when the astronomer, whose vocation is pre-eminently
dependent on accurate calculation, when he would make us acquainted with
the phenomena of the sidereal heavens, confines himself almost entirely
to them, without wearying those whom he wishes to interest, with the
complicated reckonings which, however, in all probability, he was
obliged himself to go through. With all these arts and pursuits of
practical life, the intellectual business of thinking--of such thinking
at least as is common to most men--and of communicating thought, has a
sort of affinity and resemblance. For, unquestionably, it is one among
the many problems of philosophy to establish a wise economy and prudent
stewardship of that ever-shifting mass of incoming and outgoing thoughts
which make up our intellectual estate and property. And this is the more
necessary the greater are the treasures of thought possessed by our age.
For, in the highly rapid interchange of and traffic in ideas, which is
carrying on, the receipts and disbursements are not always duly
balanced. There is much cause, therefore, to fear lest a thoughtless and
lavish dissipation of the noblest mental endowments should become
prevalent, or a false and baseless credit-system in thought spring up
amid an absolute deficiency of a solid and permanent capital safely
invested in fundamental ideas and lasting truths. As for the second
simile: I should, by all means, wish to gain a victory, not indeed for
you, but with you, over some of the many errors and many semblances of
thought, which are, however, but cheats and counterfeits which distract
the minds of the present generation, disturb the harmony of life, and
banish peace even from the intellectual world. And as respects the third
illustration: I should indeed rejoice as having, in a great measure,
attained my object, if only I shall succeed in directing your attention
to some star in the higher region of intellect, which hitherto was
either totally unknown, or, at least, never before fully observed.

But above all, I think it necessary to observe further, that in the same
way as philosophy loses sight of its true object and appropriate matter,
when either it passes into and merges in theology, or meddles with
external politics, so also does it mar its proper form when it attempts
to mimic the rigorous method of mathematics. In the middle of the last
century scarcely was there to be found a German manual for any of the
sciences that did not ape the mathematical style, and where every single
position in the long array of interminable paragraphs did not conclude
with the solemn act of demonstrative phraseology. But it is also well
known that the philosophy which was propounded in this inappropriate
form and method was crammed full of, nay, rather, was hardly any thing
more than a tissue of arbitrary, now forgotten, hypotheses, which have
not brought the world at all nearer to the truth--not at least to that
truth which philosophy is in search of, and which is something higher
than a mere example of accurate computation.

And even in the present day--although, indeed, the application is made
in a very different way from formerly--German philosophy is any thing
but free from those algebraic formularies, in which all things, even the
most opposite, admit of being comprised and blended together. But, be it
as it may, this elaborate structure of mechanical demonstration can
never produce a true, intrinsic, and full conviction. The method which
philosophy really requires is quite different, being absolutely internal
and intellectual (_geistige_). As in a correct architectural structure
it is necessary that all its parts should be in unison, and such as the
eye can take in easily and agreeably, so in every philosophical
communication, the solid simple basis being laid, the arrangement of all
the parts, and the careful rejection and exclusion of all foreign
matter, is the most essential point, both for internal correctness and
external perspicuity. But, in truth, the matter in hand bears a far
closer resemblance and affinity to natural objects which live and grow,
than to any lifeless edifice of stone; to a great tree, for instance,
nobly and beautifully spreading out on all sides in its many arms and
branches. As such a tree strikes the hasty and passing glance, it forms
a somewhat irregular and not strictly finished whole; there it stands,
just as the stem has shot up from the root, and has divided itself into
a certain number of branches, and twigs, and leaves, which livingly move
backward and forward in the free air. But examine it more closely, and
how perfect appears its whole structure! how wonderful the symmetry, how
minutely regular the organization of all its parts, even of each little
leaf and delicate fiber! In the same way will the ever-growing tree of
human consciousness and life appear in philosophy, whenever it is not
torn from its roots and stripped of its leaves by a pretended wisdom,
but is vividly apprehended by a true science, and exhibited and
presented to the mind in its life and its growth.

Not only, however, the arrangement of the whole, but also the connection
of the several parts of a philosophical treatise or development, is of a
higher kind than any mere mechanical joining, such, for instance, as
that by which two pieces of wood are nailed or glued together. If I must
illustrate this connection by a simile from animated nature, the facts
of magnetism will best serve my purpose. Once magnetically excited, the
iron needle comes into invisible contact and connection with the whole
globe and its opposite poles; and this magnetic clew has guided the bold
circumnavigator into new and unknown regions of the world. Now, the
intrinsic vital coherence of the several thoughts of philosophy
resembles this magnetic attraction; and no such rude, mechanical, and,
in fact, mere external conjunction of thought, like that lately alluded
to, can satisfy the requirements of philosophical connection.

But the supreme intrinsic unity of philosophical thought, or of a
philosophical series of ideas, is quite different from every thing
hitherto mentioned. It belongs not to nature, but to life; it is not
derived from the latter by way of figure or illustration, but is a part
and constituent of it, and goes to the very root and soil of the moral
life. What I mean is, the unity of sentiment--the fixed character,
remaining ever the same and true to itself--the inner necessary sequence
of the thoughts--which, in life no less than in the system and
philosophical theory, invariably makes a great and profound impression
on our minds, and commands our respect, even when it does not carry
along with it our convictions. This, however, is dependent on no form,
and no mere method can attain to it. How often, for instance, in some
famous political harangue, which perhaps the speaker, like the
rhapsodist of old, poured forth on the spur of the moment, do we at once
recognize and admire this character in the thoughts, this consistency of
sentiment? How often, on the contrary, in another composed with the most
exquisite research and strict method, and apparently a far more
elaborate and finished creation of the intellect, we have only to pierce
through the systematic exterior to find that it is nothing but an
ill-connected and chance-medley of conflicting assumptions and opinions
taken from all quarters, and the crude views of the author himself,
devoid of all solidity, and resting on no firm basis, without character,
and wholly destitute of true intrinsic unity?

If now, in the present course of Lectures, I shall succeed in laying
before you my subject in that clearness and distinctness which are
necessary to enable you to comprehend the whole, and, while taking a
survey of it, to judge of the agreement of the several parts, you will
find, I trust, no difficulty in discovering the fundamental idea and
sentiment. And further, I would venture to entreat you not to judge
hastily of this sentiment from single expressions, and least of all at
the very outset, but, waiting for its progressive development, to judge
of it on the whole. Lastly, I would also indulge a hope that the views
of an individual thinker, if perspicuously enunciated, may, even where
they fail of conviction, and though points of difference still subsist,
produce no revolting impression on your minds; but, by exercising a
healing influence on many a rankling wound in thought and life, produce
among us some of the fairest fruits of true philosophy.

Hitherto we have been considering, first of all, the object and proper
sphere of the philosophy of life; and, secondly, its appropriate form of
communication, as well as all other methods which are alien and foreign
to it. Of great and decisive importance for the whole course and further
development of philosophical inquiry is it to determine, in the next
place, the starting-point from which it ought to set out. It will not do
to believe that we have found this in any axiom or postulate such as are
usually placed at the head of a system. For such a purpose we must
rather investigate the inmost foundation--the root out of which springs
the characteristic feature of a philosophical view. Now, in the
philosophy of life the whole consciousness, with all its different
phases and faculties, must inevitably be taken for the foundation, the
soul being considered as the center thereof. This simple basis being
once laid, it may be further developed in very different ways. For it
is, I might almost say, a matter of indifference from what point in the
circumference or periphery we set out in order to arrive at the center,
with the design of giving a further development to this as the
foundation of the whole. But in order to illustrate this simple method
of studying life from its true central point, which is intermediate
between the two wrong courses already indicated, and in order to make,
by contrast, my meaning the plainer, I would here, in a few words,
characterize the false starting-point from which the prevailing
philosophy of a day--whether that of France in the eighteenth century or
the more recent systems of Germany--has hitherto, for the most part,
proceeded. False do I call it, both on account of the results to which
it has led, and also of its own intrinsic nature. In one case as well as
in the other, the starting-point was invariably some controverted point
of the reason--some opposition or other to the legitimacy of the
reason--under which term, however, little else generally was understood
than an opposition of the reason itself to some other principle equally
valid and extensive. The principal, or, rather, only way which foreign
philosophy took in this pursuit, was to reduce every thing to sensation
as opposed to reason, and to derive every thing from it alone, so as to
make the reason itself merely a secondary faculty, no original and
independent power, and ultimately nothing else than a sort of chemical
precipitate and residuum from the material impressions.[3] But however
much may be conceded to these and to the external senses, and however
great a share they may justly claim in the whole inner property of the
thinking man, still it is evident that the perception of these sensuous
impressions, the inner coherence--in short, the unity of the
consciousness in which they are collected--can never, as indeed it has
often been objected on the other side, have come into the mind from
without. This was not, however, the end which this doctrine had
exclusively, or even principally, in view. The ultimate result to which
they hoped to come by the aid of this premise was simply the negation of
the suprasensible. Whatever in any degree transcends the material
impression, or sensuous experience, as well as all possible knowledge
of, and faith therein, not merely in respect to a positive religion, but
absolutely whatever is noble, beautiful, and great--whatever can lead
the mind to, or can be referred to a something suprasensible and
divine--all this, wherever it may be found, whether in life or thought,
in history or in nature--ay, even in art itself--it was the ultimate
object of this foreign philosophy to decry, to involve in doubt, to
attack and to overthrow, and to bring down to the level of the common
and material, or to plunge it into the skeptical abyss of absolute
unbelief. The first step in this system was a seeming subordination of
reason to sensation, as a derivative of it--a mere slough which it
throws off in its transformations. Afterward, however, the warfare
against the suprasensible was waged entirely with the arms of reason
itself. The reason, indeed, which supplied these weapons was not one
scientifically cultivated and morally regulated, but thoroughly
sophistical and wholly perverted, which, however, put into requisition
all the weapons of a brilliant but skeptical wit, and moved in the
ever-varied turnings of a most ingenious and attractive style. Here,
where the question was no longer the abrogation of any single dogma of
positive religion, but where the opposition to the divine had become the
ruling tendency of philosophy, it is not easy to refrain from
characterizing it as atheistical--what, indeed, in its inmost spirit it
really was, and also historically proved itself by its results.

The other course adopted by French philosophy, in the times immediately
preceding the Revolution, was to lay aside the weapons of wit, and to
employ a burning eloquence as more likely to attract and to carry away
minds naturally noble. It had, consequently, if possible, still more
fatal results than the former. The reason, as the peculiar character of
man in a civilized state--so it was argued--is like civilized man
himself, an artificial creation, and in its essence totally unnatural;
and the savage state of nature is the only one properly adapted to man.
As the means of emancipation from an artificial and corrupt
civilization, the well-known theory of the social contract was advanced.
Our whole age has learned dearly enough the lesson, that this dogma,
practically applied on a large scale, may, indeed, lead to a despotism
of liberty, and to the lust of conquest, but can as little effect the
re-establishment of a true civilization as it can bring back the state
of nature. It would be a work of supererogation to dwell upon the
pernicious results or the intrinsic hollowness of this system. It is,
however, worth while to remark, that, in this theory also, the beginning
was made with an opposition to reason. Starting with a depreciation of
it as an artificial state and a departure from nature, at the last it
threw itself, and the whole existing frame of society, into the arms of
reason, and thereby sought to gain for the latter an unlimited
authority over all laws, both human and divine. A somewhat similar
phenomenon may every where be observed, and the same course will
invariably be taken when philosophy allows itself to set out with some
question or impugning of the reason, and, in its exclusiveness, makes
this dialectical faculty the basis of its investigations.

Modern German philosophy, wholly different from the French, both in form
and spirit, has, from its narrow metaphysical sphere, been of far less
extensive influence; and, even if it has occasionally led to anarchy, it
has been simply an anarchy of ideas. And yet, notwithstanding its
different character, a similar course of inversion is noticeable in it.
Beginning with a strict, not to say absolute, limitation of the reason,
and with an opposition to its assumptions, it also ended in its
investiture with supreme authority--not to say in its deification. The
founder[4] of the modern philosophy of Germany commenced his teaching
with a lengthy demonstration that the reason is totally incapable of
attaining to a knowledge of the suprasensible, and that, by attempting
it, it does but involve itself in endless disputes and difficulties. And
then, on this assumed incompetency of the reason for the suprasensible
was based the doctrine of the need, the necessity of faith--nay, faith
itself.[5] But this arbitrary faith appeared to have but little reliance
on itself; and, when closely viewed, turned out to be the old reason,
which, after being solemnly displaced from the front of the
philosophical palace, was now again, slightly altered and disguised, set
up behind it as a useful but humble postern. Dissatisfied with such a
system, the philosophical _Me_ (Ich, Ego) chose another and a new road,
that of absolute science,[6] in which it might, from the very first, do
as it pleased--might bluster and fluster at will. But soon it became
plain, that in this idealistic doctrine there was no room for any but a
subjective reason-god devoid of all objective reality. In it the
absolute Ego or Me of each individual was substituted for and identified
with the divine. Against this certainty of the “Me,” therefore, there
arose first of all a suspicion, and lastly the reproach of atheism.
But, in truth, we ought to be extremely scrupulous in applying this term
in all cases where the question does not turn on a rude denial of the
truth, but rather on a highly erroneous confusion of ideas. At least, it
would be well if, in such a case, we were to distinguish the imputed
atheism by the epithet of scientific, in order to indicate thereby that
the censure and the name apply in truth only to the error of the system,
and not to the character of the author. For with such a scientific
atheism, the sternest stoicism in the moral doctrine may, as indeed was
actually the case here, be easily combined. Quite weary, however, of the
transcendent vacuity of this ideal reason and mere dialectical
reasoning, German philosophy now took a different road. It turned more
to the side of nature,[7] in whose arms she threw herself in perfect
admiration, thinking to find there alone life and the fullness thereof.
Now, although this new philosophy of nature has borne many noble fruits
of science, still even it has been haunted by that delusive phantom of
the Absolute, and it is not free from liability to the reproach of a
pantheistic deification of Nature. But properly and accurately speaking,
it was not nature itself that was set up as the supreme object of
veneration, but this same phantom of reason, which was taken as the
basis and fundamental principle of nature. It was, in short, nothing but
the old metaphysical one-times-one[8] in a somewhat novel application
and more vivid form. Here, therefore, also did the system commence with
a seeming disgust at the reason, and with a subordination of it to
nature, in order to conclude with the absolute principle of the reason.

Viewed, however, as a philosophical science of nature, it has rather to
answer for some occasional errors and perverse extravagances, than for
any thoroughly consequent and systematic carrying out of the ingrafted
error into all its parts. Moreover, a broad distinction must undoubtedly
be drawn between its different advocates and promulgators. In these last
days German philosophy has, in a measure at least, reverted again into
the empty vacuum of _the absolute_ idea.[9] The latter, indeed, and the
idol of absolute reason which is enshrined therein, is no more a mere
inward conception, but is objectively understood and set up as the
fundamental principle of all entity. But still, when we consider how the
essence of mind is expressly made to consist in negation, and how also
the spirit of negation is predominant through the whole system, a still
worse substitution appears to have taken place, inasmuch as, instead of
the living God, this spirit of negation, so opposed to Him, is, in
erroneous abstraction, set up and made a god of. Here, therefore, as
well as elsewhere, a metaphysical lie assumes the place of a divine
reality.

Thus, then, do we every where observe a strange internal correspondence
and affinity between the several aberrations of our age. Here the
remotest mental extremes, which externally seem to repel each other,
suddenly converge at the same point of delusive light, or rather of
brilliant darkness. Instances of this correspondence startle us where we
least expect to meet with them. An English poet,[10] perhaps the
greatest, certainly the most remarkable poet of our age, in his tragic
delineation of the oldest fratricide, has portrayed the prime mover of
this deed, the enemy of the human race, and the king of the bottomless
pit, as the bold censurer of the divine order of things, and the head of
all discontented spirits, and leader of the opposition of the whole
creation. In this light he has painted him with unparalleled boldness,
and with such moving and astonishing truthfulness, that all previous
descriptions by the greatest poets seem but arbitrary and unreal
phantoms when compared with this portrait, which was evidently a
favorite sketch, for the author’s secret partiality betrays itself in
the skill and pains with which he has lavished on this dark figure all
the magic colors of his fancy. Thus, then, in this poetic creation, the
same hostile principle--the same absolute, _i.e._, evil spirit of
negation and contradiction that forms the consummation of the errors of
German philosophy, notwithstanding its abstract unintelligibility--is
enthroned amid the disordered system. And so, by a strange law of
“pre-established harmony,” the anti-Christian poet and these
anti-Christian thinkers unexpectedly meet together at the point of a
spurious sublimity. In any case, however, this last instance forms the
third stage of idealistic confusion, and certainly the last grade of
scientific atheism.

Now, briefly to recapitulate my own convictions and my view of the
relation subsisting between the philosophy of life which I propose to
set before you, and the prevalent philosophy and science of the age, the
following few remarks will suffice. I honor and admire the discoveries
so pregnant with important results which natural philosophy has made in
our days, but especially the gigantic strides which the study of nature
in France has taken; so far, at least, as they contain and have
established a real and solid advance of human science; so far, too, as I
am acquainted with them, and in my sphere understand them. On the other
hand, I can not but take exception to that admixture of materialism
which has been infused into them by the ruling philosophical system of a
previous age, which in France has still so many followers. I honor, too,
and love German science, with its diligent and comprehensive research.
Nay, I value the natural philosophy of Germany even still more than that
of France, since, while it adopts the same great discoveries, it views
them in a more spiritual light. As for that idealistic jargon, however,
which runs parallel and is interwoven with it, on which, indeed, it was
originally based, and from which even now it is any thing but
clear--this I can not regard in any other light than, what it really is,
an intellectual delusion of the most pernicious kind, and one which will
inevitably produce the most destructive and fatal consequences on the
human mind.

What has been now said will suffice for our notice of the opposing
systems of philosophy. Henceforward we shall have no need to turn our
looks to this side, but shall be able to give our attention solely and
calmly to the development of that which I have already announced, and
have now to communicate to you. Previously, however, to entering upon
this subject, it seemed to me advisable, by contrasting the false
starting-point with the true center of philosophy, to set the latter
before you in a clearer and distincter light.

The dialectical faculty of abstraction is naturally the predominant one,
and the most completely evolved in the thinking mind. Accordingly, most
thinkers have set it up as the basis of their speculations, in order to
arrive the more rapidly at the desired end of an absolute science; or,
if the habit of mind be more disposed that way, at an absolute
_not-knowing_, and the rejection of all certainty; which, in the main,
is quite as false, and, in this respect, identical with the former. But
it is not sufficient to follow any such a partial course, and to start
from any one side merely of the human consciousness. On the right and
sure road of a complete and thorough investigation, our first duty is to
study the human consciousness in its fullness and living development, in
all its faculties and powers. And then, in the second place, when, by
thus assuming a position in the center, man has enabled himself to take
a complete survey of the whole, he may unquestionably proceed to inquire
what kind and what degree of knowledge, with such a consciousness, he is
capable of attaining, both of the external world and of the
suprasensible, and how far the latter is conceivable and its existence
possible. Now, just as generally the soul is the principle of all life
in nature, so is the thinking soul the center of the human
consciousness. But in the thinking soul is comprised the reason which
distinguishes, combines, and infers, no less than the fancy which
devises, invents, and suggests. Standing in the center between the two,
the thinking soul embraces both faculties. But it also forms the
turning-point of transition between the understanding and the will; and,
as the connecting link, fills up the gulf which otherwise would lie
between and divide the two. It comprises, also, all sorts and degrees of
conceptions, from the absolutely necessary, precisely definite, and
permanently unchangeable, down to those which arise and pass away half
involuntarily--from those in no degree clearly developed up to those
which have been advanced to the highest clearness of the
understanding--those which are witnessed with a calm indifference, and
those also which excite a gentle longing or kindle a burning resolve.
The thinking soul is the common store-house where the whole of these
conceptions are successively lodged. Indeed, to describe it in general
terms, it is but the inner pulse of thought, corresponding to the
pulsation of the blood in the living body.

This general description, it must be confessed, is very far from being
an adequate explanation of the matter, and at best does but imperfectly
convey our meaning. But perhaps a different line of thought, however
bold and hazardous it may seem, may bring us far more simply to the
point at present in view--a more accurate description, namely, of the
peculiar property of the human mind, and of the characteristic feature
which distinguishes man from other beings equally finite, but endowed in
the same manner with consciousness. That the rational soul, or the
reason, distinguishes him from the brutes, is a remark common and trite
enough. But this is only one aspect of the matter: and must we always
cast our looks downward, and never upward? What I mean is this:
supposing that there are other created spirits and finite intelligences
besides men, might not the comparison of their purely spiritual
consciousness with man’s serve, perhaps in an eminent degree, to
elucidate the distinctive properties of the human consciousness in that
other aspect which is too commonly neglected? I am far from intending to
make this matter a subject of investigation in the present place. I take
it merely as an hypothesis, warranted, indeed, by universal tradition,
and solely as an aid to elucidate the matter in hand. Universal,
however, I may well call this tradition, since, agreeing in the main
with what Holy Writ asserts, the oldest and most civilized nations of
antiquity (among whom I need only mention the Egyptians, and especially
the Persians and the Hindoos) have admitted, as a well-established fact,
the existence of such finite intelligences and created spirits,
invisible indeed to man, but not altogether alien to him. And as for the
Greeks and Romans, if occasionally they allude to the genius of Socrates
as something strange and singular, this was only because the wise
Athenian spoke of this subject in peculiar language, and referred to it
more habitually than was the wont of his countrymen and cotemporaries.
Otherwise it was the general belief, both of Greeks and Romans, that
every man has his guardian spirit or genius. Now this hypothesis being
once admitted to be possible, let us inquire in what light were these
ancients accustomed to regard, and what ought we to conceive of the
peculiar nature of these spiritual beings in conformity with the
representation of so universal a tradition?

Now, in the first place, they have always been thought of as pure
spiritual beings, having no such gross terrestrial body as man has. At
least, if they were supposed to require and possess a body as the organ
and medium of their spiritual operations, it was considered to be of a
special kind--an ethereal body of light, but invisible to the human eye.
But this incorporeity is little more than a negative quality. A more
positive and a profounder distinction lies perhaps in this, that these
pure spiritual beings are wholly free from that weakness of character,
or frailty, which is so peculiar to man. That pervading internal
mutability, that undecided vacillation between doing and letting alone,
that reciprocation between effort and relaxation--the wide gulf between
volition and execution, the thought and the carrying into
effect--nothing of all this admits of being applied or transferred to
these pure spiritual beings without contradicting the very idea of their
essence. It is thus only, or not at all, that we can conceive of them.
Coming and going like the lightning, and rapid as the light, they never
grow weary of their endless activity. They need no rest, except the
spiritual contemplation which constitutes their essence. All their
thoughts are marked with unity and identity. With them the conception is
at the same time a deed, and the purpose and the execution are
simultaneous. Every thing, too, in them has the stamp of eternity. This
prerogative, however, has, it must be confessed, its disadvantages. When
once they have deviated from the true center, they go on forever in
their devious course.

But still, all this is little more than a description of the whole idea
which I have allowed myself, merely with a view of employing it as a
passage to the point which is at present in question. That purpose was,
on the supposition of the existence of such superior beings, accurately
to indicate which of man’s powers, or faculties of mind and soul, may
rightly be attributed to them. Now, to my mind, the distinction is very
strikingly suggested in the well-known sentiment of one of our famous
poets. Thus he addresses man--“Thy knowledge thou sharest with superior
beings;” superior, for in the clearness of their eternal science they
undoubtedly stand far higher than men: and then he continues, “But art
thou hast alone.”[11] But, now, what else is art than fancy become
visible, and assuming a bodily shape, or word, or sound? It is,
therefore, this nimble-footed, many-shaped, ever-inventive fancy, which
forms the dangerous prerogative of man, and can not be ascribed to
these pure spiritual beings. And as little justifiable would it be to
ascribe to them that human reason, with its employment of means, and its
slow processes of deduction and comparison. Instead of this, they
possess the intuitive understanding, in which to see and to understand
are simultaneous and identical. If, then, in an accurate sense of the
terms, neither fancy nor reason belongs to them, it would further be
wrong to attribute them a soul as distinct from the mind or spirit, and
as being rather a passive faculty of inward productiveness, and change,
and internal growth. Briefly to recapitulate what has been said: The
existence of the brutes is simple, because in them the soul is
completely mixed up and merged in the organic body, and is one with it;
on the destruction of the latter it reverts to the elements, or is
absorbed in the general soul of nature. Twofold, however, is the nature
of created spirits, who besides this ethereal body of light are nothing
but mind or spirit; but threefold is the nature of man, as consisting of
spirit, soul, and body.[12] And this triple constitution and property,
this threefold life of man, is, indeed, not in itself that pre-eminence,
although it is closely connected with that superior excellence which
ennobles and distinguishes man from all other created beings. I allude
to that prerogative by which he alone of all created beings is invested
with the Divine image and likeness. This threefold principle is the
simple basis of all philosophy; and the philosophical system which is
constructed on such a foundation is the philosophy of life, which
therefore has even “words of life.” It is no idle speculation, and no
unintelligible hypothesis. It is not more difficult, and needs not to be
more obscure, than any other discourse on spiritual subjects; but it can
and may be as easy and as clear as the reading of a writing, the
observation of nature, and the study of history. For it is, in truth,
nothing else than a simple theory of spiritual life, drawn from life
itself, and the simple understanding thereof. If, however, it becomes
abstract and unintelligible, this is invariably a consequence, and, for
the most part, an infallible proof of its having fallen into error. When
in thought we place before us the whole composite human individual,
then, after spirit and soul, the organic body is the third constituent,
or the third element out of which, in combination with the other two,
the whole man consists and is compounded. But the structure of the
organic body, its powers and laws, must be left to physical science to
investigate. Philosophy is the science of consciousness alone. It has,
therefore, primarily to occupy itself with soul and spirit, or mind, and
must carefully guard against transgressing its limits in any respect.
But the third constituent beside mind and soul, in which these two
jointly carry on their operations, needs not always, as indeed the above
instance proves, to be an organic body. In other relations of life, this
third, in which both are united, or which they in unison produce, may be
the word, the deed, life itself, or the divine order on which both are
dependent. These, then, are the subjects which I have proposed for
consideration. But in order to complete this scale of life, I will
further observe--triple is the nature of man, but fourfold is the human
consciousness. For the spirit or mind, like the soul, divides and falls
asunder; or, rather, is split and divided into two powers, or
halves--the mind, namely, into understanding and will, the soul into
reason and fancy. These are the four extreme points, or, if the
expression be preferred, the four quarters of the inner world of
consciousness. All other faculties of the soul, or powers of mind, are
merely subordinate ramifications of the four principal branches; but the
living center of the whole is the thinking soul.




LECTURE II.

OF THE LOVING SOUL AS THE CENTER OF THE MORAL LIFE; AND OF MARRIAGE.


The development of the human consciousness, according to the triple
principle of its existence, or of its nature as compounded of spirit or
mind, soul, and animated body, must begin with the soul, and not with
the spirit, even though the latter be the most important and supreme.
For the soul is the first grade in the progress of development. In
actual life, also, it is the beginning and the permanent foundation, as
well as the primary root of the collective consciousness. The
development of the spirit or mind of man is much later, being first
evolved in or out of, by occasion of, or with the co-operation of the
soul. But even when thus developed, the mind (under which term we
comprise the will, as well as the understanding) is neither in all men,
nor always in the same individual, equally active. In this respect we
may apply to it what has been said of the wind, which imparts vital
motion and freshness to all the objects of outward nature: we “hear the
sound thereof, but we can not tell whence it comes, nor whither it
goeth.”[13] The thinking soul, on the contrary, is, properly speaking,
always, though silently, working; and it is highly probable that it is
never without conceptions. Of these, indeed, it may either possess a
clear or an almost totally indistinct consciousness, according to that
principle of unconscious representations propounded as a fundamental
axiom of psychology by a great German philosopher[14] of earlier times,
with whose opinions I often find myself agreeing, and with whom, before
all other men, I would most gladly concur.

Applied to the alternating states of sleeping and waking in the outward
organic life, this would merely mean that in sleep we always dream, even
at those times when our vision leaves no traces on our memory. The great
majority of dreams, even those which in the moment of awakening we still
remember, are absolutely nothing but the conjoint impression of the
bodily tone and the ever-varying temperament of life and health, and of
the disorderly repetition of such ideas as previously to sleeping had
principally engaged the attention. Now, since every opposite comes near
to its correlative in one or more points of contact, which, as they
establish, also serve to maintain the relationship between the two, so
the state of the soul in dreaming will serve strikingly to illustrate
its waking action. Of the great multitude of dreams, which are for the
most part confused and unmeaning, some occasionally stand out from the
rest extremely clear and well-connected, in which the feelings
oftentimes discover a profound significance, or which, at least, as
significant images, interest the fancy. And just in the same manner in
the state of waking there passes before the soul no inconsiderable
number of obscure and vague conceptions, which are not much if at all
clearer or more methodically disposed than the train of images which in
a dream succeed one another without the least intrinsic order or
connection. Still we should greatly err were we to assume, that like the
latter they leave no trace behind them on the soul. On the contrary, in
these undeveloped beginnings of thought there often lies the germ of
very definite ideas, and especially of the various peculiarities of
mental character, as also of the impulses and determination which, at
first slowly and spontaneously formed, eventuate in some definite
susceptibility or direction of the will. Now, as the external life of
man alternates between the waking activity and the state of repose in
sleep, so, too, the thinking soul is divided between the abstracting and
classifying Reason and the inventive Fancy.[15] These two are, as it
were, the halves, so to speak, or the two poles of the thinking soul,
of which the one may be regarded as the positive, the other as the
negative. In respect to the inner fruitful cogitation itself--to the
origination and production of thoughts--the imagination, as the
reproductive faculty, is the positive pole. As for the fancy, properly
so called--the poetic _fancy_, or that which plays an important part in
the inclinations and passions--it is only a particular species and
operation of this faculty, which in its general form also manifests
itself in many other directions and spheres of human thought and action.
To it belongs, for instance, that talent of extensive combination which
distinguishes all the great discoverers in mathematics. Opposite to this
productive faculty of thought, the negative pole is formed by the
classifying faculty of reason, which further elaborates, closely
determines, and limits the materials furnished to it by the fancy. Thus,
then, the place which the fancy--with all the powers, emotions, and
impressions which belong to it--assumes relatively to the external
world, is subordinate and ministerial, since it is only within certain
prescribed limits that it can duly make use of its rich productive
energies, realize its inmost ideas, and act upon them.

Here, therefore, the first place belongs to the ordering and determining
reason, and which here ought to hold the helm. In this respect it may
justly be called the regulative faculty. And yet, since the reason is,
so to speak, only one half of the soul, it must not pretend to exclusive
authority; while, on the other hand, it is but little likely that that
which we may have set before our mind and imagination as the innermost
wish of our hearts, will simply on that account prove invariably a real
and lasting good.

I called the understanding and the will, the reason and the fancy, the
four principal branches of the human consciousness, of which all other
mental powers or faculties of the soul, usually ascribed to man, are but
so many offshoots. These other powers, however, can not with perfect
propriety be called subordinate, since in another point of view they
may, perhaps, be entitled to assume a higher rank. _Assigned_[16]
faculties is, therefore, what I should prefer to term them. Now of such
faculties belonging to the domain of the combining and distinguishing
reason, the memory and the conscience are pre-eminently to be
mentioned. For the memory also in another way is a combining, just as
the conscience is a distinguishing faculty--the latter, however, being
so not only in another, but even in a far higher sense. But we must
postpone for the present the further consideration of this matter, and
consider rather those faculties or functions which are under the
influence of, or at least immediately connected with, the fancy. These
are the senses, and the inclinations or instincts. With regard, then, to
the senses: in the first place, I would simply call your attention to
the fact, that the triple principle of human existence--according to
which the latter consists of a spirit or mind, of a soul, and of a
living body or a bodily manifestation--is repeated as it were in
miniature in every smaller and narrower sphere of man’s consciousness.
This is especially the case with the external senses. Thus viewing them,
however, we should have to reckon but three senses instead of the usual
number of five. This can be managed easily enough by taking the three
lower and counting them as one, since they constitute pre-eminently the
corporeal sense, as contradistinguished from the other two, which are
both higher and more incorporeal. For to the three lower senses, not
only is a material contact indispensable, but also, as in the case of
smell, a sort of chemical assimilation with matter. No doubt, in the act
of seeing and hearing there is likewise a certain but imperceptible
contact of the nerves of the eye and ear with the waves of light and the
undulations of the air; but still this contact is of a different kind
from the former, and of another and indeed of a higher nature, producing
the relations of tone, color, and shape. Now, in this classification,
the eye is the mind or spirit’s sense for beauty of form and grace of
motion. It is so in truth, not merely in those who are endowed with a
taste for the arts or the artistic eye, but far more universally, being
diffused in a greater or less degree through the whole human family.
Special gifts of it, or, rather, higher though varying endowments, are
to be found in some highly-favored individuals; and in the same way the
ear for music is not imparted to all who possess the general organ of
hearing, which we very properly term the soul’s sense. The external
senses man shares, indeed, in common with the brutes, in some of whom
they are found of an exquisite and highly-developed susceptibility. But
these higher endowments of eye and ear, and above all the natural
artistic feeling for beauty of form, and the musical talent, are the
prerogatives of man, conferred upon him by his peculiar faculty of
fancy. On this account they, like that faculty, are distributed
unequally among men, though they are not on that account less real and
undeniable.

The brutes, I said, do not possess them. No doubt there is a certain
melodious rhythm perceptible in the songs of birds. Some, also, of the
more eminently docile and sagacious of terrestial animals do indeed
evince peculiar signs of pleasure in the music of man. Still I would
call this but so many single, unconnected echoes or reverberations of
fancy, since every thing like free choice, further development, or
intrinsic coherence, is wanting to them--all is broken, abrupt, and
incapable of being formed into a whole. In the same manner the artistic
instinct and skill of some animals exhibits, no doubt, a certain
likeness in its operations to the rational works of man, but still it
ever remains a resemblance at best, and is forever divided from reason
by a wide and impassable gulf. It is, as it were, the indistinct trace
of a weather-worn and nearly obliterated inscription--the dying notes of
some far-off music. And hence the agreeable, but, at the same time,
melancholy, impression which such things make upon our feelings. A
something human seems to be stirring in them. They appear to revive a
faint but nearly-forgotten allusion to an originally close and intrinsic
relation between animated nature in its highest developments and man as
its former master and as the divinely-appointed lord of the whole
earthly creation. But if the influence and the operation of the fancy on
the external senses be thus indistinct and difficult to be traced, it is
far more apparent, as also far greater and more decided, on the
inclinations, instincts, and passions which form the second class of the
faculties subordinate to the fancy. It can easily be shown how even the
simplest instincts of self-preservation, and the gratification of the
most natural wants, are in man perceptibly affected by the working of
fancy, so as to be manifoldly diversified thereby. But still more is
this the case with the higher impulses and instincts, as confirmed and
strengthened by use and indulgence, especially when, in their most
violent and intensest development, they become passions. For, in this
shape, both by this excess and by the false direction they give to the
mental powers, originally designed for nobler and more exalted purposes,
they form so many moral perversities and faults of character. I would
here, in the first place, call your attention to the fact, that in all
the passions, when, by their intensity, they become immoral, the fancy
exercises an essential and co-operating influence. And, in the second
place, I would remind you that in the same way as in the external senses
generally, so also in all the principal phases of ill-regulated passion,
the threefold principle of human existence manifests itself once more,
and is even repeated anew in all the several forms and subdivisions of
these special spheres.

Now, the first of these false tendencies and moral
infirmities--unbounded pride and haughtiness--is essentially a mental
blindness and aberration; and vanity, with its delusions, is the same
disease in a lower and milder phase. And all will admit that the source
of this moral failing is an overweening love of self. But in
self-conceit the co-operating influence of fancy is easily and
distinctly traceable. As to the second of those infirmities which
distract and disturb life: I should also be disposed to consider the
sensual passionateness or passionate sensuality as a disease indeed, but
of a brutalizing tendency--an inflammatory habit, a fever of the soul,
which either spends itself in acute and violent paroxysms, or with
slower but certain progress secretly undermines and subverts all man’s
better qualities. In either case, the true source of the evil--the
irresistible energy and the false magic of this passion--lies in an
over-excited, deluded, or poisoned fancy. The natural instinct itself,
in so far as it is inborn and agreeable to nature, is obnoxious to no
reproach. The blame lies altogether in the want of principle, or that
weakness of character which half-voluntarily concedes to the mere
instinct an unlimited authority, or, at least, is incapable of
exercising over it a due control. The third false direction of man’s
instincts which, after the two already noticed, involves human society
in the greatest disorder, and most fatally disturbs the peace of
individuals, is an unlimited love of gain, selfishness, and avarice. No
doubt, in a certain modified and lower sense, the hope of advantage or
profit is the motive that prompts every enterprise; at least, according
to the judgment of the world, nothing is undertaken or transacted
without a view to some object of a selfishness more or less refined. But
when we look to the worst and most violent cases of this disease--an
insatiable avarice and a morbid love of gain, then we at once see the
baneful effects which the fancy, dwelling exclusively on material
property and chinking coin, has on this moral disease, where, with the
golden treasure, mind and soul are shut up and buried, and both
completely numbed and petrified, in the same way that, by certain
organic diseases of the body, the heart becomes ossified.

By these pernicious passions, the higher moral organ of life is in
different ways attacked and destroyed. In the first case, that of the
blinding of the mind by pride and vanity, the moral judgment is
perverted and falsified. In the second case, where the soul is
brutalized by a life of sensuality, the moral sense is clouded, loses
all its delicacy, and is at last totally obliterated. In the third
instance, that of a thorough numbness of the inner life produced by
selfishness and avarice, the idea of moral duty is in the end totally
lost, dies away, and becomes extinct, while the dead Mammon is regarded
as the supreme good of life, and, being set up as the sole object of
human exertion, is substituted for the best and noblest acquisition of
mind and soul. The three passions which we have already examined are
founded indeed on a positive pursuit, however false may be the extent or
perverted the direction in which it is carried out. We might now proceed
with our speculation, and, progressively developing it from the same
point of view, extend and apply it to the aggressive passions, which are
based on a merely negative pursuit--the attack, annihilation, and
destruction of their objects. I allude to the passion of hatred, in its
three different elements or species, viz., anger, malice, and revenge.
But to enter further upon such investigations would be inappropriate in
the present place. Generally, indeed, in touching upon matters so
universally known, my object has been merely to consider and exhibit
them from their psychological side, in order to show partly how the
triple principle of human existence, according to mind or spirit, and
soul, and the third element, wherein the former two conjointly operate,
finds its application, and is repeated, as it were, in miniature, in the
narrower sphere of the natural inclination, both good and bad, and also
in that of the external senses. At the same time it was also my wish to
call attention to the fact, that the dominion of the fancy over its
subordinate faculties, whether of the external senses or the instincts,
manifests itself likewise in the pernicious passions, as exercising over
them a very baneful influence, and, indeed, as being the principal
source of the prevailing aberrations.

These three passions and leading defects of character, which destroy the
inward peace of individuals and disturb the order of society, may be
regarded as so many Stygian floods, so many dark subterranean streams of
lava and fire, which, bursting from the crater of a burning fancy, pour
down upon the region of the will, there again to break out in lawless
deeds and violent catastrophes, or, perhaps, what is far worse, to lie
smoldering in a life frittered away in worthless pursuits, without
object or meaning, or in the frivolous routine of an ordinary existence.

Having thus fully set forth the injurious influence of a disordered
fancy on the deadly and pernicious passions of man, we shall be more at
liberty to consider the other and better aspect of this mental faculty.
For fancy, which, as his peculiar prerogative, distinguishes man from
all other intellectual beings, is a living and fruitful source of good
no less than of evil. Accordingly, in the higher aims of his good
instincts, noble inclinations, and true enthusiasms, fancy gives life
and stability to his exertions, and arouses and calls to his aid all the
energies of mind and intellect.

But here I must make the preliminary remark, that in the ethical domain
generally, and in all moral matters and relations, nothing but a very
fine line divides right from wrong. The fault lies not unfrequently in
the undue exaggeration or false application of a right principle. Pride
and vanity, for instance, are the commonest subjects of the world’s
censure; but who would banish from existence a true sense of honor, and
a noble thirst of fame. And how would society lose all its tone and its
true ring, if we were to withdraw from it all those precious metals!
Avarice and the love of gain are, no doubt, fruitful sources of evil,
and bring into society a thousand--nay, we may rather say, without
exaggeration, ten thousand times ten thousand woes. They are the
occasion of countless feuds and endless litigation; so that the
prevention and settlement of these numberless commercial quarrels and
disputes about property occupy the chief part of the attention, and
absorb the best energies of domestic government. But a gainful industry,
directed to utility, and even to private utility--labor and assiduity
which have no other end in view than a lawful gain and a fair profit,
which not merely does not violate the rights of others, but even pays a
due regard to their interests, will be universally recognized as an
essential part of the frame of society. It forms, indeed, the
alimentary sap of life, which, as it ascends through its different
vessels, diffuses every where both health and strength.

Lastly, we will now consider that other instinct of our nature, which,
even as the strongest, most requires moral regulation and treatment. By
all noble natures among civilized nations, in their best and purest
times, this instinct has, by means of various moral relations, been
spontaneously associated with a higher element. And, indeed, taken
simply as inclination, it possesses some degree of affinity therewith.
Such a strong inclination and hearty love, elevated to the bond of
fidelity, receives thereby a solemn consecration, and is even, according
to the divine dispensation, regarded as a sanctuary. And it is in truth
the moral sanctuary of earthly existence, on which God’s first and
earliest blessing still rests. It is, moreover, the foundation on which
is built the happiness and the moral welfare of races and nations. This
soul-connecting link of love, which constitutes the family union, is the
source from which emanate the strong and beautiful ties of a mother’s
love, of filial duty, and of fraternal affection between brethren and
kindred, which together make up the invisible soul, and, as it were, the
inner vital fluid of the nerves of human society. And here, too, the
great family problem of education must be taken into account--and by
education I mean the whole moral training of the rising generation. For,
however numerous and excellent may be the institutions founded by the
state, or conducted by private individuals, for special branches and
objects, or for particular classes and ages, still, on the whole,
education must be regarded as pre-eminently the business and duty of the
family. For it is in the family that education commences, and there,
also, it terminates and concludes at the moment when the young man,
mature of mind and years, and the grown-up maiden, leave the paternal
roof to found a new family of their own. In seasons of danger, and of
wide-spread and stalking corruption, men are wont to feel--but often,
alas! too late--how entirely the whole frame, both of human and
political society, rests on this foundation of the family union. Not
merely by the phenomena of our own times, but by the examples of the
most civilized nations of antiquity, may this truth be historically
proved; and numerous passages can be adduced from their great historians
in confirmation of it. In all times and in all places a moral revolution
within the domestic circle has preceded the public outbreaks of general
anarchy, which have thrown whole nations into confusion, and undermined
the best-ordered and wisely-constituted states. When all the principal
joists of a building have started, and all its stays and fastenings,
from the roof to the foundation, have become loose, then will the first
storm of accident easily demolish the whole structure, or the first
spark set the dry and rotten edifice in flames.

Next in order and dignity to this soul-binding tie of a noble and
virtuous love, which promotes and preserves the intimate union of all
the parts of social life, another species or form of a lofty, a good,
and a beautiful--nay, even of a sublime--endeavor, shows itself in what
we call enthusiasm. The latter has for its positive object a thought
which the soul having once intellectually embraced, is ever after filled
and possessed with. But the mere inward idea does not suffice here,
however it may in the case of the simple conception or admiration of a
noble thought. The distinctive characteristic of enthusiasm is rather
the untiring energy with which, even at great personal sacrifice, it
labors to realize, or to preserve in realization, the idea which has
once fully possessed the soul. The commonest form or species of this
enthusiasm is patriotism, or the love of country, which best and most
plainly manifests itself in seasons of national danger or calamity. As
the daily life of the individual alternates between labor and rest, and
the refreshing sleep of the night renews the strength which has been
exhausted by the toils of the day, so is it on a larger scale with the
public life of the state in its alternations between peace and war. For
although peace is justly prized and desired, as the greatest of public
blessings, still it is some comfort and compensation for its unavoidable
absence, to know that the presence of war, and the struggle with its
dangers and hardships, first awaken and call into being many of man’s
best energies and noblest virtues, which, in uninterrupted peace and
tranquillity, must have remained forever dormant. But, as is every where
the case throughout the moral domain, a spurious enthusiasm stands close
alongside of the true and genuine species, and requires to be carefully
distinguished from it. Forced to speak of the love of country, and to
paint its genuine traits, I rejoice that I am standing on one of its
chosen and most familiar scenes, where my hearers will understand me at
the first sound, when I declare that the true enthusiasm of patriotism
reveals itself most plainly in misfortune--in the midst of deep and
lasting calamities. Another characteristic is, that it does not
arbitrarily set up its object, or capriciously make its own occasion,
but at the first call of its hereditary sovereign rushes to the post of
danger. The second mark, therefore, of a true patriotism is obedience,
but an obedience associated with the forward energies of a fixed and
prepared resolve, which far outruns the exact requisitions of duty, and
gives rise to a true and real equality--the equality of self-sacrifice,
wherein the high and noble vie with the poor and lowly in the
magnanimous oblation to their country of their best and dearest
possessions.

Another generally known and admitted species of enthusiasm, viz., a
taste for the arts, has not so universal a foundation in the
constitution of the human mind as the feeling of patriotism, but implies
a particular mental disposition, and certain natural endowments, and
consequently the sphere of its operation is far narrower. But here,
also, as in the former case, enthusiasm manifests itself as a property
or state of the soul which is far from being contented with a calm
philosophical contemplation, or admiration, of its inward thought, but
which, longing eagerly to realize and exhibit externally the idea with
which it is possessed, knows no rest nor peace till it has accomplished
its cherished object. And such an ideal enthusiasm is not confined to
the sphere of art alone, but even in the calmer regions of science is
its influence felt. It is, in short, the animating impulse of all great
inventions, creations, and discoveries. Without it Columbus would never
have been able to overcome all the dangers and obstacles which beset the
first design and the final consummation of his bold conception. But in
the latter instances the object of enthusiasm is no longer a pure ideal,
like that which animates the artist, but something great or new in the
region of useful science, or of practical life. In every case, however,
enthusiasm has for its object a something positive and real, which, even
if it be not one which captivates the soul with its transcendent beauty
and excellence, yet, at least, by its exalted nature fills it with
wonder and admiration. Quite otherwise is it with a longing--an
indefinite feeling of profound desire, which is satisfied with no
earthly object, whether real or ideal, but is ever directed to the
eternal and the divine. And although it presupposes, as the condition of
its existence, no special genius or peculiar talents, but proceeds
immediately out of the pure source of the divinely created and immortal
soul--out of the everlasting feelings of the loving soul--still, from
causes which are easily conceivable, a pure development of this species
is _far_ rarer than even of the enthusiasm for art. No doubt, in certain
happy temperaments, under circumstances favorable to their free
expansion, this vague longing is peculiar to the age of youth, and is
often enough observed there. Indeed, it is in that soft melancholy,
which is always joined with the half-unconscious, but pleasant feeling
of the blooming fullness of life, that lies the charm which the
reminiscence of the days of youth possesses for the calm and quiet
contemplations of old age. Here, too, the distinctive mark between the
genuine and the spurious manifestations of this feeling is both simple
enough, and easily found. For as this longing may in general be
explained as an inchoate state--a love yet to be developed--the question
reduces itself consequently to the simple one of determining the nature
of this love. If, upon the first development and gratification of the
passions, this love immediately passes over to and loses itself in the
ordinary realities of life, then is it no genuine manifestation of the
heavenly feeling, but a mere earthly and sensual longing. But when it
survives the youthful ebullition of the feelings, when it does but
become deeper and more intense by time, when it is satisfied with no
joys, and stifled by no sorrows of earth--when, from the midst of the
struggles of life, and the pressure of the world, it turns, like a
light-seeing eye upon the storm-tossed waves of the ocean of time, to
the heaven of heavens, watching to discover there some star of eternal
hope--then is it that true and genuine longing, which, directing itself
to the divine, is itself also of a celestial origin. Out of this root
springs almost every thing that is intellectually beautiful and
great--even the love of scientific certainty itself, and of a profound
knowledge of life and nature. Philosophy, indeed, has no other source,
and we might in this respect call it, with much propriety, the doctrine
or the science of longing. But even that youthful longing, already
noticed, is oftentimes a genuine, or, at least, the first foundation of
the higher and truer species, although, unlike the latter, it is as yet
neither purely evolved nor refined by the course of time.

One general remark remains to be added. This beautiful longing of youth,
a fruitful fancy, and a loving soul, are the best and most precious
gifts of benignant nature, that dispenses with so liberal a hand, or,
rather, not of nature, but of that wonderful Intelligence that presides
in and over it. They form, as it were, a fair garden of hidden life
within man. But as the first man was placed in the garden of Eden, not
merely for his idle enjoyment, but, as it is expressly stated, “to dress
it and to keep it,” so here also, when this law of duty is neglected,
the inmost heart of the most eminent characters and of the most
richly-endowed natures becomes, as it were, a Paradise run wild and
waste.

In the consideration of these three forms of man’s higher effort--viz.,
longing, true love, and genuine enthusiasm--I have throughout silently
implied, what no one can possibly deny, the co-operating influence of
fancy. As in the evil passions it exercises an injurious, inflammatory,
and destructive effect, so also it co-operates beneficially with the
longing which is directed to the good and the divine, and imparts to it
its animating ardor, and its highest energy. In the pure longing,
indeed, the inventive fancy is dissolved in what has ceased to be an
earthly feeling, and has become completely identified with the living
soul. But in the love and enthusiasm which are directed to some actual
object, it is the sustaining flame of life, and of all loftier
aspirations which, as they spring from the source of fancy, attest its
co-operation. It may be that the pure spirits are filled and pervaded
with that loving veneration of the Deity which makes up their blissful
existence, simply by means of the intuitive understanding and the pure
will, without even any admixture of fancy. A human love or enthusiasm,
however, which should be totally devoid of fancy, and free from its
influence, will very rarely, if ever, be met with, and is but barely
conceivable. This, however, does not involve any reproach or censure
against man’s love and enthusiasm, as though they were unreal and
founded on an untruth. For nothing can be more erroneous than to suppose
that the fancy must invariably be untrue and deceiving, or at least
self-deceived. Such a supposition is derived merely from one species of
it--the poetical fancy. And yet even this, in its genuine
manifestations, contains beneath its privileged and permitted garb of
external untruth, a rich store and living source of great and profound
verities, of a peculiar kind, and belonging to an internal truth of
nature. Or, perhaps, this misconception of fancy in general may have its
origin in that abortion or corruption of it which operates so
powerfully in the evil passions, which is undoubtedly in the highest
degree deceptive and delusive. In and by itself, and taken in its widest
signification, this faculty of fancy is, generally speaking, the living
productive thought--the faculty of internal fertility--and which also
with its outward organs, both of an earthly and a higher sense,
apprehends the whole external world. It enters, therefore, with a living
interest into every good as well as base pursuit of man, and giving new
shapes of its own to all that it has once apprehended, labors to invest
it with a living form, to apply and to realize it. In itself, therefore,
and in its pure and uncorrupt state, far from clashing with the divine
truth (which, however, is not in every case identical with the ordinary
reality), fancy, as we shall show more fully in another place, admits of
being easily reconciled with it. But of human things we must always
judge by a human standard, and with due allowance. Even supposing that,
in the case of a true love and a genuine enthusiasm, a passing thought
may be detected, a momentary excitement or manifestation which goes
beyond the exact line of the actual truth--even in such a case this love
and this enthusiasm would not therefore be less real and genuine--still
would not all be exaggeration that might seem so to the unsympathizing
and unenthusiastic intellect. At all events, it must ever remain
undeniable, that emergencies occur in human life which are not met by
the rigorous and mathematical formularies of ethical science, and where
by nothing but a noble sacrifice of love far transcending all the common
and general requisitions of the practical reason--by nothing but a lofty
energy and resolute enthusiasm--can a man extricate himself from his
perplexities and arrive at a happy result. At least, it will not do to
overlook or misrepresent this element of human life, even though it must
be admitted that it is not exempt from those traces of human infirmity
which are also but too apparent in the other aspect of it, the one,
viz., in which the formal reason decides every thing, and is supreme.

As, therefore, the thinking soul is the living center of the human
consciousness, so, on the other hand, the loving soul is the middle
point and the foundation of all moral life, as it shows itself in that
soul-bond of love, which, while it constitutes marriage, is tied and
completed therein. On this union, then, which, as historically
represented, appears to be the true commencement of civilized life, it
will be necessary to say a few words; and the present seems the most
appropriate place for them. Now, both in philosophy and in all general
speculation, there are many reasoners who would derive every thing from
material sensations, and seek to degrade all that is regarded as high
and noble by mankind. So here, also, in the world’s mode of judging of
this union--which, however, all publicly-acknowledged principles regard
as holy--it, and all that belongs to it, is accounted for by some
evanescent passion, some sensual impression, or some interested view or
other, while the existence of any thing like true and genuine love is
absolutely denied. But, in the first place, in the case of a union which
embraces the entire man--his sensuous as well as his rational, or, as I
should prefer to say, his earthly no less than his spiritual nature and
temperament--it can not fairly be urged in objection to it, that both
the elements of his mixed constitution are present in it. On the
contrary, it is obviously most unjust, in our estimate of it, violently
to separate what, even in the least corrupted disposition and purest
characters, are most closely interwoven, or, rather, fused together, and
to subject them to an invidious and destructive analysis. This is not
the way to determine the characteristics of a true and of a false love.
The distinction between them must rather be sought by a simpler method,
similar to that which we followed in the case of longing and
enthusiasm--by considering merely the total result. A feeling of this
kind may appear at the beginning never so violent; it may even amuse
itself with a thorough mental hallucination, which betrays itself in its
very outward aspect, with the profoundest veneration, nay, deification
of its admired object; but in married life this intense admiration soon
gives place to satiety or indifference, and imbittered by mutual
distrust and misunderstanding, it terminates in incurable discord. In
such a case the feeling, even in its ardent beginnings, was no true
love, but simply passion. But in those happy unions, where the first
passionate ardor of youth yields only to an ever-growing and still purer
development of mutual good-will and confidence--while self-sacrifice and
patient endurance, both in good and evil fortune, do but cherish the
same deep affection and calm friendship--here, from the very first, it
was true and genuine love. For, however much the outward appearances of
human life may seem to contradict it, there is not in nature, and even
in the higher region, any love without a return. And as all true love
is reciprocal, so also is true love lasting and indestructible; or, to
“speak as a man,” even because it is the very inmost life of humanity,
it is, therefore, true unto death.

Moreover, in the case of a union which extends to the whole of life, it
is quite consistent that a due regard should be paid to the other
circumstances and relations of existence; only no general rule can be
laid down in this respect. This is a matter which has been left to the
discretion of individuals, even by the divine laws, those sacred
guardians of wedlock, which, however, rigorously insist on the absence
of all compulsion, inasmuch as the free consent of all parties is an
essential condition of this union. And as we should be justified in
taking for granted that this reciprocal act of free will must not be any
inconsiderate or extorted assent, or one induced by other interested
feeling or consideration, so is this expressly asserted by the fact
that, according to the spirit of these holy laws of matrimony, this
union must be founded on mutual affection, and regarded as an
indissoluble bond of souls, and not as a mere civil contract or deed of
sale and transfer of rank and property. The latter, as well as all else,
are mere subordinate matters. Three things, according to God’s moral
government of the world, are indispensable to and required by the
essence and spirit of these holy laws. In the first place, there must be
a mutual consent of the will--a reciprocal fondness and liking, to which
the will, whenever it is left free and unshackled, gives an appropriate
utterance and expression. In the second place, these laws require that
unison of temper which is indispensable to its permanence; while,
thirdly and lastly, they provide that this union, so sacred in the sight
of all civilized nations, should be indissoluble. In perfect harmony
with this last condition is monogamy--the fundamental law of Christian
wedlock. And even among the heathen nations of antiquity, though without
the sanction of law, yet, nevertheless, under the influence of an
instinctive sense of what is morally right and noble, monogamy had
practically become the almost universal rule. Highly important to the
welfare of the human race is the inviolable maintenance of this sacred
law of marriage. So incalculable are the disasters which follow from its
violation, that I can safely venture to assert, without fear of
exaggeration, that a religion which would venture to desecrate or pull
down the venerable sanctuary of wedlock, and consequently to expose the
weaker sex to degradation and oppression, would even thereby bespeak its
own falsity, and renounce all pretensions to a divine origin. Wherever,
on the contrary, this noble institution and woman’s dignity are
acknowledged and respected, there this union of souls in consecrated
love operates, by the means of lasting personal intercourse, a
reciprocal mental influence of the most diversified, salutary, and
beautiful kind. And this influence tends to promote the development not
only of the soul and character, but also of the mind or spirit.
Accordingly in this, the first and the most intimate of all unions, all
the three principles of human existence--body, soul, and spirit, or
mind--alike meet together, and partake of a common evolution. And the
result of this mutual influence relatively to the different characters
of the mental capacities and consciousness of the two sexes, and the
development of each produced thereby, forms, merely in its psychological
aspect, a remarkable and pregnant phenomenon. Consistently, therefore,
with the law I have proposed myself, in every case, to set out in my
investigations from life itself, and from the very center thereof, I can
not well avoid, while treating of the several grades of the development
of man’s consciousness, to give some, though it must be but a partial,
consideration to this interesting topic.

Congeniality of mind and temper forms, it is confessed, the sole basis
of domestic peace and contentment, and of a happy, _i.e._, of a
well-assorted marriage. But to determine on what this depends, in each
individual case, is a problem which, considering the extremely great and
infinite varieties of human dispositions, admits not of a precise or
particular solution. On this point the closest observers are not
unfrequently deceived in their predictions. How often do those agree
very well of whom previously it would not have been supposed possible?
On the contrary, those frequently live most unhappily together of whose
blissful union the judgment of society and the ordinary estimate of
human character had led to the most favorable anticipations.
Nevertheless, for the latter fact a general reason may be given. It is
not so much the similarity of tastes and pursuits, as, rather, the want
in one of some mental quality possessed by the other, that forms the
strongest source of attraction between the two sexes, so that the inner
life or consciousness of the one finds its complement in that of the
other, or, at least, receives from it a further development and
elevation. For in the same way that a certain community of goods and
property, even though not complete nor enforced by law, yet still, in
some measure and by daily use, does practically take place in
wedlock--so, also, by the constant interchange of every thought and
feeling, a sort of community of consciousness is produced, which derives
its charm and value from the very difference in the mental character of
the two sexes. When I would attempt to give a more precise determination
of this difference, I feel how difficult and incomplete must be every
attempt generally to define the varieties of mental character. And this
is especially the case when men take in hand to paint the characters of
whole ages and nations, and by contrasts endeavor distinctly to limit
and sharply to define them. Thus, for instance, the predominant element
in the mental character of the Greeks is usually said to be
intellect--comprising under this term every form and manifestation of
it, the scientific as well as the artistic, profundity not less than
acuteness, and vivid perspicuity, together with critical analysis; while
energy of will, strength of mind, and greatness of soul, are assigned to
the Romans as their distinguishing peculiarity. No doubt these
descriptions are not in general untrue. How many nicer limitations,
however, and modifications must they undergo, if we are not to rest
contented with this historical antithesis and summary--which, no doubt,
are correct enough, as far as they go--but desire, rather, to form in
idea and to set down in words a full and complete image of these two
nations in their whole intellectual life. So, too, as a general
description of the middle ages, it might be said, with tolerable truth,
that in them fancy was predominant; while in modern times reason has
been gradually becoming more and more paramount. But how many
particulars must be added in the latter case, if the truth of life is
not to be swallowed up in a general notion. But in a still higher degree
does this observation apply, when we come to speak not merely of nations
and eras, but of the mental differences of the two sexes. Such mere
outlines must be given and taken for nothing more than what they really
are, mere sketchy thoughts. However, they may often lead us farther,
giving rise occasionally to useful applications, or, at least, serving,
not seldom, to exclude a false and delusive semblance of a thought. To
attempt, therefore, something of the kind, I would make the following
remark, in which most voices will, I think, concur. Of the several
faculties or aspects of human consciousness previously described, soul
appears to be most pre-eminent in the mental constitution of women; so
that the prophet who said that women have no soul proved himself thereby
a false prophet. For it is even this rich fullness of soul which
manifests itself in all their thoughts, and words, and deeds--that
constitutes the great charm of the social intercourse of civilized
nations, as well as the winning attractiveness of their more familiar
conversation, and in part, also, the harmonizing influence which they
produce on the mind in the more intimate union of wedded life.
Nevertheless, I think we should altogether miss the truth, if, from any
love of antithesis, we should go on to append the remark, that, in like
manner, mind [_geist_] generally predominates among men, and is commonly
to be found in a higher degree among them than among women. For, in the
first place, the measure both of natural capacity and also of acquired
culture, not only in themselves, but also in the manifold spheres and
modes of their application, are so exceedingly different in different
individuals, that it is not easy to form therefrom any general and
characteristic estimate of the whole sex. And just as it would be a most
false exaggeration to deny to man altogether the possession of a soul
with its rich fullness of feeling, since it is only of its preponderance
among the other sex that it is allowable to speak, so can we with as
little justice refuse absolutely to attribute mind to woman, or at best
ascribe it to her only in a very limited degree. For even if the subtler
abstractions of scientific reasoning are very rare among, and little
suited to them, still sound reason and judgment are only the more
common. The understanding which women possess is not so much dry,
observant, cool, and calculating, as it is vivid and intuitively
penetrating. And it is exactly this vividness of intellect that, when
speaking of individuals, we call mind or spirit.

Another line of thought will, perhaps, lead us more directly and nearer
to the end we have in view. The external influence of women on the whole
human community is, for the most part (for here, too, there are great
and memorable exceptions) confined to a narrow sphere of the immediate
duties of the affections, or to similar relations in the wider social
circle. So, too, is it inwardly as regards the consciousness. All the
faculties of women and their several manifestations lie, if I may so
express myself, close together, and, as it were, in a friendly circle
around the loving soul, as their common center. With regard, then, to
the comparison of the two sexes and their mental differences, I would
venture to observe, that on the one side it seems to me that a certain
harmonious fullness of the consciousness is the preponderating
character; and, on the other, its eccentric evolution. Not that I mean
that in the sex which is pre-eminently called to outward activity, the
mind loses its grand center in the inner life, or, comet-like, delights
to wander in vast, irregular orbits, as is, indeed, commonly enough
asserted. My meaning is, simply, that the masculine mind will ever dare,
as, indeed, it ought, to move in wider circles than the feminine. The
extremes of the consciousness, if the expression be allowable--the
farthest poles both of reason and fancy--are, so to speak, the property
of the more active sex; while the harmonious union and contact of both
in the soul belong to the more sensitive. All such general and
characteristic sketches, however, must always be most imperfect. Still I
believe it may be safely and truly said, that, with highly-favored
dispositions and noble natures (and these must be always supposed and
taken for the foundation of such general remarks), the gain to be
derived from this intellectual community and influence, in which one
individual consciousness completes the other, must be sought in the one
sex in a greater development of mind and elevation of soul, and in the
other in a more harmonious adjustment and softening of the mental
powers, and in a far more sensitive excitement of the soul’s
susceptibilities. But in this most intimate of unions, when regarded as
divinely blessed, and when in reality it appears to be so, then on
either side both mind and soul are, as it were, twice combined and
joined together in closest association, and, if we may say so, even
married and wedded together. Consequently, while external life derives
from marriage its moral foundation and origin, the internal life of man
is, as it were, mentally renewed by it, or fructified afresh and
redoubled.




LECTURE III.

OF THE SOUL’S SHARE IN KNOWLEDGE; AND OF REVELATION.


In the first Lecture our attention was directed to the thinking soul as
the center of the whole human consciousness; while in the second, I
attempted fully to set before you, and to delineate, the loving soul as
the true middle point of the moral life. The object of our present
disquisition will be to ascertain the part which the soul takes in the
knowledge to which man is able to attain. The general element, indeed,
which the soul furnishes as its contribution to human knowledge, is not
indeed very difficult to determine; but when we come to details, there
is much that requires to be well weighed and pondered.

Now, the soul furnishes the cognitive mind with language for the
expression of its cognitions; and it is even the distinctive character
of human knowledge, that it depends on language, which not only forms an
essential constituent of it, but is also its indispensable organ.
Language, however, the discursive, but at the same time also the vividly
figurative language of man, is entirely the product of the soul, which
in its production first of all, and pre-eminently, manifests its
fruitful and creative energy. In this wonderful creation the two
constituent faculties of the soul--fancy and reason--play an equal and
co-ordinate part. From the fancy it derives the whole of its figurative
and ornamental portion, and also its melodious rhythm and animated tone.
And, moreover, its inmost fundamental web and the primary natural roots
belong also to man’s original deep feeling of sympathy with outward
nature, and therefore to fancy, unless perhaps some would prefer to
ascribe them at once to the soul itself, as still more profoundly and
intimately akin to nature. To the reason, on the other hand, language
owes its logical order, and its grammatical forms and laws of
construction. Which part is the more important, or more highly to be
esteemed, is a question whose solution will vary according to the point
of view which in any case may be adopted as fundamental, or to the
different relations under which the whole shall be considered. Both
elements, however, are equally essential and indispensable. In all the
instances already considered of the reciprocal relation of reason and
fancy we found almost invariably a decided preponderance of one or the
other; but neither there nor elsewhere will reason and fancy be found
combining in such harmonious proportions, or working so thoroughly
together, or contributing so equally to the common product, as in the
wonderful production of language, and in language itself. And this is
the case, not only with language in general, but also with all its
species and noblest applications. Now this dependence of the cognitive
mind on its organ of language, discursive indeed, but yet almost always
figurative--this close and intimate connection between man’s knowledge
and his speech--is even the characteristic mark of human intelligence.
But the fault of most of the mere speculative thinkers lies even in
this, that they abandon the standard of humanity, by seeking to wrest,
and to conquer an unhuman, if we may so say, _i.e._, a wholly
independent and absolute knowledge, which, however, it is not in their
power to attain to, and in pursuit of which they lose the certainty
which lies within their reach, and so at last grasp nothing but an
absolute not-knowing, or an endless controversy. If, as we can not but
suppose, a communication does take place among those spiritual beings,
who in intelligence are preferred to man, then must the immediate speech
of these spirits be very different from our half-sensuous half-rational,
half-earthly half-heavenly language of nature and humanity. For, even as
spiritual, it can not but be immediate--never employing figure and those
grammatical forms which human language first analyzes, to form again out
of them new and fresh compounds. According to the two properties which
constitute the essence of mind [_geist_], it can only be a
communication, a transmission, an awakening or immission of
thought--some wholly definite thought--by the will, or else the
communicating, exciting, and producing by the thought of some equally
definite volition. It may be that something of this, or at least
something not absolutely dissimilar, occurs in human operations. It is
possible that this immediate language of mind, as a secret and invisible
principle of life--as a rare and superior element--is contained also in
human language, and, as it were, veiled in the outer body, which,
however, becomes visible only in the effects of a luminous and lofty
eloquence, in which is displayed the magic force of language and of a
ruling and commanding thought. Taken on the whole, however, human
speech is no such immediate and magically-working language of mind or
spirit. It is rather a figurative language of nature, in which its great
permanent hieroglyphics are mirrored again in miniature, and in rapid
succession. And it retains this natural and figurative character even in
the ordinary form of rational dialogue, which must observe so many
varieties and details of grammar, of which superior intelligences have
no need for their immediate intercommunion, but in which, as in all
other human things, many greater or less grammatical oversights creep in
and give rise to important consequences in science and thought, and also
in life itself. But in the next place, language is intimately connected
and co-ordinate with tradition, whether sacred or profane, with all the
recorded fruits of human speculation and inquiry. And as the word is the
root out of which the whole stem of man’s transmitted knowledge, or
tradition, has grown up, with all its branches and offshoots, so, too,
in the eloquent speech, in the elegant composition, and even in all
lofty internal meditation--which form, as it were, the leaves, flowers,
and fruits of this goodly tree of living tradition--it is again the word
by which the whole is carried on and ultimately perfected.

But now, in order to develop still more completely, and more accurately
to ascertain the part which the soul, as the creator of language,
contributes to human cognition and knowledge, it will be necessary to
examine nicely the essence of reason, and especially in relation to its
collateral and closely-connected, but subordinate faculties. Above all,
it will be advisable to determine, as accurately and carefully as
possible, the difference between reason and understanding. For otherwise
its proper share in this common fruit and joint product of human
knowledge can not be ascribed to each power of mind and to each faculty
of the soul, nor their proper places and due limits in the whole be
severally assigned.

The faculties, then, of the soul, which stand in the same close
relationship to the reason that the senses and the instincts or passions
do to the fancy, are memory and conscience. Now, memory may be
considered either as a gift, according to its greater or less power of
comprehension and retention, or as an art to strengthen and facilitate
its operations by artificial means of every kind, or as a problem to
determine how far the exercise of it constitutes an essential part of
man’s intellectual culture and development. But it is not in any of
these points of view that we have here to consider it, but simply in its
essential conjunction with the reason and rationality, which appear to
be dependent on this union.

In other words, we have to regard the memory principally as the inward
clew of recollection and of association in the consciousness, in the
ever-flowing stream of thought and interchange of ideas. We may, or, I
might rather say, we must, forget infinitely many things. But this
connecting thread of memory being once broken, or destroyed, or lost,
the reason invariably suffers with it, and is injured, or its exercise
limited, or, lastly, is rendered totally confused and extinct. Whenever,
in the extreme decrepitude of old age, memory fails, reason ceases in an
equal degree to be active and energetic, and is supplanted by more or
less of a foolish doting. In sleep, no doubt, consciousness is regularly
interrupted, but still it is immediately restored again on awaking. If
the contrary were to take place, if, as is the foundation of many an
ingenious story among the poets, when suddenly awakened we could not
recall our former memory and our knowledge, then should we be
continually falling into mistakes about ourselves and lose all identity
of consciousness. Some such violent interruption or rent in the inward
memory of self-consciousness is invariably to be found in madness, and
is a leading symptom of it. And here I would merely call upon you to
observe a further illustration of what has been already more than once
pointed out. The triple principle of body, soul, and spirit is again
repeated and manifested even in this sad state of mental alienation, and
in all its different forms and species. In true lunacy or
monomania--which is generally harmless and quiet--a radically false but
fixed idea is often associated, and is not inconsistent with an
extraordinary shrewdness on all other points. Nevertheless, this fixed
erroneous idea, being made the center of all other thoughts and of the
whole consciousness, produces that confusion and that disorganization of
the mind which characterizes this form of a disordered intellect. But in
true madness, or frenzy, the seat of the disease is in the soul, which,
having broken loose from all the ties and restraints of reason and
rational habit, appears to have fallen a prey to some hostile, wild, and
raging force of nature. In idiotcy, lastly, especially where it is
inborn and conjoined with the perfection of the external organs of
sense, we must assume the existence of some faulty organization, some
defect in the brain, or whatever else is the unknown but higher organ
both of thought and life. The source of the last is altogether physical
and corporeal, whereas moral causes often co-operate in the highest
degree to the production of the former two. The deaf and dumb, if left
wholly to themselves, would, in all probability, belong always to the
third class, since, with the loss of speech they are simultaneously
deprived of a leading condition of rationality. And, accordingly, the
first object with those who undertake the difficult task of training
these unfortunate beings is to furnish them with another language, by
means of signs, instead of the ordinary audible speech of which the
accident of birth has deprived them. This instance, therefore, is only a
further confirmation of what I have already advanced, that the
intellectual character is, in every respect, most intimately dependent
on the faculty of speech. A more minute examination of these matters
belongs to physical science. Nevertheless, our passing remark on the
triple character of this psychological evil, or misfortune, will not, I
hope, be found inappropriate here, as affording, even in this narrow and
special sphere of a disordered intellect, a further illustration of the
general principle of our theory of the human consciousness.

Now, the outer and especially the higher senses may, by reason of the
supremacy of the fancy, to which they are subordinate, be termed, with
propriety, so many applied faculties of imagination. In the same way we
might give the same designation to the inclinations and impulses--the
good as well as the evil--if, perhaps, it would not be more accurate to
name them an imagination passed into life. In a similar way the memory
may be considered as an applied reason which in the application has
become quite mechanical and habitual; for unquestionably the logical
arrangement is the chief quality in memory. From this it derives both
its value and scientific utility. On the other hand, there are certain
acquired mental aptitudes which, though originally they can not be
formed without the voluntary exercise of memory, become at last a
completely unconscious and mechanical operation--the facility, for
instance, of learning by heart, or the acquisition of foreign languages,
or catching up of musical tunes. In all these the reason has become an
instinct, just as the instinct of animals, their artistic impulse and
skill, may be designated an unconscious analogy of reason.

In this subordinate faculty of the memory, the reason, agreeably to its
specific character, exhibits itself as a useful and ministering agent.
In conscience, on the contrary, as its highest function, it assumes a
somewhat negative character. But in both relations, whether as a
ministerial or negative faculty of thought, the reason, in its place, is
of the highest value. If occasionally we have seemed to detract from and
to limit its importance, such remarks have been called forth by the
undue and overweening authority which the present age would claim for
the reason. This is the sole end and meaning of our opposition, which is
directed exclusively against that spurious reason which claims to be
supreme, and arrogates to itself a productive power; whereas, in truth,
it ought not to be the one, and can never be the other. The thought
which distinguishes, divides, and analyzes, and that also which
combines, infers, and concludes--which, as such, make up the faculty of
reason--may be so carried on in indefinite and infinite process, as
ultimately to get entirely rid of its object-matter. It is this endless
thinking, without a correspondent object, that is the source of
scientific error, which, as in all cases it arises solely out of this
vacuum in thinking, can only lead to a thinking of nothing--a cogitation
absolutely null and false. Far different is the case where a memory,
stored with the rich materials of intellectual experience, forms the
useful basis of man’s studies and pursuits, or where, as is the case
with the apperception of the conscience, the object, even while it is
less extensive and manifold, is the more highly and more intensely
important. Now, as the reason generally is not only a combining and
connecting, but also a distinguishing faculty of thought, so likewise
the conscience is a similar power of drawing distinctions in the thought
and in the internal consciousness, though in a higher and special
degree, and also in a different form from that which, in all other
instances, is discursive reason. For it is by a simple feeling and
immediate perception that the conscience, in obedience to the voice
within man, draws between right and wrong, or good and evil, the
greatest of all distinctions. This voice of conscience, while it makes
itself heard among all nations, nevertheless, under the ever and
widely-varying influence of ruling ideas of the age, and of education,
and of custom, speaks in different times and places, in differing tones
and dialects. But these differences extend only to subordinate matters.
The primary and essential point remains unchanged and never to be
mistaken; the same dominant tone and key-note sounds through all these
variations--the common tongue and language of human nature and of an
untaught and innate fear of God. This fact has led many to regard the
conscience as the principal source of all higher and divine truth; with
whom I can readily concur, so long as they do not mean thereby that it
is the only source, to the exclusion of every other.

Now it is surely significant that in German--and all languages furnish
numerous instances of such significant allusions--the word and the name
of reason[17] is derived from that internal perception of the conscience
which constitutes its highest function. What, then, it may be asked, is
perceived by this wonderful perception, that before it the will inwardly
retires and withdraws even its earlier and most cherished wishes? The
warning voice it is called, in every age and nation. It is, as it were,
one who within us warns and remonstrates. It is not, therefore, our own
Me, but as it were another, and, as a vague feeling would suggest, of a
higher and a different nature. And now by its light that earlier and
retiring will appears in like manner as another self--a lower false and
seducing Ego--an alien power which would hurry away ourselves and our
proper Me. But between the two--this higher warning voice on the one
hand, and this constraining, compelling force on the other--there stands
a power which is free to decide between them. And this, as soon as the
decomposing process is finished, which in the as yet undecided will, or
its mixed states, separates and distinguishes between the good voice and
the evil inclination--remains to us as our own Ego and our proper self.
This inward voice, and the immediate perception of it, is an anchor on
which the vessel of man’s existence rides safely on the stormy sea of
life, and the ebb and the flow of the will. In other words, it is a
divine focus, or a sacred stay of truth. But further, it must be
observed, that the understanding of this inner perception, as I have
just painted it, does not belong to the reason, to which alone the
perceiving can itself be ascribed. The true intelligence thereof--its
higher interpretation, and explanation, which adds to it, or recognizes
in it a reference to the divine--must, even because it is an
intellectual act, be ascribed to the understanding.

The present, therefore, is the place for a close and accurate
investigation of the difference between reason and understanding--a
question of the highest importance for the whole theory of the
consciousness, and its true philosophical interpretation, as well as
absolutely for every branch of science. For this purpose I shall follow
a line of thought somewhat unusual, perhaps, but which on that account
is even the more likely to carry us quickly to the desired end, and to
place the distinction in a full and clear light. I lately employed the
somewhat hypothetical comparison between man and a superior order of
intelligences, as a means of illustrating the faculty of the fancy as
the peculiar property of the human consciousness. And now I would go a
step higher, and from the acknowledged characteristics of the divine
intelligence, derive the means of determining the different functions of
the human consciousness, and of setting the relations they stand in, not
only to one another, but also to a superior intellect. In this course,
however, I shall take nothing for granted but what is well known and
generally intelligible. That God is a Spirit, is the concurrent voice of
all men, wherever a belief in the one God is professed, or the idea of a
Divine Being is diffused. God is a Spirit, and therefore an omniscient
intellect and an all-mighty will are unanimously attributed to Him. This
axiom, with which a child even of the most ordinary intelligence can
associate some kind of meaning, is at the same time the fundamental
principle which is involved in all that the deepest thinker can know of
God. The same faculties, therefore, that make up the essence and the two
functions of created spirits--understanding and will--may, without
hesitation, be attributed to the uncreated Spirit; and although this
attribution must be understood according to the exalted standard of the
infinite distance between the creature and the Creator, still it is made
properly and not merely by way of figure.

But now, in Holy Writ, and in the language of pious adoration and
prayer, among other nations as well as the Jewish, a multitude of
properties, faculties, and senses are ascribed to the Deity in perfectly
anthropomorphic descriptions and imagery. Thus mention is even made of
His eye, His ear, His guiding hand, His mighty arm, and the omnipotent
breath of His mouth. In so far as these are admitted to be mere images
there can be no objection to them, and it is not easy to see how they
can lead to any abuse. And this is equally the case even with such
expressions as it is plain can only be applicable to the Deity in a
figurative sense--for instance, when human passions are ascribed to
Him--since, if employed properly and literally, they all involve more or
less of imperfection. And in the same way, where no forgetfulness is
possible or conceivable, it can only be in a figurative sense that it is
allowable to speak of memory. And with still less propriety can the
faculty of conscience, in its human sense, be ascribed to God. His
balance of justice--His regulative thought--is something very different
from our mere sense of right. To ascribe conscience to the Deity would
be to confound the judge on the bench with the criminal at the bar. Even
the first man, as long as he was yet innocent, knew not conscience. For
the sense of guilt, and the faculty of perceiving it, must at the very
earliest have come simultaneously with the transgression itself, if it
was not, rather, consequent upon it. In the application to the Deity of
such figurative language, great license is of course allowable. The
question, however, which concerns us in a philosophical point of view is
whether, in the same proper sense as understanding and will, so also the
other faculties which are so peculiarly distinctive of man--reason and
fancy, or the soul--can be attributed to the Divine Being. Now it is at
once evident that, far beyond all other figurative expressions, it would
be perfectly unsuitable to ascribe fancy to God. We feel clearly enough
that by so doing we should be leaving the safe ground of truth for the
treacherous domain of mythology. That inner mine of intellectual riches
which man in his weak measure finds in the faculty of fancy, is, in the
case of the Divine Being, furnished once and for all by His omnipotent
will; which of itself creates and produces its object, and, unlike
created beings, is not confined to any limited data or to a choice
between them. Here, then, the Almighty will itself is the full fatherly
heart--embracing, nourishing, and sustaining all creatures--or even the
living maternal womb of eternal generation, and requires no new and
special faculty for this end. In the next place, as to the soul: the
expression of the soul of God does, indeed, occur in some of the less
known Christian writers of the first centuries of the church, but it
soon fell into disuse--from a fear, probably, of its leading to a
confusion of idea, and being identified with a mere soul of the world.
But however that may be, the soul is simply a passive faculty, and
therefore, on that account alone, is highly inappropriate as applied to
God. That third property which in the Divine nature is associated with
an omniscient intelligence or understanding, and an omnipotent will, can
not be called the soul of God, but is even the spirit of love, in which
both understanding and will unite and are one. And if this third
property be added to the axiomatic definition of the Deity already
alluded to, then in the proposition, God is a spirit of love, the double
predicate in its essential import involves all that man in general, and
even the profoundest thinker, can properly know of God. All besides is a
mere expansion or elucidation of this primary and fundamental thought.
Moreover, if it is not allowable to ascribe fancy or a soul to God, so
neither can He be spoken of as possessing reason as an essential faculty
in the same proper sense as understanding and will are attributed to
Him. God is indeed the author of reason; and the sound reason is even
that which adheres to the center of truth, as He, in creating it,
designed and ordered. But from this it does not by any means follow that
He is himself the reason which He has created, or that He is even one
with it. Were it so, then the advocates of absolute science, the
rationalists, would be in the right; in such a case, the knowledge of
God were in truth a science of reason, inasmuch as like can only be
known by like.

But now, if it be not reason, but rather understanding, that, with the
co-operation of all the other faculties both of soul and spirit, is the
proper organ for acquiring a knowledge of the divine, and the only means
by which man can arrive at a right apprehension thereof; then is the
knowledge of God simply and entirely a science of experience, although
of a high and peculiar kind, by reason of the finiteness and frailty of
man as compared with such an object. As the fancy is the apprehension or
seizing of an object, the reason a combination or distinction, so the
understanding is the faculty which penetrates, and, in its highest
degree, clearly sees through its object. We understand a phenomenon, a
sensation, an object, when we have discerned its inmost meaning, its
peculiar character and proper significance. And the same is the case
even when this object be a speech and communication addressed to us--a
word or discourse given us to extract its meaning. If we have discerned
the design which is involved in such a communication, its real meaning
and purpose, then may we be said to have understood it, even though some
minutiæ in the expression may still remain unintelligible, which, as not
belonging essentially to the whole, we put aside and leave unconsidered.
There are, therefore, many steps and degrees in understanding--very
different phases and species of it. A familiar instance will, perhaps,
elucidate this matter. We will suppose the case of an extremely rare and
remarkable, or, perhaps, hitherto wholly unknown, plant, brought to our
country from a foreign clime. The naturalist, having examined its
structure and organs, assigns it to a particular class of the higher
botanical genera, where it either belongs to some lower species or forms
an exception. The chemist, again, when the plant is brought before his
notice, conjectures, from certain other characters, that it is formed of
such or such elementary parts; while the physician, on other grounds,
concludes that in certain diseases it will probably serve as a remedy,
equally if not more efficacious than other herbs or roots previously
employed for that purpose. Now, if the two last have judged correctly,
if their conjectures be confirmed by trial and experiment, then will all
the three have understood the plant, and each in his own department have
learned and discerned its intrinsic character. Again: how slowly, step
by step and gradually, do men attain to the understanding of some
ancient, foreign, and difficult language. It commences, perhaps, with
the long and difficult deciphering of a manuscript or inscription, with
an alphabet incomplete or imperfectly known, and after much painful
labor the final discovery of its true meaning is made perhaps by some
fortunate accident which all at once throws a full light upon it. A
remarkable instance, in our own days, will both elucidate the matter,
and serve at the same time to prove how a higher Providence regulates
even the progress of science. For more than a millenium and a half had
the hieroglyphics of an ancient race remained unintelligible to and
undeciphered by a posterity of aliens, when at last, amid the recent
commotions and tempests of the political world, a happy accident brought
the secret to light. Who can forget the brilliant and dazzling
expectations which hailed the departure of the French expedition for
Egypt? How was all Europe electrified at the bold project of planting at
the foot of the Pyramids a colony of European art and civilization. The
enterprise itself failed, and was soon forgotten amid still more
important events and greater revolutions; and the humble monument with
its triple inscription, which was carried away from Egypt, is all, if we
may so speak, that remains of it. But that has unquestionably founded a
great epoch in the peaceful empire of science.[18] For a whole
generation the learned labored to decipher it with but slow and very
imperfect success, when at last a happy coincidence presents itself, and
suddenly the key is found. And although of the seven hundred secret
symbols, scarcely more than one hundred are as yet made out, still even
these have opened a wide vista into the spacious domain of the dark
_origines_ of man’s history. And this was effected at a time when man
had just learned to put together a few characters of the great alphabet
of nature, and here and there to decipher a word or two of its
hieroglyphical language, while at the same time streams of historical
knowledge began to flow down from the remotest antiquity of the human
race, confirming and setting in the clearest light the best of all that
we had before possessed, and exciting a hope that we might, perhaps, be
also able to understand the obscure hieroglyphics of our own age, and
the fearful war of minds which is commencing in it.

Such is the course of things, or, rather, the higher Providence that
rules therein; and it was to this, chiefly, that I wished to call your
attention by this digression. Thus slow and gradual, but permanent, are
the progressive steps in the growth and development of true human
science, which is founded on experience--the internal as well as
external, the higher as well as the lower--and on tradition, language,
and revelation. But, on the contrary, that false, or, as I termed it at
the outset, that unhuman and absolute knowledge, as it pretends to
embrace all at once, and by one step to place us in full possession of
the whole sum of human knowledge, so, ever fluctuating between being and
non-being, it soon dissolves into thin air, and leaves nothing behind
but a baseless void of absolute non-knowing. Ill would it fare with the
knowledge of God and of divine things, if they were left to be
discovered, and, as it were, first established by human reason. Even
though, in such a case, the intellectual edifice were never so well
built and compact, still, as it had originally issued out of man’s
thoughts, it would be ever shaking before the doubt whether it were any
thing better than an idea, or had any reality out of the human mind.

For this doubt is the foundation of all idealism, to which, often
recurring under differing forms of error, it does but give a fresh
creation and new shape. Even from this side, consequently, it is
apparent that no living certainty and complete reality is attainable by
it. Easy, in truth, were it from this position to evolve the ideas of
the illimitable, and the infinite, and the absolute; and of such
developments there is no lack. But they are at best but pure negations,
which do not serve in the least to explain that which is most necessary
for us to understand. Curious, indeed, should I be to see the process by
which, out of this pet metaphysical idea of the absolute, any one
positive notion of God--His patience, for example, and long-suffering--is
to be deduced. Strange, too, must be the way in which alone it could
carry out the proof that the absolute Deity, or as man prefers, it
seems, to say, _the Absolute_, can not dispense with the possession of
this attribute of patience, on which, however, before all others, it is
important for man to insist. Moreover, this character of absoluteness
is applied to the Deity in a manner which is altogether false and
erroneous. That God, in the mode of his existence, is unlimited--that
the First Cause is not dependent on, and can not be qualified by any
other being, is self-evident, and is nothing but a mere identical
proposition. But this character does not admit of being applied to
his inner essence, or His essential attributes in relation to man and
the whole creation. Wo to all men, nay, we might rather say, wo to
all created beings, if God were really absolute--if, for instance,
His justice, which, however, is the first and principal of all His
attributes, were not manifoldly modified, limited, and conditioned by
His goodness, His mercy, and His patience. Before such a justice of
God, if it were at once to make such an unconditional manifestation of
itself, the whole world in terror would sink in dust and ashes. But it
is not so. Man does hope--he must believe--ay, we may go on and add,
man does know, that the divine justice is not unconditional, but is in
an eminent degree limited by His fatherly love and goodness.

No doubt, too, it must not, on the other hand, be forgotten, that the
divine love and grace are also conditioned by the attribute of justice,
what, however, in a certain effeminate theology of a recent day, seems
to have been totally overlooked. However, this grave error of a too
sentimental view of divine things is now pretty generally recognized as
such, and, for the most part, abandoned. Moreover, it does not properly
lie within the scope of our present disquisition. Now, the position that
the justice and the grace of God mutually limit each other, involves
nothing unintelligible, or, in this sense, inconceivable; as, however,
is the case with the baseless phantom of the absolute, where the empty
phrase becomes only the more unintelligible the more frequently it is
repeated. How much more correct, in this respect, were the definitions
and distinctions of the great philosophers of antiquity, especially the
Pythagoreans. With them the limitless and the indeterminate were even
the imperfect and the evil, and the former they regarded as the
characteristic marks of the latter; while the fixedly definite and
positive, which forms the very heart and core of personality, was with
them identical with the good: and unquestionably, God’s personality--the
fundamental notion, the proper and universal dogma of every religion
that acknowledges the one true God--is the true center around which the
whole inquiry revolves. For the question is, whether philosophy, while
it allows this idea to stand indeed externally, and apparently--for even
in Germany only one has been found bold enough to deny it expressly and
without reserve--intends all the while to put it quietly aside, and
secretly to entomb it by refusing to see in it any thing more than an
illusion of the natural feelings. The point at issue is whether, by so
teaching, philosophy is to come into direct collision with one of man’s
most universal and deeply-rooted feelings, and to produce an eternal
schism--an irreconcilable discord--not only between science and faith,
but even between science and life. For to unsettle life, is even the
necessary result of rationalism.

But let us now turn from the “_Absolute_” of reason to the personal God
of the believers among all peoples and times. If, now, the knowledge of
God be not a discovery of the reason, whose proper office is to analyze
and investigate--if, on the contrary, we are only able to understand of
Him so much as is given and imparted to us, then the matter assumes
quite another aspect. If God has conferred a knowledge of Himself upon
man--if He has spoken to him, has revealed Himself to him--as is the
common tradition of all ancient nations, the more unanimously
corroborated the older they are--then is the power to understand this
divine communication given together and at the same time with it, even
though we should be forced to allow that this intellectual capacity be
limited by human frailty and extremely imperfect. To take our estimate
of it as low as possible, we will conceive it to be something like the
degree of intelligence with which a child eighteen months old
understands its mother. Much it does not understand at all; other things
it mistakes, or perhaps does not fully attend to, and its answers, too,
are not much to the purpose; but something, nevertheless, it does
understand--this we see clearly enough. On this point we should not be
likely to be led astray, even though the theorist should wish to raise a
doubt on the matter, by attempting to prove that the child could not
properly understand its mother, since for that purpose it would be
necessary for it to have previously learned thoroughly and methodically
the elements of grammar. We believe, however, what, indeed, we see, that
man’s power of understanding divine things is really very imperfect. For
the relation between the child a year and a half old and its mother
completely represents that of man to God, with the more than
half-imperfect organs that are given him for this purpose--with his so
manifoldly limited mind or spirit, which is a spark of heavenly light,
indeed, but still only a spark--a drop out of the ocean of the infinite
whole--and, moreover, with his half-soul. For half-soul we may and must
call it in this respect, since with the one half it is turned to the
earth, and still wholly fraternizes with the sensible world; while with
the other it is directed to, and is percipient of, the divine. But such
a childlike and humble docility will not satisfy the proud reason, and
so it is ever turning again to the other absolute road of a false,
imaginary, and unhuman knowledge. Fundamentally, however, those two
words,[19] which alone man can be certain of with respect to God, would,
since God invariably imparts to every creature its due measure, be quite
enough, if only man would always rightly apply and faithfully preserve
them.

Now, to this first hypothesis we might append the further
question:--supposing that God has imparted a knowledge of Himself to
mankind--has spoken to them, and revealed Himself to them--is it not
highly probable that He has ordained some institution for the further
propagation and diffusion of revealed truth, and also for the
maintenance as well of its original integrity as also of the right
interpretation of it? But I must content myself with merely advancing
this question. I can not attempt to prosecute it in the present place;
for its further consideration would carry us out of the established
limits of philosophy into the domain of history, and it involves,
moreover, the positive articles of faith.

But the previous question, whether the knowledge of God, which we either
possess or are capable of possessing, be a science of absolute reason,
or rather an understanding of given data, and consequently a science of
experience, and resting, ultimately, on revelation--this certainly falls
within the scope of philosophical investigation. Indeed, it forms the
chiefest and most essential problem of philosophy, inasmuch as it is
properly the very question of _being_ and _non-being_--of a true and
human, or of an empty and imaginary science--that is here to be decided.
On this account, a precise and correct phraseology is of the utmost
importance toward a right solution of this leading topic of
philosophical inquiry. Now, it is a fact deserving of remark, and well
calculated to arrest our attention, that nowhere in Holy Writ, nowhere
in all antiquity, or in any of the great teachers and philosophers of
olden time, is there any mention made of God’s reason--but universally
it is intelligence or understanding, an omniscient intelligence that is
ascribed to Him. The wrongful interchange of the two words was reserved
exclusively for our modern times, and for the epoch of the absolute rule
of reason, and of the worse than Babylonish confusion of scientific
terms which has arisen out of it. The only exceptions from the previous
remark, which may be found in antiquity, are confined to one or two of
the Stoics. But when we reflect how greatly their whole chapter on the
Deity labors under the evil influence of that doctrine of an inevitable
necessity and blind fate, which forms the reproach of the whole Stoical
theory, this apparent exception serves to confirm the general rule, that
a wrong use of language invariably has its source in a rationalistic
basis of speculation, or, perhaps, is itself the spring and occasion of
that erroneous point of view. God is unquestionably the author of
reason. If, therefore, any one be disposed to call the divine order of
things (which, however, is not the Deity himself) a divine reason, this
is a mere matter of indifference. Only in such a case the question to
be agitated would not involve the mere expression, but rather the
meaning which is associated with it. But, for my part, I should prefer
to avoid a mode of speaking which might give rise to great
misconception. And this is the more desirable the more needful it is at
all times carefully to distinguish between the true and sound reason and
its contrary. God is the author of the sound reason, _i.e._, of the
reason which follows and is obedient to the divine order. But the other,
the rebellious reason, has for its source that spirit of negation which
every where opposes God, and has drawn so great a part of creation after
him in his fall. For, having lost his true center, and finding none in
himself, that evil spirit, with indescribable desire and raging
passionateness, seeks to find one in the disordered world of sense, and
in its noblest ornament--even in the soul of man, the very jewel of
creation. And this is even the origin of the rebellious reason. And it
is rebellious even because having wandered from its center in the loving
soul, which again has its center in God, it has thrown off the obedience
of love, that holy bond which retains the soul in subjection to the
divine order. How far in the present day, amid the fermenting
rationalistic medley which constitutes the spirit of the age, that sound
reason which willingly follows and observes the divine order, or that
rebellious reason which is absolute in itself, has the upper hand, and
forms the predominant element, is a question easy of solution. It is one
which I am content to leave to the decision of all who are in any degree
acquainted with the prevailing tone of science and of life.

The philosophy which I have here undertaken to develop, setting out from
the soul as the beginning and first subject of its speculations,
contemplates the mind or spirit as its highest and supreme object.
Accordingly, in its doctrine of the Deity, directly opposing every
rationalistic tendency, it conceives of Him and represents him as a
living spirit, a personal God, and not merely as an absolute reason, or
a rational order. If, therefore, for the sake of distinction, it
requires some peculiar and characteristic designation, it might, in
contrast with those errors of Materialism and Idealism which I have
described and condemned, be very aptly termed Spiritualism. But our
doctrine is not any such system of reason as the others pretend to be.
It is an inward experimental science of a higher order. Such a
designation, consequently, bespeaking as it does, a pretension of
system, is not very appropriate, and is, at all events, superfluous. It
is best indicated by a simple name, such as we have given it in calling
it a philosophy of life.

Moreover, the revelation by which God makes himself known to man, does
not admit of being limited exclusively to the written word. Nature
itself is a book written on both sides, both within and without, in
every line of which the finger of God is discernible. It is, as it were,
a Holy Writ in visible form and bodily shape--a song of praise on the
Creator’s omnipotence composed in living imagery. But besides Scripture
and nature--those two great witnesses to the greatness and majesty of
God--there is in the voice of conscience nothing less than a divine
revelation within man. This is the first awakening call to the two other
louder and fuller proclamations of revealed truth. And, lastly, in
universal history we have set before us a real and manifold application
and progressive development of revelation. Here the luminous threads of
a divine and higher guidance glimmer through the remarkable events of
history. For, not only in the career of whole ages and nations, but also
in the lives of individuals, the ruling and benignant hand of Providence
is every where visible.

Fourfold, consequently, is the source of revelation, from which man
derives his knowledge of the Deity, learns his will, and understands his
operation and power--conscience, nature, Holy Writ, and universal
history. The teaching of the latter is often of that earnest and awful
kind, to which we may, in a large sense, apply the adage, “Who will not
learn must feel.” How often does it show us some mighty edifice of
fortune, which, having no firm basis in the deep soil of truth and the
divine order, owed its rapid growth and false splendor to some evil
influence, falling suddenly in ruins, as if stricken by the invisible
breath of a superior power. On such occasions the public feeling
recognizes the hand which sets a limit to every temerity in the history
of the world--to every extravagance of a false confidence--and appoints
it its ultimate term. And the olden notion (which, with men of the day,
had become little more than an antiquated legend) of God’s retributive
justice, resumes its place among the actuating sentiments of life, with
new and intense significance. The sublime truth, however, is only too
soon forgotten, and the temporary alarm subsides but too quickly into
the habitual calm of a false security--that old and hereditary feeling
of human nature.

The volume of Holy Writ, as it is transmitted to us, and was first
commenced about three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the
possibility of an earlier sacred tradition in the twenty-four centuries
which preceded it. So far, indeed, is the supposition of such an
original revelation from being inconsistent with Scripture, that, on the
contrary, it contains explicit allusions to the fact, that such a
manifold enlightenment was imparted to the first man, as well as to that
patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants,
was the second progenitor of mankind. But as this divine knowledge,
derived immediately from the primary source of all illumination, flowed
down in free and unconfined channels to succeeding generations, and to
the different nations which branched off from the parent stock, the
original sacred traditions were soon disfigured and overloaded with
fictions and fables. In these, however, a rich abundance of remarkable
vestiges and precious germs of divine truth were mixed up with
Bacchanalian rites and immoral mysteries. And thus, amid a multitude of
sensuous and stimulating images, the pure and simple truth was buried,
as in a second chaos, under a mass of contradictory symbols. Hence arose
that Babylonish confusion of languages, emblems, and legends, which is
universally to be met with among ancient, and even the most primitive
nations. In the great work, therefore, of purification, and of a
restoration of true religion (which we may call a second revelation, or,
at least, as a second stage thereof), a rigid exclusion of this
heathenish admixture of fable and immorality was the first and most
essential requisite. But those older revelations, imparted to the first
man and the second progenitor of mankind, are expressly laid down as the
groundwork of that evangel of the creation, which forms the introduction
to the whole volume of Scripture, and furnishes us thereby with a key to
understand the history and religion of the primitive world--or, to speak
absolutely, the true Genesis of the existing world, its history and its
science. This double principle, expressly recognizing, on the one hand,
an original revelation and divine illumination of the first progenitors
of the human race, of which the olden and less corrupted monuments of
heathenism still retain many a trace; and, on the other, strictly
rejecting the additions of a corrupt and degenerated heathenism, with
all its tissue of fables and false, godless mysteries, must be kept
steadily in view in examining the earliest portions of the sacred
Scriptures. For the neglect, or imperfect consideration of it, has
already led, and is ever likely to give rise to many complicated doubts
and perverted views, which imperil not only the simple understanding of
the whole body of revealed Scripture, but even the right conception of
revelation.

It would seem, then, that not only philosophical, but absolutely every
higher species of knowledge is an internal science of experience. For
the formal science of mathematics is not a positive science for the
cognition of a real object, so much as an organon and aid for other
sciences, which, however, as such, is both excellent in itself, and
admits of many useful applications. We may, therefore, on this
hypothesis consider each of these four faculties of man, which I have
called the principal poles or leading branches of human consciousness,
as a peculiar sense for a particular domain of truth. For all experience
and all science thereof rests on some cognitive sense as the organ of
its immediate perceptions. Now, the reason, which, in its form of
conscience, announces itself as an internal sense of right and wrong,
is, as the faculty for the development and communication of thought,
usually named the common sense. It constitutes the bond of connection
between men and their thoughts, which is dependent on and conditioned by
language and its organ, and may be called the sense for all that is
distinctively human. In this respect it forms the foundation and first
grade of all other senses for, and immediate organs of, a higher
knowledge. Fancy, again, being itself but a reflection of life and of
the living powers of the natural world, is the inward sense for nature,
which, as will hereafter be more fully shown, first lends and assures to
natural science its due import and true living significance. And,
inasmuch as the perfect intellection of a single object results from the
totality alone--the significance and spirit of the whole--therefore the
understanding is the sense for that mind [_geist_] which manifests
itself in the sensible world, whether this be a human or natural, or the
supreme Divine intelligence.

Now, if we may venture to consider the fourfold revelation of God in
conscience, in nature, in Holy Writ, and the world’s history, as so many
living springs or fertilizing streams of a higher truth, we must suppose
the existence of a good soil to receive the water of life and the good
seed of divine knowledge. For without an organ of susceptibility for
good to receive the divine gift from above, no amount of revelation
would benefit man. Now, the soul, so susceptible of good on all sides,
both from within and from without, is even this organ for the reception
of revelation. And this function of the soul, together with its creation
of language as the outer form of human knowledge, constitutes its
contribution to science, and especially to internal science. And even
with the understanding, as the sense which discerns the meaning and
purport of revelation, the soul is co-operative--since nothing divine
can be understood merely in the idea, and of and by itself alone, but in
every case a feeling for it must have preceded, or, at least,
contributed toward its complete understanding. The soul, consequently,
which is thus susceptible of the divine, is ever informing itself about,
or co-operating in the acquisition of a knowledge of the Godlike. And
this, the soul’s love and pursuit of divine truth, when, unfolding
itself in thought, it comes forth in an investiture of words, is even
philosophy--not, indeed, the dead sophistic of the schools, but one
which, as it is a philosophy of life, can be nothing less than living.
And the soul, thus ardently yearning for the divine, and both receiving
and faithfully maintaining the revealed Word, is the common center
toward which all the four springs of life and streams of truth converge.
In free meditation it reconciles and combines them.

On this account the oldest and most natural form of philosophy was that
of dialogue, which did not, however, exclude the occasional introduction
of a simple narrative, or the continuous explanation of higher and
abstruser questions. Philosophy, accordingly, might not inappropriately
be defined as a dialogue of the soul in its free meditation on divine
things. And this was the very form it actually possessed among the
earliest and noblest of the philosophers of antiquity--first of all
really and orally, as with Pythagoras and Socrates, and lastly in its
written exposition, of which style Plato was the great and consummate
master. But it was only to the noblest and best of all ranks, though
without distinction of age or sex, that these the greatest men of
antiquity communicated their treasures of philosophical wisdom. In this
course Pythagoras first set the example, which, on the whole, was
followed also by Socrates and Plato. For, in general, the latter
confined their philosophical teaching to a select circle, and imparted
it, as it were, under the seal of friendship, to such only as in the
social intercourse of life they admitted to close and familiar intimacy.
Occasional exceptions were, perhaps, furnished by their disputes with
the sophists, in the course of which they were constrained to adopt, not
only the weapons, but also the method of their adversaries--a license of
which Plato, perhaps, has too often availed himself, even if he has not
sometimes abused it. For about this time the sophists introduced a
practice as erroneous as their doctrine was false. Publishing their
philosophemes to the whole people, they treated it and quarreled about
it in the market-place as a common party matter. Such a procedure was in
every sense pernicious, and one which must have brought even truth
itself into contempt. Lastly, Aristotle comprised in his manuals the
collective results of all earlier philosophical speculation, and
intrusted his treasury of mature knowledge and well-sifted and
newly-arranged thoughts to the keeping of a school. Now, we should be
far from justified were we to make this a reproach against this master
of subtlety and profoundest of thinkers; for at this time all true
intellectual life had, together with public spirit, become extinct among
the Greeks, amid the disorders of democracy, or under the pressure of
the armed supremacy of Macedonia. Still it must ever remain a matter of
profound regret. For philosophy, as standing in the center between the
guiding spirit of the divine education of man and the external force of
civil right and material power, ought to be true mundane soul
[_Weltseele_] which animates and directs the development of ages and of
the whole human race. Deeply, therefore, is it to be deplored whenever
science, and especially philosophy, are withdrawn from this wide sphere
of universal operation, and from human life itself, to remain banished
and cooped up in the narrow limits of a school.




LECTURE IV.

OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO NATURE.


“We know in part,” exclaimed, with burning zeal, the honest man of God
in Holy Scripture, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part.” How true
the first member of this sentence is even in the case of that knowledge
of God which alone deserves the name of knowledge, or repays the trouble
of its acquisition, the previous Lecture must in many ways have served
to convince us. The second member, which will chiefly occupy our
attention in the present discussion, is in an eminent degree applicable
to physical science. For what, in fact, is all our knowledge of nature,
considered as a whole and in its inmost essence, but a mere speculation,
conjecture, and guess upon guess? What is it but an endless series of
tentative experiments, by which we are continually hoping to succeed in
unveiling the secret of life, to seize the wonderful Proteus, and to
hold him fast in the chains of science? Or is it not, perhaps, one
ever-renewed attempt to decipher more completely than hitherto the
sybilline inscriptions on the piled-up rows and layers of tombs, which
as nature grows older convert its great body into one vast catacomb, and
so perchance to find therein the key to unlock and bring to light the
far greater--nay, the greatest of all riddles--the riddle of death? Now
there are undoubtedly, even in nature itself, occasional indications of,
scattered hints and remote allusions to, a final crisis, when even in
nature and in this sensible and elementary world, life shall be entirely
separated from death, and when death itself shall be no more. Gravely to
be pondered and in nowise to be neglected are these hints, although
without the aid of a higher illumination they must forever remain
unintelligible to man. Thus considered, however, the universe itself
appears replete with dumb echoes and terrestrial resounds of divine
revelation. It is not, therefore, without reason and significance, if in
this beautiful hymn the ancient prophetess of nature lends her
concurrent testimony to the promises of the holy seer of a last day of
creation, which nature shall celebrate as the great day of her
renovation and toward which she yearns with an indescribable longing
which is nowhere so inimitably depicted, so strongly and so vividly
expressed, as in Holy Writ itself. Holy Scripture could not and can not
contain a system of science, whether as a philosophy of reason or a
science of nature. Nay, in this form of a manual and methodical
compendium of divine knowledge, it could not inspire us with confidence
either as revelation or as science. Condescending altogether to the
wants of man, both in form and language, it consists of a collection of
occasional and wholly practical compositions derived immediately from,
and expressly designed for, life--in a certain sense it consists of
nothing but the registers and social statutes either of the prophetic
people or of the apostolical community. Accordingly, its contents are of
a mixed nature: historical, legal, instructive, hortatory, consolatory,
and prophetical, together with a rich abundance of minute and special
allusions, while it enters every where into, and with watchful love
adapts itself to, individual wants and local peculiarities. And the form
of these writings, at once so singular in its kind--and in such
marvelous wise, but yet so eminently human--is so far from being
inconsistent with the divine character, that the very condescension of
the Deity constitutes a new and additional but most characteristic proof
of genuine revelation. Only the first foundation-stone and the key and
corner-stone form an exception. Embracing within their spacious limits
the beginning of nature and the end of the world, they form, as it were,
the corner-rings and the bearing-staves of the ark of the covenant of
revelation. And while on the one side as well as on the other, in the
opening no less than in the closing book, which contain almost as many
mysteries as words, the seven-branched candlestick of secret
signification is set up, still all else that is inclosed within the holy
ark receives therefrom sufficient light for its perfect elucidation. In
all other respects the style is that of a plain narrative couched in
very appropriate and simple words; and if the masters of criticism in
classical antiquity have quoted a few passages from the beginning of
Genesis as the most exalted instances of the sublime, still it was in
the very simplicity and extreme plainness of the language that they
recognized this character of sublimity. From these two ends,
moreover--from this first root as well as from the last crown of the
book, there proceeds many threads and veins, which, running through the
tissue, bind it together more closely into a living unity, on which
account, although consisting of so many and such divers books, it is
justly considered as one, being called simply the “Book” (Bible).
Consequently it would, as already said, be foolish to look for a system
of science in the divine book for men. Nevertheless we do meet here and
there with single words about nature and her secrets--hints occasionally
dropped and seemingly accidental expressions--which, giving a clear and
full information as to much that is hidden therein, furnish science
consequently with so many keys for unlocking nature. These, indeed, are
not scattered throughout in equal measure, but here, perhaps, more
thinly, and there again more thickly. In all these passages, and
especially those of the Old Testament, which not only depict the
external beauties and visible glory of nature, but also touch upon its
hidden powers and inmost secrets of life, we may observe a kind of
intentional, I might, perhaps, say, cautious reserve and heedful
circumspection, amounting at times almost to an indisposition to speak
out fully and clearly, lest the abuse or probable misconception of what
should be said might give encouragement to the heathenish and
wide-spread deification of nature.

In the New Testament (if we may venture to speak of these things in the
same natural and human fashion that Scripture itself employs) the Holy
Spirit uses language far more precise and clear. On the whole, the
relation in which Holy Writ and divine revelation stand to nature
itself, and the science thereof, is a peculiar one. It is eminently
tender and wonderful, but not, indeed, intelligible at the first glance,
or broadly definable according to any rigorous and established notion.
It is one, however, capable of being made clearer by means of a simile
borrowed from Scripture itself. Those guileless men whom the Redeemer
chose as His instruments for carrying out His great work of the
redemption of the world, were endued with miraculous powers, which it
was and ever will be apparent, were not of their own strength, but of
His. Now, of the first of these apostles it is narrated that a healing
power, and, as it were, an invisible stream of life proceeded from him,
without his being conscious of, or, at least, without his regarding it,
which healed the sick who were brought out and placed within the range
of his shadow as he passed by.[20] In the same manner the fiery wain of
divine revelation, as it passes on its way, scatters, in single words
and images, many a bright spark. The radiant shadow of the word of God,
as it falls, is sufficient to kindle and throw a new light over the
whole domain of nature, by means of which the true science thereof may
be firmly established, its inmost secrets explored and brought into
coherence and agreement with all else.

I have already more than once called your attention to the method which
all the philosophers of reason, without exception, pursue. In different
ways, according to the special objects they have in view, they all alike
presumed to set certain absolute and impassable limits to human reason
(which, however, by some slight turn or other, they soon dextrously
contrive to transgress) in order to bring within their system of
absolute science--which is at best but a dead semblance--all that it
will hold, and even what it can not contain. Quite different, however,
is it with the truth, and with that living science which we take for the
basis of our speculations. For from it it appears that the soul of man,
however liable it may be to manifold error, is, nevertheless, capable of
receiving the divine communications. Since, then, man can possess as
many of these higher branches of knowledge, and can learn as much of
divine things as it is given to him to know, and since, at the same
time, it is God himself who is the primary source from which all man’s
knowledge flows, and his guide to truth--who shall determine the measure
and fix the limits--who shall dare to say how much of knowledge and of
science God will vouchsafe to man?--who shall venture to prescribe the
limits beyond which His illumination can not pass? This, it is evident,
is illimitable. It may go on to an extent which, at the beginning, man
would not have believed to be possible. In a word, though of himself,
and by his own unassisted reason, man is incapable of knowing any thing,
yet through God, if it be his will, he may attain to the knowledge of
all things. And yet it is true, though in a very different sense from
that intended by these philosophers of reason, that man’s knowledge is
in reality limited. No absolute limit, indeed, is set to it. Yet because
it is a mixed knowledge, composed of outward tradition and inward
experience, and is founded on the perceptions of the external and
internal senses, therefore is it made up of individual instances,
extremely slow in its growth, and in no respect perfect and complete,
and scarcely ever free from faults and deficiencies. Consequently, when
considered in its totality, and as pretending to be a whole, it is
invariably imperfect. But this character of imperfection belongs, in
fact, to all real science, as derived from the experience of the senses.
Seldom, indeed, is the first impression free from the admixture of
error; numberless repeated observations, comparisons, essays,
experiments, and corrections, which must often be carried on through
many centuries, not to say many tens of centuries, are necessary before
a pure and stable result can be attained to. In this way all truly human
knowledge is imperfect, and “in part;” and although, on the contrary,
the false conceited wisdom may parade itself from the very first as
fully ripe and complete, yet in a very brief space indeed will its
imperfection and rottenness appear.

And, indeed, the character of imperfection shows itself, as in all other
human things, so also in the science of nature. From its birth among the
earliest naturalists of Greece to its boasted maturity among ourselves,
it counts an age of two millenniums and a half of unbroken cultivation.
But now if, looking beyond the explanation of single isolated facts, we
consider rather our knowledge of nature in its universal system and
internal constitution, can we say that physical science has, during the
time, made more than, perhaps, two steps and a half of progress? And
this slow and toilsome advance which, in a certain sense, never arrives
at more than “knowing in part,” is the law of every department of human
science. Consequently it may be justly said of the development of man’s
science, that with God a thousand years are as a day, and one day as a
thousand years.[21] All knowledge drawn from the senses and experience
is bound by this condition. It may, no doubt, apply immediately and
principally to external experience, which is dependent on the lower and
ordinary senses, whether we reckon them according to the number of their
separate organs as five, or as three in compliance with a more
scientific classification. But it also holds equally good of those which
we pointed out and described in the last Lecture as being the four
superior scientific senses, the organs of a knowledge founded on a
higher and internal experience, the sense, viz., of reason, the sense of
understanding, the sense for nature or fancy, and the proper sense for
God, which lies in the inmost free will of man. Not merely as the
faculty of suggestion [_Ahndungsvermogen_], is fancy to be regarded as
the higher and internal sense for nature, or because it is from this
side that the affinity of man, and of man’s soul with nature, is most
distinctly revealed, but it also exhibits itself as such in the
scientific apprehension of natural phenomena. That dynamical play of the
inner life, that law of a living force which constitutes the essence of
every phenomenon of nature, is a something so fleeting and evanescent
that it can only be seized and fixed by the fancy alone, since, as is
now pretty generally allowed by all profound observers of nature, in the
abstract notion life eludes the grasp, and nothing remains but a dead
formula.

The apprehension of a living object in thought, so as to seize and fix
it in its mobile vitality and its fluctuating and fleeting states, is an
act of the imagination, which, however, is naturally of a peculiar kind,
and entirely distinct from artistic or poetical fancy. It is, in this
respect, worthy of remark, that all the most characteristic and
felicitous terms which are employed to designate the great discoveries
in modern times of the profounder secrets of nature are, for the greater
part, boldly figurative, and often even symbolical. Here, therefore,
also, we have a manifestation of that affinity which subsists between
nature and the faculty of fancy, by which alone its ever-stirring
vitality is scientifically apprehended.

I formerly observed that, in the outer senses, as faculties of the soul
subordinate to the fancy, a higher intellectual endowment, as a special
gift of nature, is occasionally found to exist, namely, the sense of
art, or the eye for beautiful forms, and the ear for musical sounds. But
even the lower sense, the more purely organic feeling, is often evolved
to higher degrees of susceptibility, which, however, do not fall within
the sphere of the feeling for art, but form, as it were, a peculiar and
special sense of nature. To this class belong those indescribable
feelings of sympathy and inward attraction--the many vivid presentiments
of a strange foreboding--traces of which may be observed among many
other animals besides man, just as, in the case of musical tones and
emotions, a light note of remote affinity seems to bring the soul of man
in unison with a correspondent nature soul in the higher members of the
brute creation. Numberless are the instances of such forebodings (among
which we must reckon also the significant vision or dream) recorded of
all times, countries, and spheres of life. No doubt, from their strange
nature, and from the manifold difficulties with which man’s mode of
observing and narrating these phenomena perplexes the consideration of
them, it is any thing but easy, in any individual case, to arrive at a
pure result, and to pass a final and decisive sentence. Still, on the
whole, the fact can not well be denied, as, indeed, it is not even
attempted, by any unprejudiced and profound observer of nature in the
present day. But now, if such an immediate feeling of invisible light
and life does freely develop and clearly manifest itself as an
indubitable faculty and a perfectly distinct state of the consciousness,
then assuredly we have herein a new organ of perception and a new
natural sense. Though not, indeed, more infallible than any other of the
senses, it may, nevertheless, be the source of very remarkable
phenomena, which, perhaps, above all others require investigation, in
order that their distinctive character may be precisely and accurately
determined. It is, however, necessary to remember that the latter is not
to be determined by any side-blow of caprice, any more than the electric
phenomena of nature and the atmosphere, when they are actually lowering
there, are to be got rid of by any such expedient.

It is only just and right, and not inconsistent with true human
knowledge, if physical science should commence with the study of man.
Still, if we would contemplate man from the side of nature, it seems the
safer course to endeavor, first of all, to obtain a clear and leading
idea of the whole of his constitution in this respect, rather than to
lose ourselves in the contemplation of the special phenomena of a
particular sphere. Now, with regard to the whole of man’s organization,
the organic body as the third constituent of human existence, I will
merely remark that, just as the triple principle of body, soul, and
spirit is repeated in the special and narrower spheres of the senses,
the instincts, and the passions, and even in the different forms in
which a disordered intellect usually manifests itself, so also it admits
of a further application to the organic body in general. That most
wonderful organization, the marvelous structure of bones and muscles,
the outward organic frame, is, as it were, the body in a narrower sense,
the pre-eminently material constituent of living bodies. The soul of
man--here consequently the organic soul--is in the blood and in the five
or six organs whose functions are first of all to elaborate the blood
and afterward to provide for its circulation--or perhaps by maintaining
a perpetual interchange of the breath and the external air, to keep the
vital flame constantly burning on the hearth of life within. A third
element--and, indeed, the principal one of the three, though only
noticeable in its effects on the brain--exists within the higher senses
and functions--in short, in the whole nervous tissue. But it lies not in
the nervous filaments themselves: anatomy can not detect it, for it is
not visible to the eye. On this account some have called it the æther of
the nerves to indicate its incorporeal nature--incorporeal, _i.e._,
relatively to, and in comparison with, the other two constituents of
man--the blood-soul, and the external frame--as being the spirit of life
in the organic body. Strictly and sharply enough does Holy Writ
distinguish this spiritual body (as it calls it) of man from the body of
the soul, or the organic blood-soul, considering the former, as it were,
the seed of the resurrection, even because at the moment of death this
ethereal body-of-light leaves its terrestrial veil to be in due time
reunited to it after a more glorious fashion. And death itself is even
nothing else than its total departure and painful emancipation from the
organic body, on which the features, one might almost say, the
physiognomy of corruption stamps itself, immediately that the immortal
Psyche, the invisible seed of light and eternity, has put off the
tabernacle of this body.

This internal, invisible body-of-light [_Lichtkorper_] is also the organ
and the center of all the higher and spiritual powers of the human
organization. For it is easily conceivable that a partial projection of
this life of light which is latent in the sound organic body should
produce such phenomena, while its complete projection, or rather total
separation, would have death for its result, or rather would itself be
death. A truly scientific view of nature can easily enter into or allow
the legitimacy of this idea. The true rule, however, and standard for
the right decision of phenomena of this kind can only be found in a
higher region, even because they themselves lie on the extreme limits of
nature and life, and in part also pass beyond them.

We therefore prefer to follow the more slow but sure course of
development pursued by physical science itself, as commenced nearly
twenty-five centuries ago by the Greeks. On the whole it began even
there with the cognition of man--of his diseases and their cure. The
naturalists, indeed, of the present day are in general disposed to
laugh at the ideas of nature which were advanced by the first
philosophers of Greece, and to despise the hypotheses of water, or air,
or fire, as being the essence of all things, which, nevertheless, as the
first beginnings of a clearer contemplation and of a higher view of
nature, greatly recommend themselves by their extreme simplicity. But
however modern observers of nature may be ready to hand these systems
over to fancy as so many purely poetical cosmogonies, yet, on the other
hand, the present masters of medicine, with greater gratitude and fuller
acknowledgment of his merits, reverence Hippocrates as the founder of
their art. For, indeed, as such, and not properly as a science, or at
any rate as an art far more than as a science, was medicine regarded by
its founder and the great masters who came after him. They looked upon
it as the art of the diagnosis and treatment of disease, in which the
unerring tact of a practiced and happy judgment is of primary
importance, and where the rapid and searching glance of genius into the
secret laboratories of life or into the hidden sources of disease is,
and ever will be, the principal and most essential point. The mere
historical acquaintance with the different forms of diseases and their
remedies, with botany, and the anatomy of the human body, with the
number and structure of its organs, forms merely the materials, the
external sphere of medical practice; while the essential qualification
is even this penetrating glance which searches out the inmost secrets of
the bodily temperament. But now those who have been most richly gifted
with this peculiar gift have ever been the last to believe themselves
possessed of a perfect science. And yet, inasmuch as that physical
knowledge which, by attaining to a complete understanding of life, shall
be able to comprehend and explain the mystery of death would alone
deserve the name of the science of nature; inasmuch also as the
searching glance of the true physician arrives the nearest to such a
point, penetrating, as it does, deep into the manifold fluctuation and
struggle between the two, and into the secrets of their conflict, this,
therefore, is perhaps to be considered as the first germ of life for a
future science of nature, which, however as yet undeveloped, has for
more than twenty centuries been slumbering on, hidden, as it were, in
embryo, in the womb of medical art and lore. The physical, geographical,
and astronomical observations of this whole period of gestation, form,
it is true, a rich treasury of valuable materials, but they do not give
us that profound knowledge, of which alone the physician’s penetrating
glance into life and its constitution furnishes the first commencement
and essay, however weak.

With respect to natural science in general, and the possibility of our
attaining to it, the case stands thus:--If nature be a living force--if
the life which reigns within it be in a certain though still very remote
degree akin to the life of man and the human soul--then is a knowledge
of nature easily conceivable, and right well possible (for nothing but
the like, or at least the similar and cognate, can be known by the like)
even though this cognition may still be extremely defective, and at best
can never be more than partial. But if nature be a dead, stony mass, as
many seem to suppose, then would it be wholly inconceivable how this
foreign mass of petrifaction could penetrate into our inmost Ego; then
at least would there seem to be good grounds for the idealistic doubt
whether ultimately this external world be any thing but a mere phantom,
having no existence save in our own thoughts--the outward reflection of
ourselves--the pure creation of our own Me.

The question of innate ideas has been often mooted in philosophy. As,
however, the essential functions and different acts of thought, together
with its several notions, are, properly speaking, nothing but the
natural division of man’s cogitative faculty, it is not on their account
necessary to suppose such a preliminary intercalation of general ideas
into the human mind. And as little necessary is it, in order to explain
the universal belief in the existence of a Deity, to suppose that there
is in the minds of all men an implanted idea of God; for this would lead
to the purely arbitrary hypothesis, of that which is so difficult to
conceive--the pre-existence of the spirit or soul of man. And as no
created beings can have an idea of God, but those to whom He vouchsafes
to communicate it, and to accord a knowledge of His existence, so can He
bestow this privilege the very instant He pleases, without the
intervention of any innate idea expressly for that end. And yet I am
disposed, and not, I think, without reason, to assume that man, as at
present constituted, does possess one, though only one, species of
inborn ideas, viz., an innate idea of death. This, as a false root of
life, and a true mental contagion, produces a dead cogitation, and is
the origin of all dead and dead-born notions. For this idea of death,
whether hereditary or inoculated in the soul, is, as its peculiar but
fundamental error, transferred by the mind of man to every object with
which it comes in contact. And thus, in man’s dead cogitation, the
surrounding world and all nature appears to him a similar lifeless and
inert mass, so long as sitting beneath this shadow of spiritual death,
his mind [_geist_] has not sufficient strength to work its way out of
its dark prison-house into the light. For not at all without higher aid,
and even with it only slowly and tardily, does man discover that all
that is really and naturally dead is within himself, or learn to
recognize it for what it truly is, a something eminently null and
naught. Another species of this false and dead conception of nature
presents itself under the form of multiplicity. In this view nature is
represented as forming something like a vast sandhill, where, apart from
the pile they thus form together and their aggregation in it, the
several grains are supposed to have no connection with each other;
while, however, they are so diligently counted, as if every thing
depended on their right enumeration. But through the sieve of such an
atomistic, which would break up the universe into a number of separate
and absolute individualities, the sand will ever run, however often and
painfully man may strive to reckon or to measure the infinity of these
grains of nature. Mathematical calculation and measuring hold the same
place in physical science that is held in every living language by
conjugating and declining, and other grammatical rules, which, in truth,
are but a species of mathematical formulæ. In learning a foreign and
especially a dead language, these are indispensable and necessary aids,
which greatly promote and facilitate its acquisition; so also
mathematics furnish indispensable helps and a most valuable organon for
the cognition of nature. But with them alone man will never learn to
understand even a word, not to talk of a whole proposition, out of
nature’s strangely-sounding and most difficult hieroglyphics.

Somewhat different is it, when man seeks to understand the true living
geometry in nature herself, _i.e._, attempts to discover the place which
the circle and eclipse (passing from these up to the spheres in their
sidereal orbits), or which the triangle, the square, the hexagon, and so
forth, assume in the scale of its creations--or when, in a similar
spirit, he investigates and ascertains the really dominant rule in the
arithmetic of life; those numbers which the physician observes in the
periodic developments of life, and which, in the fluctuating states of
an abating and heightening malady, enable him, under certain conditions,
to predict the moment of its crisis. Of a still higher kind is that
spiritual, we might almost call it divine chronology, which, in
universal history, marks out definite epochs of the mental development
of the human race, and traces therein the influence of certain grades of
life, or ages of the world, and the alternating phases of disease in
whole communities, and those decisive moments and great critical
emergencies in which God Himself appears as the healing Physician and
Restorer of life. It was, in all probability, in reference to such an
arithmetic, or in some similar sense, that Pythagoras taught that
numbers are, or contain the essence of things. For such an arithmetic of
life and geometry of nature do afford a positive cognition and a real
knowledge. As commonly understood, however, mathematics are nothing more
than a formal science--in other words, they are simply a scientific
organon, rather than a science. But now, if nature be not regarded as
dead, but living, who can doubt that it--or, as we are now speaking of
man’s nearest neighbor--that the earth is akin to man? Was he not formed
out of the dust of the earth, and is he not therefore the son, nay, in
truth, the first-born of the earth?--does he not receive from it food
and nourishment? and when the irrevocable summons goes forth from above,
does he not give back again to its bosom the earthly tabernacle of his
flesh? Do not chemists tell us that the principal constituent of the
purest wheat-corn has a great affinity to the substance of man’s blood?
and does not the blood, moreover, derive one of its ingredients from
iron--the principal among the metals of the earth? And are not gold and
other metallic substances either wholesome medicines or deadly poisons?
And is there not also an inexhaustible store of both in the wonderful
varieties of herbs and plants? Do not invigorating and healing springs
burst from numberless rocks and fissures of the earth? Is not--to speak
only of the heavenly bodies nearest to and immediately connected with
our globe--is not the sun’s heat so specifically different from every
other kind of warmth, the quickener of all that lives and moves, and for
man under a milder clime, as it were, a soft renovating bath? And is not
the other and lesser light--earth’s mighty satellite and companion, the
moon--the cause of all those changes in the weather and atmosphere,
which, from the earliest times, have been acknowledged to be most
serviceable and highly beneficial to agriculture? Is not the great pulse
of the ocean, in its ebb and flow, measured by it, as well as many
periods, of the development of life? And is it not, when its operation
is too powerful or violently exciting, the cause of a peculiar disease
among men? As, therefore, the musical unisons in the melodious songs of
birds, both find and wake a concordant echo in the heart of man, so,
too, in a larger scale, the blood-soul of man, with its living pulsation
and organic sensibility, is most nearly akin to and sympathizes with the
earth and the whole earthly frame. And is not, in all probability, this
sympathetic influence between the earth and man reciprocal? Must not,
for instance, the respiration of nine hundred millions of human beings
have affected the atmosphere? Has not the very air degenerated with the
human race, and like it become corrupt and deteriorated? Are not certain
pestilential diseases propagated by the air alone, being carried in
fixed telluric directions, without material contact or pollution? And
if, in answer to the inference which we would draw from these facts, any
one should sit down to calculate the number of cubic miles in the
atmospheric belt, and argue that the breath and evaporation from ever so
many myriads of human beings would be insufficient to have any effect
thereon, we might easily retort upon him the equally vast reckoning of
the millions of seconds which make up a hundred and more generations,
and by which these respirations must be counted. But, however this may
be, it does appear that the air must, in primitive times, have been far
more pure and balsamic, and more vital and more nutritive, than at
present. For before the Flood men required neither flesh nor wine to
recruit their strength, and yet, in duration of life and bodily vigor,
and above all in energy of will and powers of mind, they far surpassed
the sons of a later age; and it was even by the misuse of these great
gifts and endowments that they brought down the divine vengeance on
their sinful generation. And, lastly, if the earth were wholly without
life, how could it, at the creation of the animals of this planetary
world, have yielded obedience to the behest of the Creator, as it went
forth on the sixth day, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature
after its kind?” Highly important, moreover, as regards the true
estimate of the whole realm of nature as contemplated by the Divine
mind, and deeply significant, is the wide interval which, in the Mosaic
history of the creation, separates the bringing forth of the beasts by
the earth at the command of the Almighty, from the making of man,
whereof it is written, “Let us make man in our own image.”

Physical science having thus sluggishly advanced through a definite
period and number of centuries--having lived through almost two
millenniums in little better than an embryo state--made at last the few
steps of progress that it has yet taken. By a more rapid march of time,
it hastened to suit itself to the riper age of man, and to come forth
itself, as it were, mature, although, in many respects, this is even yet
very far from being the case. The principal of these advances of
physical science is the invention of the compass. For, in the first
place, the phenomenon of magnetism presents a remarkable manifestation
of the universal life of the world, which eludes all mathematical
calculations of magnitude, while the little piece of this wonderful iron
balances by its living agency the whole globe itself. And, in the second
place, the results to which it has led have been no less important and
marvelous. The magnetic index pointed the way to the discovery of the
New World, and to a more perfect acquaintance with the figure of the
earth, and thus, through an enlarged observation of geographical and
astronomical facts, opened out a grander and more extensive view of the
whole planetary system. Of the new world in the other hemisphere, a
trace unquestionably is to be found in antiquity in the legend of the
island of Atlantis. The general description of this island, as equal in
extent to both Asia and Africa together, agrees remarkably with the size
of America. But the fable contains the additional circumstance, that,
having existed in the Western Ocean in very ancient times, it was
subsequently swallowed up by the waves. From this circumstance I am led
to infer, that the legend did not, as is generally supposed, owe its
origin to Phœnician navigators, who, even if it be true that they did
succeed in sailing round Africa, most assuredly never ventured so far
westward. Like so much besides that is equally great and grand, and,
indeed, far grander, the main fact of the legend seems to be derived
from an original tradition from the primeval times, when,
unquestionably, man was far better acquainted with his whole habitation
of this earth than in the days of the infant and imperfect science of
Greece, or even of the more advanced and enlightened antiquity. A vague
traditionary notion of its existence lived on from generation to
generation. But afterward, when even the Phœnician sailors, however
far they penetrated into the wide ocean, were unable to give any precise
information about, or adduce any proof of, the fact, the hypothesis was
advanced, and finally added to the tradition, that the island had been
swallowed up by the sea.

Modern astronomy, at its first rise, was extremely revolting to man’s
feelings, which had become, as it were, habituated to the olden theory
of the world’s shape. The system of Ptolemy, indeed, with its narrow
egotistic conceit of making man the center of the sidereal universe, was
as unsatisfactory as it was absurd, and little was lost when it was
exploded. But, on the other hand, it was startling, and still has a
staggering effect on our minds, to be told, that, when measured by the
mathematical standard of the vast distances and periodic times of the
planetary system, the earth, for which the Almighty has done such
incalculably great things, and on which He has bestowed such high and
precious gifts, is, as it were, but a little and insignificant splinter
in the vast regions of infinite space. A true and profound science of
nature, however, does not allow of the validity of mathematical
magnitude as an exclusive standard of the value of things. Whether in a
greater or less sphere of existence, it sees and discovers in far other
properties the true center of life. If, even in our globe, the living
magnetic pole does not coincide with the true mathematical north pole,
but lies a considerable distance on one side of it, may it not, without
prejudice to modern astronomy, be also the case with the whole planetary
system? The first conceptions of nature are rarely, if ever, free from
mistakes, and oftentimes, together with great truths, contain also great
errors. And while the first fresh impression, the living intuition, ever
recommends itself to the general feeling of mankind, and takes deep root
therein, the notions, on the other hand, which new discoveries of nature
introduce, not unfrequently do violence to the prevalent views as to the
shape and form of the old world. Often, indeed, the former run directly
counter to what we might call the old family feelings of mankind, which,
transmitted through generations from father to son, have become, as it
were, a custom of life, a holy habit. Afterward, however, as the new
scientific discovery is more perfectly developed, it gradually
conciliates the old hereditary and customary feeling of nature. The two
at last fall into friendly relations with each other.

Now, in the article of the stars, the cherished creed of nature,
professed by all ancient peoples, insisted, perhaps, on no one dogma so
earnestly as that there are seven planets. That this deeply-rooted and
habitual feeling of men was not uninfluenced by the general
consideration of the number seven, is only natural to suppose. For not
only does it comprise the three dimensions of time, together with the
four cardinal points of space, but it is also found entering, under a
variety of combinations, into the life, the thought, and history of men.
And in the new astronomy, though the sun and moon have been ejected from
the number of the planets, yet the earth has entered into the list, and
the deficient member of the system having been discovered, we have again
seven planets, as in the olden belief. For it is, to say the least,
highly improbable that any new planetary body will ever be discovered
beyond Uranus,[22] and as for the small bodies which are situate between
Mars and Jupiter, it is pretty generally acknowledged that they are not
properly to be counted as planets, from which they are even
distinguished by their very names by some astronomers.

And as little ground is there to take exception or offense at modern
astronomy, even on that side of it where difficulties were originally
most felt and mooted. For Holy Writ was neither written exclusively nor
designed pre-eminently for astronomers. In these matters, therefore, as
in all others, it speaks the ordinary language which men employ among
themselves in the business of daily life.

Now we know that in the pulse of the organic body its regular beating is
occasionally interrupted by a hurried circulation or a momentary
stoppage. Is it not in the same way possible that the pulsatory
revolutions of the great planetary world do not observe, like a piece of
dead clock-work, a mechanical uniformity, but are liable to many
deviations and irregularities? If, then, a similar stoppage to that
which sometimes occurs in the pulse of man, be here also supposable, as
produced by a superior power and external influence, then in the case of
such an extraordinary interruption, it is a matter of indifference
whether it be said of this wonderful moment that the sun stood still, or
(as seems to be the fact) that the earth was held in check and rested in
its orbit. And, in like manner, for the changing phenomena of the
astronomical day, the common expressions are equally true with the
scientific, and equally significant. The sun’s rise, the morning dawn,
is, for all men, a figure, or, rather, a fact of pregnant meaning, while
the setting sun fills all hearts with a melancholy feeling of
separation. Equally true, however, is it, and in a symbolical sense it
conveys perhaps a still more serious meaning, when we say, in scientific
language, “The earth must go down before the sun can rise;” or, “When
the earth goes up, then is it night, and darkness diffuses itself over
all.” Or if, perhaps, in the new and quickening spring, instead of the
old phraseology, “The sun has returned, has come near to us again,” we
were to say, “The earth, or at least our side of it, is again brought
nearer to the sun,” would it not be as beautiful and significant a
description? And happy, indeed, are those periods of the world wherein,
to speak in a figurative but moral sense, that earth-soul which rules in
the changes of time--the so-called public opinion, has declined toward,
and approached more nearly to, its sun.

It is a remarkable, not to say wonderful, fact, that in ancient times
the Pythagoreans held the same system of the universe which modern
astronomy teaches, though, perhaps, they were not acquainted with the
mathematic calculations of its distances. But still more surprising is
it, that while they were thus perfectly acquainted with the number of
the planets, and even arranged them in the same order that they are
placed by modern astronomers, they admitted into their system two stars
which we have not. One of these, as the sun of the gods
[_Geister-sonne_],[23] they placed high above the visible sun. The
latter, which they named the “counter-earth,” (αντἱχθν) was
placed directly opposite to the real earth. It would seem, therefore,
that they regarded these two bodies as the invisible centers of the
whole sidereal universe, and, as it were, the choir-leaders or _choragi_
of the apparently orderless and scattered host of heaven. Are these two
stars now extinct? or is their light too pure and ethereal to penetrate
our dense and thickened atmosphere; or, like so much besides, was it
little else than a still surviving tradition from the primitive world?
This, however, must ever remain conjectural. As for the fact itself,
that the Pythagoreans did so teach, and understood by these names, not
merely figurative symbols, but real stars, has been placed beyond doubt
by modern investigations into the Pythagorean doctrines. At any rate,
their knowledge of these stars must have been acquired by some other
means than the telescope of modern astronomy, with which, in fact, they
were not acquainted, and nothing but some new observation or phenomenon
in the sidereal heavens can ever throw light on this matter. And who
shall say that even our present astronomical science shall not advance
still further, and that it has not closed too soon, and been in all too
great a haste to sum up its doubtless most elaborate and complicated
calculations?

Thus did the mind of man advance the first step toward the maturity of
physical science, by attaining to a more comprehensive survey of the
mundane system, and a more accurate knowledge of his own habitation, of
this earthly planet. The next step in this sluggish progress was made by
the chemical discoveries of modern times, and especially of the French
chemists. In a merely negative point of view, these have been important,
as establishing the fact that the old elements, water, for instance, and
air, which had long been regarded as simple, are themselves decomposable
into other constituents and aeriform parts. And, indeed, that such great
powers of nature as these are, and must ever remain so long as the
present constitution of the world shall last, could only subsist in the
reciprocal dynamical relation of several conflicting forces, a
profounder glance at nature would of itself have conjectured and
presupposed. But in a positive sense, this second step has carried us
very far toward the understanding of the hieroglyphics of nature. Those
primary elements of things discovered and numbered by that chemical
analysis which has subjected to its experiments almost every form and
species of matter, constitute, as it were, the permanent material
letters and consonants of the natural world around us. On the other
hand, the vowels of human language are represented by the fundamental
facts of the magnetism of the earth, together with the phenomena of
electricity, the decomposition of light, and the chemical chain of the
galvanic pile, in which the inner life of the terrestrial force, and of
the eternally-moving atmosphere, as well as the soul whose pulse beats
therein, finds an utterance, like a voice out of the lowest deep. And
thus, by means of an alphabet of nature, which, however, is still most
imperfect, we may hope to make a beginning, at least, and to decipher
one or two entire words. But modern chemistry has made a more important
advance toward a right understanding of nature as a whole. By analyzing
and decomposing all solid bodies, as well as water itself, into
different forms of a gaseous element, it has thereby destroyed forever
that appearance of rigidity and petrifaction which the corporeal mass of
visible and external nature presents to our observation. Every where we
now meet with living elemental forces, hidden and shut up beneath this
rigid exterior. The proportion of aqueous particles in the air is so
great, that, if suddenly condensed, they would suffice for more than one
flood. And a similar deluge of light would ensue, if all the luminous
sparks which are latent in the darkness were simultaneously set free;
and the whole globe itself would end in flame, were all the fiery
elements that are at present dispersed throughout the world to be at
once disengaged and kindled. The investigation of the salutary bonds
which hold together these elementary forces in due equilibrium,
controlling one by the other, and confining each within its prescribed
limits, does not fall within the scope of our present inquiries, as
neither does the question, whether these bonds be not of a higher kind
than naturalists commonly suppose? More immediately connected with, as
also more important for our general subject, is the result which
chemical analysis has so indubitably established, that in the natural
world every object consists of living forces, and that properly nothing
is rigid and dead, but all replete with hidden life. This colossal
mountain range of petrified mummies which forms nature on the
whole--this pyramid of graves, piled one over the other, is therefore,
it is true, a historical monument of the past--of all the bygone ages
of the world in the advancing development of death; but nevertheless,
there is therein a latent vitality. Beneath the vast tombstone of the
visible world there slumbers a soul, not wholly alien, but more than
half akin to our own. This planetary and sensible world, and the
earth-soul imprisoned therein, is only apparently dead. Nature does but
sleep, and will, perhaps, ere long awake again. Sleep generally is, if
not the essence, yet, at least, an essential signature and
characteristic of nature. Every natural object partakes of it more or
less. Not the animals only, but the very plants sleep; while in the
vicissitudes of the seasons, and of their influences on the productive
surface of the earth, and, in truth, on the whole planet, a perpetual
alternation is perceptible between an awakening of life and a state of
slumbering repose. Whatever, consequently, partakes, and requires the
refreshment of sleep, belongs, even on that account, to nature.
Painters, indeed, have given us pictures of sleeping angels or genii;
but the pure spirits sleep not, and stand, in truth, in no need of such
rest, and their activity is not subject to this necessity of alternate
repose.

The comparison of a sentence in the Mosaic history of the creation, with
a passage in the Hindoo cosmogony, somewhat similar in kind, but most
different in the application, will serve, perhaps, to place this fact in
the clearest light. In the former it is said, “God rested on the seventh
day.” Now, in this expression there is nothing to startle us. In
explaining it, there is no need to have recourse to a figurative
interpretation. It does not allude to God’s inmost nature (which admits
not of such alternation of states or need of rest), but simply to His
external operations. For in every case where an operation of the Deity
takes place, whether in history or nature, an alternation between the
first divine impulse, and a subsequent period of repose, is not only
conceivable but actually noticeable. For the divine impulse or hand is,
as it were, withdrawn, in order that this first impulse of the Creator
may fully expand itself, and that the creature adopting it, may carry it
out and develop his own energies in accordance therewith. But instead of
this correct statement, we have, in the Hindoo cosmogony, that “Brahma
sleeps.” While he thus slumbers, the whole creation, with its worlds and
mundane developments, is said to collapse into naught. Here, then, a
single word hurries us from the sure ground of truth and divine
revelation into the shifting domain of mythology. Of Him indeed, who is
higher than the angels and created spirits, it is no doubt assumed
throughout the New Testament that, while on earth, He slept like other
men. Once, too, it is expressly stated, that during a great storm, while
His disciples were filled with alarm, He was asleep in the hinder part
of the ship; but that when He awoke the winds ceased. But here, also,
the case is different. While implying many a great object and
instructive lesson besides, this passage, like several others, seems
designed to prove that our Lord’s body was no mere phantom; but that He
took upon Him a real human form, and was, in truth, a man who stood in
need of sleep. And from this we may infer, that sleep is so
indispensable a condition of natural existence, that even God Himself,
as soon as He condescended to enter its limits by taking upon Him a
human body, became subject to nature’s essential law of sleep.

The important part which sleep plays, not only in nature, but also in
man, her first-born son, appears from the earliest event that is
recorded of his history, even in Paradise. God caused a deep sleep to
fall upon Adam, and out of his opened side took of his vital substance
to invest it with a bodily veil and shape, and to present it before him
on his awaking as the gentle helpmeet of his existence. Extremely
significant also is the difference in the accounts of man’s and of
woman’s material formation. Man is formed of the dust of the earth, and
therefore shortly after invested with the dominion of the whole earthly
globe as the deputy and vicegerent of Him from whom cometh all lordship
and authority. But woman is taken and created out of the bosom or heart
of man. Would human wit have ever invented, or even conceived the
possibility of this great marvel of creative omnipotence?

This was in Paradise--but with the loss of it man was deprived, in a
great manner, of those higher powers of life and those secrets of nature
which he had previously possessed and understood. For even in the body
of his earthly tabernacle, which had fallen a prey to death, he had
become deteriorated, and his organic constitution, as is expressly
intimated, fell considerably lower in the scale of sensible existence,
and sunk nearer to the level of the brute creation. On this account the
cherubic sentinels, with the flaming sword, were placed at the gate of
Paradise, that man might not stretch forth his hand to seize again the
rights and privileges which he had formerly enjoyed. For now they would
only have led to more mischievous abuse and deeper corruption. But since
then, many great days of creation have come and gone. Again has the
great relation between God and man been restored, and that also between
man and the sensible world with the spirits and forces that rule
therein, has changed and become new. And now that the beginning is made,
and the foundation laid for the Redemption of the world, no man, no one
at least who will loyally join the banner of the Redeemer, is forbidden,
but every one has freely offered to him the divine, flaming, two-edged
sword of the Spirit--or of the Word, and of the thoughts of the heart
united to Him, enlightened by Him, and emanating from Him. This fact of
itself furnishes at once the answer to the question concerning the
secrets of nature, whether, since they are no longer to be kept close
from man, impure and wicked hands may drag them to the light, or whether
it be not better that they should be touched by the holy and
conscientious alone, and faithfully guarded with a pious reserve and
religious delicacy.

And here the very context suggests naturally the consideration of the
last of the three steps which, following the course marked out for it by
God, the human mind has at last made in very modern times toward a true
physical science, and a right understanding of the most inmost secrets
of nature. It consists in a closer observation and a commencing
recognition of a sacred thread of ensouled life--of an internal
soul-like link which holds together the whole frame of nature. The thing
and force itself are as old as the world and every sphere of
existence--all the leaves of tradition and history are full of its
manifestations and effects. But the methodical observation and treatment
of these phenomena (in which alone the true scientific character
consists) dates its commencement within little more than half a century
ago. To speak, therefore, agreeably to the measure of time in the slow
development of science, it is of yesterday or the day before; and it is
even on this account also that I have been constrained to count this
third and last advance toward a higher science of nature, as nothing
more than a half-step. For it is only a beginning which as yet has
gained no firm footing in the minds of men, and, moreover, besides the
right and direct road, it has already opened many by-paths of possible
error. This only direct road, that higher standard of correct judgment
which at the very commencement we alluded to as the guiding rule in
these matters, must be sought by philosophy in that divine sword of the
Spirit which pierces even to the marrow of life, dividing soul and
spirit, and which also is a discerner of spirits. But, if another
standard and a higher tribunal is to be set up, then I must leave it to
others who, perhaps, know more about the matter than I do, and are
better qualified to decide upon it. This spiritual warfare, at any rate,
can not be much longer eluded or avoided. O that men would take therein
Holy Writ exclusively for their guide! For it, indeed, regards the whole
of life, and every important moment of it, as a conflict with invisible
powers; as also it tacitly implies, or expressly intimates that the
whole sensible world is to be looked upon as nothing else than an almost
transparent, and, at all events, a very perishable veil of the spiritual
world. To the leader of the rebel spirits the Bible ascribes so great an
influence in creation, that it calls him the prince, nay, even the god
of this world--the ruler of its principalities and powers. And in order
that this might not be taken in a mere figurative sense, and be
understood only of a race of men morally corrupt and depraved, these
spiritual potentates are in other places expressly called the elementary
powers of nature--powers of the air, which in this dark planetary world
of ours is compounded of light and darkness, and ever struggling between
life and death. The true key and explanation of the whole may, however,
lie in the simple sentence--“Death came into the world by sin.” As,
then, by the death of the first man, who was not created for, nor
originally designed for death, death has passed upon the whole human
race; so by the earlier fall of him, who had been the first and most
glorious of created spirits, death passed upon the universe--that
eternal death whose fire is unquenchable. Hence it is written: “Darkness
was on the face of the deep, and the earth”--as the mere grave of that
eternal death--“was without form and void;” but the “spirit of God moved
on the face of the waters,” and therein lay the first germ of life for
the new creation. We here see the difference between all heathen systems
of natural philosophy and a divine knowledge of nature, _i.e._, one
acquired in and by God, and also the key for a right understanding of
the latter.

If now the dynamic play of the living forces of nature, which is
unquestionably a living entity, and has a life in itself though not
indeed of and from itself--if this dynamical alternation between life
and death be regarded as a simple fact, and man is content to rest
there, without seeking to explain it by a higher principle, then will he
have ever the self-same One--an all-producing, all-absorbing, ruminating
monster, whether we express it poetically, as in mythology, or in the
scientific formularies of physiology. Quite different is it, however, if
this great pyramid has been built upon the foundation of eternal death.
Then is the whole creature of this earthly planet and sensible world
merely a commencing life which, so long as the pyramid is still
unfinished and incomplete, is, in parts, perpetually relapsing into
death--into actual death, or at least into diseases and fractures of
various kinds, which are only so many _principia_ or germs of death.
Then is nature itself nothing less than the ladder of resurrection,
which, step by step, leads upward, or, rather, is carried from the abyss
of eternal death up to the apex of light in the heavenly illumination.
For, understanding it in this sense, it is impossible to think of nature
without remembering at the same time the divine hand which has built
this pyramid, and which, along this ladder, brings life out of death.
This view, moreover, accounts for the fact, that a state of slumber is
essential to nature, and furnishes an explanation why that
perpetually-recurring collapse into sleep, which to us appears so near
akin to death, should be nature’s proper character. And just as the
consuming fire of death appears in the more highly-organized beings to
be somewhat subdued and restrained--mitigated or exalted into the
quickening warmth of life--so also sleep is only the more than
half-enlightened brother of death. And indeed as such, and the lovely
messenger of hope to immortal spirits, was he ever regarded and
described by the ancients; but that which for them was little more than
a beautiful image of poetry is for us the profoundest of truths.

An exalted view and understanding of nature consists, then, in its being
contemplated not merely as a dynamical play of reciprocal forces, but
historically in its course of development, as a commencing life,
perpetually relapsing into death, ever disposed to sleep, and only
painfully raising itself, or, rather, raised and lovingly guided through
all the intermediate grades into the light. But beneath the huge
tombstone of outward nature there sleeps a soul, not wholly alien, but
half akin to ourselves--which is distracted between the troubled and
painful reminiscence of eternal death, out of which it issued, and the
flowers of light which are scattered here and there on this dark earth,
as so many lovely suggesters of a heavenly hope. For this earthly
nature, as Holy Writ testifies,[24] is, indeed, subject to nullity, yet,
without its will, and without its fault: and consequently in hope of Him
who has so subjected it, it looks forward in the expectation that it
shall one day be free, and have a part in the general resurrection and
consummate revelation of God’s glory, before which both nature and death
shall stand amazed--and for this last day of a new creation it sighs
anxiously, and yearns with the profoundest longing.




LECTURE V.

OF THE SOUL OF MAN IN RELATION TO GOD.


A divine science of nature--one, _i.e._, which is ever looking to and
has its root in God, unlike the old heathen physiologies--sees something
more in nature than a mere endless play of living forces and the
alternations of dynamical action. Contemplating it rather as a whole,
and in the connection of its several parts, it traces it from the first
foundation on which it was originally raised, up to the final
consummation which the Almighty has designed it to attain. Now, to such
a mode of studying it, nature appears to be in its beginning, as it
were, a bridge thrown across the abyss of eternal death and eternal
nothingness. And in perfect agreement with this origin or foundation, it
exhibits itself at the outset as a house of corruption, a character
which, to a certain degree, it subsequently and long afterward retains.
After a while, however, this house of corruption is transformed, by the
omnipotence of the good Creator, into a laboratory of new life, and
finally is raised into a ladder of resurrection, ascending, or, rather,
is made to conduct, step by step, to the highest pitch of earthly
glorification, in which nature, too, has a promise that she shall
partake. This was the subject of the preceding Lecture, and it naturally
enough suggests the further question, whether a similar scale of gradual
exaltation exists for the human soul, which, even while it is in many
respects akin to mother earth and to nature generally, is, nevertheless,
far more excellent, and, by its innate dignity, claims to be regarded as
the very head and crown of this earthly creation. The inquiry then,
whether the soul of man, gradually rising out of the depths of this
perishable existence and the bondage of corruption, up to God, can
approach nearer to, and finally be totally identified with Him; or at
least, whether it is capable of being united in a perfect and lasting
harmony with the superior powers of a higher and a diviner region--this
will form the theme of our present disquisition. In discussing it,
however, our attention will be directed principally to its psychological
aspect--its relation, _i.e._, to the theory of consciousness. For the
moral examination of this subject, even if it be not allowable to assume
that it, at all events, is well known, belongs to another department of
inquiry.

Now, on this head, the following remark immediately and naturally
suggests itself to the reflecting mind. Unless the soul be at unity with
itself it can not hope ever to be one with, or to attain to an harmonic
relation with that Being, who, as he is the one source and principle of
all and on whom all depends, is in himself a pure harmony. But so far is
this condition from being fulfilled in the actual state of the human
consciousness, that the latter appears rather to consist of pure and
endless discord. Fourfold, I said, is man’s consciousness; and I called
its four conflicting forces, viz., understanding and will, reason and
fancy, its four poles, or chief branches, or even the four quarters of
the internal world of thought. How seldom, however, do the understanding
and will agree together. Does not each of them prefer to follow an
independent course of its own? How seldom do men really and
perseveringly will and desire what they clearly see and acknowledge and
perfectly understand to be the best! And how often, on the other hand,
do we understand little or nothing of that, which yet in the inmost
recesses of our hearts, we most desire and wish, and most ardently and
determinedly resolve upon! Reason and fancy, too, both in the inner
thought and in outward life also, are, on the whole, in hostile conflict
with each other. Reason would wish to suppress or at least to dispense
altogether with fancy, while fancy, caring, for the most part, but
little or nothing for the reason, goes its own way. The will, moreover,
unceasingly distracted, is never even at peace with itself, while the
reason, standing alone in the endless evolution of its own thought,
entangles itself at last in a labyrinth of irreconcilable
contradictions. The understanding, again, has so many grades and
species, and divides itself among so many spheres and functions, that in
this respect we might be justified in saying: This one understanding
understands not the other, even though it be equally correct both in
itself and in its mode of operation. And thus, too, in the individual:
his understanding, the sum, _i.e._, of all that he understands,
consists, for the most part, but of rags and fragments of truth, which
often enough do not match very well, and seldom, if ever, admit of being
made to blend harmoniously together. And so, too, is it in all that
belongs to, and is under the influence of fancy. The subjective views,
for instance, and conceits of man--the delusions of his senses, the
rapidly changing meteors and unsubstantial phantoms of human passion,
are things only too well known, self-evident, and universally
acknowledged.

So profound, then, even in a psychological point of view, and apart from
the multiplied phases which the moral aspect presents, appears the
discord which reigns in our whole mind as at present constituted!
Dissension seems to be interwoven into its fundamental fabric. Instead,
therefore, of saying the human consciousness is fourfold, with equal, if
not with greater correctness, we might and ought to say, it is divided,
or, rather, split, into four or more pieces. It is common enough to
speak of _facts_ of consciousness. And yet how seldom among philosophers
is any thing more meant by this expression than the mere thinking of
thoughts, in the eternal repetition of the same empty process in which
the thinking _Ego_ thinks itself, and by means of which the _Me_ is, as
it were, seized in the very act, and then, as the first beginning, the
imaginary Creator and Demiurge of the ideal world, this _Me_ is hung out
like a gilded pennon from the top of the whole artificial system.[25]
The only fact of the consciousness that really deserves to be so named
is its internal dissension. And this discord not only reveals itself in
thought between the Me and Not Me, but pervades the whole and all its
branches, or parts and forms, its species and spheres, in mind and soul,
understanding and will, reason and fancy, which every where manifests
itself, and of which the thousandfold material discords of man’s outer
life is only the reflection--its natural consequence and further
development. From this fact of the manifold and ever-varying dissension
of the human consciousness an exposition of philosophy might not
inappropriately set out, in order from this point to seek the solution
of its peculiar problem, and the right road for the attainment of its
end. For the problem of philosophy, as contemplated from this side,
would consist in the restoration of that original, natural, and true
state of the consciousness in which it was at unity and in harmony with
itself. It is a leading error of philosophy that it views the present
state of the human consciousness as even its right one, which requires
only to be raised to a higher power in order to be cleansed from the
taint of commonness of the ordinary way of thinking which clings to it
among the ignorant and unphilosophical, and thereupon to be comprised in
strangely artificial and seemingly most profound formulæ. But by such an
involution to a higher power the error is not got rid of, but rather the
evil itself is aggravated, since it is contained in the root itself, and
is to be found in the inmost structure of the consciousness. Besides, it
can not have been the original constitution of man’s mind to be thus a
prey to manifold dissension, and split, as it were, into pieces and
quartered. This discord is, undoubtedly, in the true meaning of the
word, a fact, the only one which every individual can without hesitation
vouch for on the immediate and independent testimony of his own
experience. For the cause of this well-authenticated fact we have only
to look to that event which revelation has made known, of which each man
must perceive the sad traces within his own heart. It began with that
eclipse of the soul which preceded and commenced the present state of
man, and was occasioned by the intervention of a foreign body between it
and the sun which gave it light. But if the soul, the thinking as well
as the loving soul, be the center of consciousness, then, in this great
and general darkening of the center, the entire sphere, in its whole
essence and structure, must have been altered. And, consequently, in its
philosophical aspect, and apart from all special moral depravity in the
independent actions, evil habits and passions of individuals, the soul
is no longer what it was originally, as created and designed by the
Almighty.

Thus, then, the whole human consciousness is filled with unmitigated
discord and division, not merely in its mixed rational and sensuous or
terrestrial and spiritual nature, but thought itself is at issue with
life. And, moreover, while in the thought the internal and the external,
faith and science, are involved in a hostile contrariety, disturbing and
destroying each other, so is it also in life with the finite and the
infinite, the transitory and the imperishable. In such a state of
things, therefore, and from this point of view, the problem of
philosophy, as already remarked, can not well be any other than the
restoration of the consciousness to its primary and true unity, so far
as this is humanly possible. Now that this true and permanent unity, if
it be at all attainable, must be looked for in God, is at all events an
allowable hypothesis. For it will not be disputed, except by one who
holds both this unity itself and its restitution to be absolutely
impossible. But this is a point on which much may be advanced on both
sides, and which, therefore, since mere disputing can avail nothing
either one way or the other, can only be decided by the fact--the issue
of the attempt. On this hypothesis, then, even philosophy must in every
case take God for the basis of its speculations--set out from Him, and
draw in every instance from this divine source. But then, considered
from this point of view, and pursuing this route, it is no idle
speculation and simple contemplation of the inner existence and thought
alone--no dead science--but a vital effort and an effectual working of
the thought for the restoration of a corrupt and degraded consciousness
to its natural simplicity and original unity. And this is the way which
we have marked out for the course of our speculations, or, rather, the
end which we must strive, however imperfectly, yet at least to the best
of our abilities, to attain to. And, accordingly, each of the four
preceding Lectures, although in free sketchy outline, contains an
attempt to put an end to and reconcile some particular schism among
those which are the most marked and predominant in the consciousness,
and which in essential points must disturb the whole of life. How far in
these four introductory essays this problem has been satisfactorily or
completely solved and happily settled, is a question which will be best
and most fairly tested by the idea of philosophy, as having its true end
and aim in the restoration of this corrupt consciousness to its sound
state--to its original unity and full energy of life.

The discord between philosophy itself and life was the first that I
attempted to get rid of. But now, if in the place of abstract thought
and the dialectical reason, we are entitled to look to the thinking and
loving soul for the true center of man’s consciousness, then the
imaginary partition-wall between science and life at once crumbles away.
Our second Lecture was occupied with the discord which subsists between
the finite and the infinite--the eternal and the perishable; and,
because this involved a problem which can only be solved by life and
reality, I therefore confined myself to pointing out the way in which we
may hope to discover their unity and equation. With this view, I
attempted to establish a vivid conviction that there is a true
enthusiasm wherein the illimitable feeling manifests itself as actual,
and that even the earthly passion of love assumes, in the holy union of
fidelity and wedlock, the stamp of the indissoluble and eternal, and
becomes the source of many divine blessings, and of many moral ties,
which are stronger, and furnish a firmer moral basis to society, than
any general maxims, or than any ethical theory which is built upon such
notional abstractions, far more than upon the pregnant results of the
experience of life. And lastly, in pure longing, I pointed out an effort
of man’s consciousness directing itself to an infinite, eternal, and
divine object. But, as this longing can only evince its reality by the
fruits it brings forth, I reserved, to a future opportunity, the more
precise determination of this question. The theme of our third Lecture
was the existence and the reconciliation of that schism which, both in
thought and life, divides the internal and the external worlds. If all
knowing be a mere process of the reason, then must this discord between
the inner and the outer be forever irreconcilable, and we should be
utterly at a loss to conceive how a foreign and alien body could ever
have found entrance from without into our Me, and become an object of
its cognition. But if every species of knowing be positive--if, also,
the cognition of the spiritual and divine be nothing else than an
internal and higher science of experience, then the idea of revelation
furnishes at once the key to explain, while it establishes the
possibility of a knowledge of the divine. And this remark admits, also,
of application to nature itself, when we consider it in its totality and
internal constitution, and speak of a knowledge of these things--of the
vital force which rules in it, or its animating soul; for this, indeed,
eludes our grasp, but yet speaks plainly to us--to him, at least, who is
wise to understand nature’s language. For if, in attempting to
understand nature, we isolate her, as it were, and exclude all reference
to Him who gave her being, and has assigned, also, her limits and her
end--if, in short, we disturb the two poles of a right understanding of
nature, then, most assuredly, will the effort be fruitless, and all our
labor unprofitable. Man, however, has gone still further, and by
transferring the innate discord of his internal consciousness to outward
objects, has forcibly rent asunder God and Nature--he has thus divorced
the sensible world and its Maker, and set them in hostile array against
each other, and thereby brought physical science in collision with the
knowledge of divine things and with revelation. Our fourth Lecture,
therefore, was consecrated to an attempt to effect here, also, a
reconciliation, or, at least, to lay the first stone, and to mark out
the road by which alone we could hope to arrive at so desirable a
result: and this is a problem which is even the more important the truer
it is, that this discord is not confined to science and the scientific
domain, but extends, also, to real life, where these discrepant views
and modes of thinking are arrayed against each other in so many hostile
and conflicting parties. And although, as differing merely as to the
form and direction of thought, they do not come forward in so distinct a
shape, or under such characteristic names, as the parties in religion
and politics, still this dissension is not, therefore, less real and
universal, or its effects and influence less noticeable. Of these
parties the first, and by far the most numerous, is the sect of the
rationalists, who doubt indiscriminately of all things, and test every
matter by the standard of their own skepticism. The second class is
formed of the exclusive worshipers of nature, and has many members among
scientific men; while, lastly, the third consists of those who derive,
from the positive source of a divine decision, the law of their thinking
and the standard of their judgment. Now, this last party, if it would
only go a few steps farther, and draw still deeper from this source,
would be able to assign its appropriate place and value to every potence
and truth in the other species of thought and knowledge, and even
thereby might qualify itself to dissolve and reconcile the all-pervading
discord. But inasmuch as they do not adopt this conciliatory attitude
toward natural, historical, and even artistic knowledge, so far as they
are true, but, on the contrary, in a spirit of animosity, attempt to
circumscribe and set negative limits to them, if not absolutely to
reject them as worthless and profane--then, when they least wish it,
they really sink into a party no less than the other two. And thus,
while they might occupy a far higher position, they fall to the level of
the rest, and contribute, on their part, an element to the intellectual
strife, and tend to promote and perpetuate it. The three parties, then,
which by their ruling ideas divide life and age, are the rational
thinkers, the worshipers of nature, and those who, in all controverted
questions, appeal absolutely to a higher and divine authority; for
inasmuch as the sentence of the latter is only of a negative import, it
is therefore insufficient to meet all the requisitions of life.

Thus, then, have I led your consideration to four different points, in
order to seize and exhibit, in as many different forms and spheres, this
great fact of the dissension in man’s consciousness, as it exists at
present. In a similar manner, too, a fourfold attempt has been made to
remedy its hereditary disease, which has been inherent in it since the
original darkening of the soul at the Fall, and, by appeasing the
discord which, as it is all-pervading and universal, assumes manifold
shapes and forms, to make the first step of return and approximation
toward the original harmonic unity. Having considered the matter in
these four special points of view, it will not, I hope, appear premature
if I now propose the question in a more general point of view, which
will embrace the whole human consciousness itself; but, at the same
time, limit our consideration of it exclusively to its psychological
aspect.

Now it is in nowise difficult to conceive of the human soul as much
simpler than it is, and apart from that division of it into several
faculties, which is at most, and properly, but an accident of its
existence. One of the first among the modern philosophers of Germany,
says somewhere of the soul, that the supposition of its existence is
superfluous, and that it is a pure fiction.[A] But this statement was
the result of his having abandoned in his system the true center of life
and consciousness; whoever, on the contrary, adheres steadily thereto,
will never concur in a position which simply, as contradicting the
general feeling of human nature, requires no elaborate refutation. But
as regards the two parts into which the soul is divided, viz., Reason
and Fancy--these, at any rate, are no fiction, but exist really and
truly within the consciousness, where, as in life itself, they often
stand confronting each other in hostile array. This division can not
well be called superfluous, but yet it does not admit of being
considered absolutely necessary, and belonging to the soul’s original
essence. If all thinking were a living cogitation--if the thinking and
the loving soul had remained at unity in their true center, then the
external methodical thought and the internal productive thinking,
meditating, and invention, would not be separate and divorced--at least
they would not come into hostile conflict with each other, but would
rather be harmoniously combined in the living cogitation of the loving
soul. The several forms, too, of a higher love and a higher endeavor,
aye, every lawful earthly inclination, would be blended in this harmony
of the soul, and no longer stand out as a separate and isolated faculty,
occasionally conflicting with all the others. Even the conscience would
no longer appear as a special act or function of the judgment, of a
distinct and peculiar kind, but would be absorbed in the whole as a
delicate internal sensibility and the pulse of the moral life.

As for sensation and memory, they are in any case but ministering
faculties, which only appear distinct and independent under the
influence of the prevailing tendency to separation and disunion, but on
the supposition of a simpler and more harmonious consciousness, would be
counted merely as bodily organs. If, then, the soul had not suffered an
eclipse--if it had remained undisturbed in the clear light of God--then
would man’s consciousness also have been much simpler than it now is,
with all those several faculties which we at present find and
distinguish in it. In such a case, it would consist only of
understanding, soul, and will. For if, according to the three directions
of its activity, any one should still be disposed to divide it into the
thinking, the feeling, and the loving soul, still this would not be
founded on any intrinsic strife or discord, but they would all combine
harmoniously together, and in this harmonious combination be at unity
among themselves. As for the distinction between understanding and will,
that would still remain, since it is essential to mind or spirit, and
may, in a certain sense, be ascribed even to the uncreated spirits. But
in this garden of the soul of inward illumination--on this fruitful soil
of harmonized thought and feeling--they would walk amicably together,
and work in common, and would not, as hostile beings, turn aside in
opposite directions, or as is mostly the case in actual life, be divided
from each other by an impassable gulf, and never meet in friendly
contact.

Thus nearly, or somewhat similarly, must we conceive of, and attempt to
represent to ourselves, the human mind in its original state, before it
was darkened, rent asunder, and condemned to lasting discord, but was as
yet eminently simple and perfectly harmonious.

And now as regards understanding and will, as a division of powers
essential to the mind or spirit, which, however, as such, is not
necessarily inharmonious: the expression already touched upon of another
of our modern German philosophers, will serve as a transition to and
commencing point for my remarks. According to this memorable assertion
with regard to the mind [_geist_], and which will serve as an
appropriate pendent to that last quoted about the soul, the essence of
mind or spirit in general consists in the negation of the opposite.[26]
Now I can not stop at present to inquire what sense this would give, if
applied to the uncreated spirit, and the Creator of all other spiritual
beings. But as concerns created spirits: their essence, contrariwise,
consists principally in an eternal affirmation. But this, however, they
have not of and from themselves, but it is the affirmation of the one to
which God has exclusively destined them. But it is not of themselves,
but of God and His energy, of whom these created spirits are, as it
were, but a ray--a spark of His light--therefore, in this ray, not only
sight and understanding, but also thought and deed, will and execution,
are simultaneous and identical. And it is in this respect that they are
so totally different from men. Now this ray of light, imparted to them
from God, is nothing less than the thought of their destination--of the
purpose of their being--in a word, their mission, if we may speak after
a human fashion, and in the prevailing phraseology. And, indeed, in all
ancient languages, the pure created intelligences have these names from
that mission which constitutes their essence; for their essence is even
perfectly identical with this divine mission or inborn eternal
affirmation. To the fallen spirits, on the other hand, the maxim above
quoted applies truly enough: their essence consists, not in the divine
affirmation, or the mission which they have abandoned, but rather in the
eternal, though bootless, denial of their opposite, which is even
nothing less than the divine order. For to their ambitious intellect and
perverse wills, the latter, in all probability, appeared far too loving,
and, therefore, unintelligible; while, to their censorious judgment, it
seemed deficient in rigor of consequence, and not unconditional and
absolute enough.

All that has hitherto been said reduces itself to the following result.
As by the first obscuration and eclipse of the human soul the very body
of man was deteriorated, and having been originally created with a
capacity of immortality, fell a prey to death, and received the germs,
or became liable to many diseases, as roots of death--which is not guilt
itself, but the natural result of guilt--so in his consciousness there
was then implanted, and has ever since been propagated, a germ of
intellectual death, and manifold seeds of error, which, however, are not
a new sin, but merely the natural consequences of the first sin and the
original corruption of the soul. In four different forms, according to
the four cardinal points and fundamental faculties of the human
consciousness, does this inborn error and fruitful germ of erroneous and
false thinking show and develop itself. We have already spoken of this
futile idea of the deadness of all external life, which has taken such
deep root in the center of all human thought--in the dead abstract
notion and the empty formula, and which, clinging as an original taint
to the human mind as at present constituted, renders it so difficult for
all those who, not content with merely observing nature, wish really to
understand it in its living operation, and, moreover, to imitate in
thought its dynamical law, and the inner pulse of its vital forces. For
in the abstract notion all this evaporates, and when confined within
such dead formularies, the true life of nature quickly becomes extinct.
This, therefore, is the primary source of error--the leading species of
barren and futile thinking in the abstract understanding. But now this
dead and lifeless cogitation of abstract ideas, with its processes of
combining and inferring, or of analyzing and drawing distinctions, may
be carried on into infinity, as being that wherein the essence or
function of reason consists, and also as giving rise to interminable
disputes and contradictions. Consequently this form of the reason, which
is ever pursuing dialectical disputations, or else skeptically
renouncing its own authority, even because it never allows itself to
proceed in what alone is its legitimate course, becomes thereby a second
source of error and false thinking among men. And, indeed, this
erroneous procedure of the dialectical reason, which is incessantly
working out or analyzing its abstract notions, is the effect of the
present constitution of the human mind; so that no individual can in
justice be blamed on its account, nor can its perverted conclusions and
corrupting results be fairly imputed to ulterior views and principles of
an immoral character.

In considering the imagination as a source of error, we have no need to
select the instance of a fancy satanically inflamed to passion, or
satanically deluded, or even one of a purely materialistic bias and
leaning. For fancy, even in its greatest exaltation and purest form, is
at best but a subjective view and mode of cogitative apprehension, and,
consequently, as such, is ever a fruitful parent of delusion. How very
rarely an imagination is to be found which is not predominantly
subjective, is shown precisely in the very highest grade of its
development--in the creations of imitative art. Of the exalted geniuses
who in single ages and nations have distinguished themselves from the
great mass, and attained to that rare eminence--the reputation of the
true artist; out of this short list of great names, how few can be
selected of whose productions it can be truly said and boasted--Here in
this picture we have something more than a mere general view, or the
peculiar fantasy of an individual; here life and nature stand before us
in their full truth and objective reality, and speak to us in that
universal language, which is intelligible to men of all countries and
all times! And the same remark applies to the whole domain of scientific
thought in general; but especially to physical and historical science.

In like manner, in the sphere of the will, it is not merely immoral
volitions, which, as such, must ever be false and wrong, that are
exclusively the source of erroneous thought. The spring of those errors
which we are at present considering lies in the very form of the will
itself, _i.e._, in the absolute willing, even though its object and end
be, in themselves, perfectly legitimate and unexceptionable. That this
absolute willing--or, to speak more humanly, and in ordinary language,
self-will and obstinacy--is a fundamental and hereditary failing of the
human character, as at present constituted, which shows itself in the
very youngest children, with the first dawn of reason, and requires to
be most watchfully checked, is but too well known to every teacher and
every mother. But not in infancy only, but also in the most important
and comprehensive relations of life--nay, even in the history of the
world--this same absolute willing proves the most pernicious of all the
sources of error and corruption in the soul and life of man, even when
its object is not unmitigatedly bad, or when, perhaps, it may even
deserve to be called great and noble. It is through this absolute
willing that the sovereign with unlimited authority, even though he be
gifted with a strong and comprehensive intellect, and possessed of many
estimable qualities and moral virtues, becomes, nevertheless, the
oppressor of his people and the merciless tyrant. Through it, also, in
states which are not monarchical, but where the supreme authority is
divided among several estates, views and principles which, calmly
considered and duly limited by opposing principles, are true and
beneficial, by being advanced absolutely, and without qualification, are
converted into so many violent factions, which, distracting the minds of
men and inflaming their passions, produce a wide-spread and fearful
anarchy.

The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of
the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects
by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human
error. Considered apart from the aberrations of passion, special faults
of character, and prejudices of education, as well as the false notions
and wrong judgments to which the latter give rise--these four are the
springs from which flows all the error of the soul which makes itself
the center of the terrestrial reality, and which, springing out of this
soil, is nourished and propagated by it. To what, then, are we to look
to dispel these manifold delusions but to a closer and more intimate
union of the soul with God as the source of life and truth?

What, let us therefore ask, is the organ by which such closer union with
and immediate cognition of God is to be effected? Plainly not the
understanding, even though as the cognitive sense of a revelation of
spirit, and of the spirit of revelation, it carries us through the first
steps toward a right understanding of ourselves and the Creator. For so
long as we confine ourselves to the understanding, which, at most, is
but a preparatory and auxiliary faculty, we shall only make an
approximation. It is only when the divine idea, passing beyond the
understanding--the mere surface, as it were, of our consciousness--penetrates
into the very center of our being, and strikes root there, that it is
possible, with a view to this end, to draw immediately from the primary
source of all life. Now, the organ which essentially co-operates in
this work is the will, which, in such co-operation however, divests
itself entirely of its absoluteness. On this account I called the will
the sense for God, or the sense which is appropriated to the perception
of Deity.

But before I proceed in my attempt to define and elucidate the nature of
this reciprocal action, and show how it is possible or generally
conceivable, it will be necessary to premise one essential remark. I
have already attempted to discover and establish a special and
characteristic mark for every sphere of life, and its highest and
lowest grades. Thus, the proper and distinctive signature of nature, and
all that belongs to it, is a state of slumber or sleep; the
characteristic property of man, which distinguishes him from all other
intellectual beings, is fancy; while the essential property of the pure
created spirits is the stamp of eternity which is impressed on all their
operations, by means of which they perform, with untiring energies,
their allotted duties, without the alternation of repose or the
necessity of sleep, and by reason of which they remain forever what they
once begin to be. Applying the same line of thought to a higher region,
I would now attempt to discover there some characteristic sign, by
observing which man may, perhaps, be able to find his true position.
Proceeding, then, in this line of thought, and preserving a due regard
to the weakness of the human capacity, I would observe as follows. The
characteristic, not, indeed, of the divine essence--for that is too
great for man’s powers of apprehension--but of the divine operations and
His influence on the creation and all created beings, consists in His
incredible condescension toward these His creatures, and especially
toward man. Incredible, however, it may, nay, must and ought to be
called, inasmuch as it transcends every notion, nay, all belief, even
the most confiding and childlike, and the more it is contemplated,
appears the more inconceivable and amazing. Only it admits of question,
whether the expression be sufficiently simple and appropriate, and,
consequently, well-chosen; for the fact itself of this divine
condescension is affirmed in every line and word of revelation. And by
revelation I mean not merely the written revelation, but every
manifestation more or less distinct of God, and His divine operations
and providence--history, nature, and life. Now, on no one point are the
voices of all, who on such a matter can be regarded as authorities, so
perfectly concordant and unanimous, as on this wonderful attribute of
the Godhead, which, on the supposition that the belief in one living God
is universal, may be considered as placed beyond doubt or question.

In order to demonstrate how essential is the co-operation of the will to
that living intercommunion with God, which is something more than a mere
understanding, we advance the following assumptions. Supposing that in
the incredible condescension of His love, God has made Himself known to
a man, just as in the first books of our Holy Scripture He is described
as conversing with Moses, and as familiarly as one friend talks to
another; supposing also that He revealed to him all the secret things of
heaven and earth without reserve; that He at the same time laid open to
him His will and hidden counsels, and that not summarily and in a
general way, but definitely and in detail--expressly making known to him
His gracious purposes, both in what He at present requires of him and
designs for him hereafter; that He has also pointed out to man the means
which will enable him to accomplish His will, and, moreover, has added
the highest possible promises for his encouragement; supposing all this,
is it not evident that it nevertheless could not help or profit man
unless he consented to receive it? The whole divine communication would
be in vain if man obstinately continued in his old Egoism, mixed and
compounded of evil habits, fears, and sensual desires, and, unable to
tear himself away, still clung close to the narrow limits of self and
his own Me.

Now it is nothing but this intrinsic consent and concurrence in the will
of God, this calm affirmation of it, that can help man, who is now left
to his own free determination even as regards the Deity, and that can
lead him to God. On this account I called the will, rather than the
understanding, man’s sense for the divine. But all that is here required
is the internal assent, and not the power of actual performance; for
that varies even according to the standard of nature, or rather of that
which is imparted to him from above, since of himself man has no
capacity for that which is higher and more excellent, nothing being
man’s own but his will. Now this internal assent and submission of man’s
own will to the divine is clearly inconceivable where it has not, to a
certain degree, withdrawn from the sensible world which surrounds him
with so many ties and allurements, and where it has not loosened and set
itself free from the narrow domain of self to which his Ego so closely
clings.

Here, then, naturally arises the question, how far a renunciation of the
world and self-sacrifice, on which even the Platonic philosophy so
greatly insisted, is necessary, if we would advance one degree, or at
least one step, nearer to God, as the supreme good and all-perfect
Being, and what are its true and proper limits? In obedience to this
idea of the renunciation of the world as indispensable to communion with
God, the Hindoo fakir will sit for thirty years in one spot, with his
eyes fixed immutably in the same direction, so that he not only
surpasses all the limits of human nature, but also erases and
extinguishes all traces of it in himself. Or perhaps, in spite of the
simple principle and rule of sound reason, that man, as he is not the
author of his own being, has no right to terminate it, he follows a
false idea of self-sacrifice, and mounts the flaming pile in order to be
the sooner united to the Deity. In the fundamental idea of these
extravagances there is doubtless a germ of beauty and of truth, though
in the perverse application and gigantic scale of exaggeration that we
meet with it among the primeval nations of Asia, it is distorted into
monstrous falsehood. A simple illustration, taken from the different
ages of man’s life, will perhaps serve to set in a clear light the point
on which every thing turns in this matter of the assent of the human to
the divine will, and to determine the sense and the degree in which man
ought not to give himself up entirely to the world, or to revolve
closely round the center of self, if he would yield a sincere and hearty
submission to a higher voice and that guiding hand which conducts the
education of the whole human race, and watches with equal care the
development of individuals and of ages. The child may and must play, for
such exercise is wholesome and even necessary for the free expansion of
its bodily powers; but at its mother’s call, for to the child hers is
the higher voice, it ought to leave its play. Youth, again, ought to be
merry and enjoy the verdant spring; but when honor and duty summon to
earnest action, then must he be ready to lay aside all light-hearted
amusement for sterner avocations; or to take another view of the
youthful temperament, should its joyousness touch too rudely, not to say
overstep, the bounds of morality, then at the first hint of warning it
must abandon its treacherous pleasures. The full-grown man, too, having
to make his way in the world and to fight with fortune in the hard
struggle of life, has little leisure for idle feelings and meditations;
only he must not renounce all higher and nobler sentiments, nor dismiss
from his mind the thought of the Godhead and the divine (which indeed
for its mere preservation requires no outward ordinance or loss of
time), as belonging to the boy, and suitable only for the unripe years
of youth. Or to regard life under its passive aspect, let us think of
the happy wife by the side of a husband she loves, and living only in
her children, and possessing of worldly good as much as she wishes or
requires: suddenly, by one of those changes and chances which prevail in
this transitory life, she is bereaved of all--the partner of her joys
and cares, the children of her bosom, and perhaps, too, of her rank and
consideration, while beneath the repeated strokes of affliction her very
health sinks. Who would check her tears or blame her natural sorrow if
she feels and tells her woes? No one: for holier eyes than man’s look
upon her with compassion. One thing, however, may fairly and reasonably
be expected of her--that she do not give way entirely to despair, nor
murmur against Providence. More, therefore, than man requires of man in
the ordinary relations of life, God requires not of the human will; and
on that alone does He make any requisition, in respect to that free
assent and internal concurrence which alone can bind us in personal
union with the Godhead, and bring us near to Him; a consummation which
no mere intellectual apprehension of all possible revelations, whether
written on the pages of inspiration, or on the open tablets of nature,
or engraven on the imperishable annals of history, is sufficient to
bring about.

So much and nothing more is required for this essential concurrence of
the human will with the divine, in the general relations of life. But,
in the case of any special vocation and profession--if, for instance, a
man feels himself disposed to become a minister of the revealed Word, an
instrument and messenger of the divine communications--then, no doubt,
higher and sterner requisitions must come into consideration. To men of
native courage, what vocation can be more universal than that of a
soldier and defender of his country? but does not it require, besides
undaunted courage and contempt of death, the patient and enduring
fortitude which bears up under countless hardships and privations? What
vocation, again, can be simpler and more fully founded in nature, than
that of the softer sex to become a mother? but how many sufferings, and
fears, and dangers, compass it about, and how infinite are the great and
little anxieties to which a mother’s love--that purest and truest of all
earthly affections--is exposed? And it is even herein that human love
most betrays its weakness; it may suffice for some one determinate
direction, some transitory period of life, for some single effort of
magnanimity or self-sacrifice, but it rarely survives the changes of
time and fortune, and its faith and ardor too often are extinguished
amid the petty trials of every-day life, and its numberless cares and
anxieties.

And as with the love, so also is it with the faith of men: it enters not
sufficiently into minutiæ; it is not personal enough, nor sufficiently
childlike and confiding; it is not made to refer enough to ourselves.
Most men, indeed, have only too high an opinion of their own worth--an
overweening confidence in their own powers; at least, the opposite fault
of extreme diffidence is a rare exception. But yet, it is true, men
generally take far too low an estimate of their true vocation and proper
destiny; they believe not in its high dignity; and as viewed in its
place among the vast universe, they hold it and themselves as
comparatively insignificant. But this is a total misconception. Every
man is an individual entity--an inner world of his own, full of life--a
true microcosm (as has already been said in a different sense) in the
eye of God and in the scheme of creation: every man has a vocation of
his own, and an appropriate destiny. Could men’s eyes be but once opened
to see it, how would they be amazed at the infinity which they have
neglected, and might have attained to, and which generally in the world
remains neglected and unattained. But of the many thousands whom this
remark concerns, how very few ever attain to a clear cognition of their
real destination! And the reason of this is simply the fact, that the
faith of men is all too weak, and, above all, that it is too vaguely
general, too superficial, too little searching or profound--not
sufficiently personal and childlike.

A childlike faith, and a love that endureth unto the end--these are the
true bonds to hold the soul of man in intimate union with God. But it is
in hope, such as is at present found among men, that the chief defect
lies; for hope ought to be strong and heroic, otherwise it is not that
which the name expresses. Few men, perhaps, are entirely devoid of faith
and love, only they are not sufficiently carried into the details and
trifles of life, as human wants require; for it is exactly to these that
all that is divine in men’s thoughts and deeds ought to be directed. In
hope, on the contrary, the inner man must raise himself and ascend up to
God: it must, therefore, be strong and energetic, if it is to be
efficacious. On this account we might well expect it to be far more
rare, comparatively, than faith and love, considered according to the
human scale of reasoning; on the other hand, probably, there are many
men who, internally, are almost totally destitute of hope.

The longing after the eternal and divine, which has been already
described, is the seeking of God; but this calm, inward assent of the
will, whenever, with a childlike faith and enduring love, and in
steadfast hope, it is carried through and maintained with unwavering
fidelity throughout life, is the actual finding of Him within us, and a
constant adherence to Him when once we have found Him. As the root and
principle of all that is best and noblest in man, this divine longing
can not be too highly estimated, and nowhere is it so inimitably
described, and its excellence so fully acknowledged, as in Holy Writ
itself. A remarkable instance of it is the fact that a prophet who was
set apart and called by God Himself to his office, and was for that
purpose endued with miraculous gifts, is expressly called in Holy Writ
the man of longings.[27] And yet this longing is nothing but the source,
the first root, from which springs that triple flower in the lovely
symbol of faith, hope, and charity, which afterward, spreading over
every grade and sphere of moral and intellectual existence, expands into
the richest and most manifold fruits.

Now, it is very possible in some serious and intellectual work to feel a
pleasure in this triple union of holy thoughts and sentiments, as with
any deeply-significant picture in general, without duly entering the
while into its precise requisitions and profound meaning. But from one
particular end of a philosophy of life, _i.e._, of a thorough knowledge
of the human consciousness, the psychological aspect of the subject
assumes a peculiar importance, and essentially demands our attention.
With this view, I venture to assert that the human consciousness, which
otherwise and in itself is entirely a prey to discord, and split into
irreconcilable contraries, is, by faith, hope, and love, redeemed from
this dissension--is raised from its innate law, of an erring and dead
thought, and of an absolute will, which is no less dead and null, being
restored gradually to a perfect state of unison and harmony. Under the
influence of faith--and by this term I understand, not the cold and
heartless repetition of a customary formulary, but a living and personal
faith in a living and personal God and Savior--under the influence of
such a faith, the living spirit of truth steps into that place of the
consciousness which before was usurped by the mere abstract thinking of
a degraded understanding. And whenever, on the other hand, a refined
goodness and love have in patient endurance become the soul of
existence, there is no room for the stormy obstinacy or passionate
wildness of an absolute will. Even in the will itself all is now life;
discord is banished from it, and all the threatening elements of strife
are forever appeased. And in that trusting confidence with which the
loving soul leans upon God--in the strong godlike hope which takes its
stand upon the Eternal, the reason, with its ordering, regulating, and
methodical processes, and the fancy, with its dreams of the infinite,
are again completely reconciled, and thereby the harmony of the human
consciousness restored. Fancy, I remarked formerly, is the
characteristic property of man, as distinguished by it from other
spiritual intelligences; for reason, as a mere faculty of negation,
affords only a negative distinction of his nature as compared with
irrational creatures. But now, in a more comprehensive view, and, at the
same time, with profounder significance and greater truth of
description, we may say of man, in the same sense and in the same
relation, hope forms his characteristic property and his inmost essence.

Here, then, in this holy hope, is longing, that marvelous flower of the
soul, expanded into its perfect and noblest fruit. If, in judging of the
three, man looks to the end to which he is to attain--if, in thought, he
places himself at this point of view, then assuredly will love appear
the highest and the best; for hope ceases when fulfillment comes in, and
sight enters into the place of faith, but love abideth forever.[28] As
long, however, as man has not yet attained unto that which is perfect,
and is still in pursuit of it, hope must be regarded as the greatest,
for it is even the true vital flame of faith, as well as of love, and of
all higher existence.

This divine hope is even the fruit-bearing principle and the
fructification of the immortal soul by the Holy Spirit of Eternal
Truth--the luminous center and focus of grace, where the dark and
discordant soul is illuminated and restored to unison with itself and
with God.




LECTURE VI.

OF THE WISDOM OF THE DIVINE ORDER OF THINGS IN NATURE, AND OF THE
RELATION OF NATURE TO THE OTHER LIFE AND TO THE INVISIBLE WORLD.


The highest and loftiest language would fail us were it our purpose to
speak of the inmost essence of the Godhead, since He is that which no
thought or conception can comprehend, and which no words are sufficient
completely to describe or adequately to express. On the other hand, when
we reflect on God’s work in creation, and of His superintending
providence which rules the course of this earthly world, our thoughts
can not be simple enough, nor, to judge by that principle of the divine
condescension which formed the nucleus of our remarks in the last
Lecture, too familiar or affectionate. In a general way this is commonly
enough admitted, but practically it is neglected. Men do not clearly
present to their minds all that is involved in it, and the remote
consequences to which it leads. And so, in spite of their better
convictions, they insensibly adopt a high-sounding and solemn strain,
when the tone of a childlike reverence is alone the suitable and
appropriate style for expressing the relation between the benignant
Creator and His creatures, and man especially, as simply and as
naturally as it is in reality.

I said as naturally, because it is implied in the very nature of things
that if God did originally create free beings like men, He would give
them all things needful, keep them constantly in His regard, and every
where lend them a helping and directing hand. But from time to time He
might, it is not inconsistent to suppose, withdraw, as it were, His
guidance; for otherwise they would cease to be free beings. In this
respect the divine Providence may be likened to a mother teaching her
child to walk. Having chosen a clear spot, free from all things likely
to hurt the infant in its fall, she places it firmly on its feet. For a
little while she holds and supports it, and then, going back a few
steps, she waits for its love to set its little limbs in motion and to
follow her. But how watchful is her eye, how outstretched her arms to
catch her babe the instant it begins to totter! Such nearly, and equally
simple, is the relation of God to man; and not to individuals only, but
also to the whole human race. For in the divine education and higher
guidance of mankind we may trace the same degrees and natural gradation
of developments as form the basis of the education of individuals, and
may also be observed in all the processes of nature.

Now we take it for granted that God has willed the creation not only of
free and pure spirits, but also of the natural world; for that He has so
willed is a fact that, as it were, stares us in the face. If, then,
along with the free spirits He has also created a nature, _i.e._, a
living reproductive power, capable of and designed to develop and
propagate itself, it is plain that we can not and ought not to think of
such a nature as independent and self-subsisting. For, first of all, it
had not its beginning in itself. Moreover, it would move as a blind
force, and as such manifest itself only in destruction and desolation,
if its Maker had not originally fixed and assigned to it the end toward
which all its efforts were ultimately to be directed. Nature, indeed, is
not free like man; but still it is not a piece of dead clock-work,
which, when it is once wound up, works on mechanically till it has run
itself down again. There is life in it. And if a few abstract but
superficial thinkers have failed to discern, or even ventured expressly
to deny this truth, the general feeling of mankind, on the other hand,
bears witness to it. Yes, man feels that there is life rustling in the
tree, as with its many arms and branches, its leaves and flowers, it
moves backward and forward in the free air; and that, as compared with
the clock, with all its ingenious but dead mechanism, it is even a
living thing. And what the common feeling of mankind thus instinctively
assumes is confirmed by the profounder investigations of physical
science. Thus we know that even plants sleep, and they, too, as much as
animals, though after a different sort, have a true impregnation and
propagation. And is not nature, on the whole, a life-tree, as it were,
whose leaves and flowers are perpetually expanding themselves and
seeking nourishment from the balsamic air of heaven, while, as the sap
rises from the deep-hidden root into the mighty stem, the branches stir
and move, and invisible forces sweep to and fro in its waving crown.
Most shallow and superficial, in truth, is that physical science which
would consider the system of nature, with all the marvels of beauty and
majesty wherewith its Maker has adorned it, as nothing more than a piece
of lifeless clock-work. In such a system the all-mighty Creator must
appear at best but a great mechanical artist who has at his command
infinite resources; or, if we may be allowed so absurd an expression, as
the fittest to expose the absurdity of those who would regard the divine
work, both in its whole and in its parts, as dead, an omnipotent
clockmaker. If, however, to meet the needs of man’s limited capacity, we
must, when speaking of the Creator, employ such trifling and childish
similes, then of all human avocations and pursuits that of the gardener
will serve best to illustrate the divine operations in nature.
All-mighty and omniscient, however, He has Himself created the trees and
flowers that He cultivates, has Himself made the good soil in which they
grow, and brings down from heaven the balmy spring, the dews and rain,
and the sunshine that quicken and mature them into life and beauty.

If, then, there be life in nature, as, indeed, observation teaches, and
the general feeling of man avouches, it must also possess a vital
development, which in its movements observes a uniform course and
intrinsic law. In truth, the Creator has not reserved to himself the
beginning and the end alone, and left the rest to follow its own course;
but in the middle, and at every point, also, of its progress, the
Omnipotent Will can intervene at pleasure. If He pleases He can
instantaneously stop this vital development, and suddenly make the
course of nature stand still; or, in a moment, give life and movement to
what before stood motionless and inanimate. Generally speaking, it is in
the divine power to suspend the laws of nature, to interfere directly
with them, and, as it were, to intercalate among them some higher and
immediate operation of His power, as an exception to their uniform
development. For, as in the social frame of civil life, the author and
giver of the laws may occasionally set them aside, or, in their
administration, allow certain special cases of exception, even so is it,
also, with nature’s Lawgiver.

Now, this immediate operation, and occasional interference of Supreme
Power with the order of nature, is exactly what constitutes the idea of
miracle. The general possibility of miracles is a principle which man’s
sound and unsophisticated reason has never allowed him to deny. But, on
the other hand, it is evidently essential to their very idea that they
should be thought of simply as deviations from the usual course of
nature’s operations; if they were not exceptions to the laws of nature,
then were they no miracles. Such miraculous exceptions, however, it may
be observed, need not invariably to be _contrary_ to the course of
nature, though _above_ nature, and far transcending its ordinary
standard, they always are. Exceptions, therefore, they are; but such, at
the same time, as do not permanently disturb the natural course and flow
of the vital development, which, on the whole, continues unchanged. For
it is only agreeable with Creative wisdom to maintain the world so long
as the present state of things subsists, and the final consummation has
not yet arrived, in the order originally prescribed to it by His
omnipotence.

To this an objection might be made in the opposite sense. Taken then in
their principle, the laws of nature, no less than those exceptions to
them which are usually called miracles, are one and the same; they are
alike from the Creator of all--and the laws themselves, therefore, are
equally miraculous. This remark is quite true; but it only teaches us
that we ought not to be too ready to see a miracle in every
extraordinary event. But still, there will ever remain an essential
difference between an immediate operation of omnipotence and the
Creator’s original production of a living force, implanting in this
creature an inner law, and thereupon leaving to it the further evolution
of its powers in the course marked out for and assigned to it.

Now, if such a creature, like this terrestrial nature, be of a mixed
constitution, composed of a principle of destruction as well as of a
principle of productive development and progression--if its life be a
constant struggle with death, then it is manifest that only by the same
hand which first formed it, gave it laws, and prescribed its order, can
its wise and divine economy be preserved, and the permanence of the
organic evolution of its whole system be secured, and the outbursts of
elementary dissolution, which are perpetually menacing it, held in check
and averted. If this restraint be once relaxed, if the destructive
energy of the wild elements be once let loose, and free scope given to
their fury--and this globe presents the manifest traces of one such
catastrophe, at least--then this, too, must be regarded as an exception,
and is only explicable by the higher principle of divine permission.
Viewed, however, as the retribution of divine justice on a guilty
world, it forms an exception and a miracle of a peculiar kind, and must
be distinguished from those other extraordinary operations properly
called miracles, wherein, with some saving or quickening purpose, the
Almighty, as it were, raises nature above herself, and takes her out of
her usual course.

In this way, then, we ought unquestionably to refer every thing in the
world to its author and preserver, whether it be conformable to the
usual course and order of nature, or, as an extraordinary phenomenon,
bespeak a higher and more immediate operation of divinity. But, at the
same time, we must never forget that nature itself is a living force
endowed with a capacity of self-development. Nature, indeed, is not free
in the same sense that man is, possessed and conscious of a power of
self-determination and choice; but as all life contains in itself the
germ of a free movement and expansion, and while it expands itself a
hidden and slumbering consciousness begins to stir and awake, so also in
nature, an initiatory or preparatory grade of it, if not fully
out-spoken, is at least indicated. In this respect it may be regarded as
the vestibule of that temple of freedom which in man, the crowning work
of this earthly creation, and made after the divine image and likeness,
stands forth in its full dimensions and proportions. Considered from
another point of view, the sensible world may be looked upon as a veil
thrown over the spiritual world--the light-flowing and almost
transparent robe, and, as it were, in all its parts the significant
costume of the invisible powers. But in no point of view can we rightly
consider nature as properly self-subsisting, or independent of its
Creator, and, therefore, in no case as isolated by itself and apart from
all reference to a superior being. Rather is it a living force, and one,
too, doubly significant, both from within and from without; to which
property an allusion is contained in the simile already employed, of a
book written both on the inside and the outside. These two ideas, then,
of the free will of man and of the living development of nature, must be
taken as the basis, and serve as the fixed point of every attempt to
ascertain the divine order in nature. On this account we have placed
them in the foreground of the present Lecture, which will, in the main,
be consecrated to such an investigation.

If, now, this demonstration of a divine order in nature seem to contain
nothing less than a kind of Theodicée[29] (so far as man can establish a
justification of God’s ways), I, for my part, must confess that I would
much rather have before my eyes a Theodicée for the feelings, conceived
in the very spirit of love, than any purely rational theory. For such
theories, founded in general on far-fetched hypotheses, subtilly
introduce into nature numberless divine purposes and designs, of which,
however, we are able neither clearly to understand, much less to prove
that they were intended by the everlasting counsels, or even that such
vestiges of a divine purpose are really discernible in the universe. In
this province of speculation we must not be too rigorous in our
determinations, and especially we must guard against systematizing. But,
above all, we can not be too watchful against the fault which so many
reasoners fall into, of transferring into the realm of nature, or of
God, that logical necessary connection which is a part of and connatural
with our rational constitution, and an indispensable aid to our limited
intellectual powers. Such a way of thinking would inevitably lead us to
that most mistaken notion of a blind fate--the phantom of destiny.

On the other hand, how many are the questioning feelings and
perplexities which arise in the human heart at the sight of certain
natural objects. And these even, because they are far from amounting to
doubts and objections, or at least from assuming a definite expression
or a scientific dignity, seem, on that account, only the more loudly to
demand an answer. The mournful cry of some helpless and innocent animal
when killed by man--or in a different category--the hissing of the
venomous serpent; the lothsome mass of maggots in the putrid corpse: all
these are but so many dumb exclamations which, as it were, do but keep
back the question, Are, then, these the productions of the all-perfect
Being--of the Supreme Intelligence?

The sufferings of animals are indeed a theme for man to reflect upon;
and I, for my part, can not concur with him who would regard this as a
topic unworthy of his thoughts, and expel from the human bosom all
sympathy with the animal creation. The consideration, however, of this
subject, naturally enough gives rise to the question as to the soul of
animals. Now, it certainly would do no discredit to philosophy, if it
should succeed in giving a satisfactory answer to this question, and
enable us to follow a middle course; as remote from the exaggerated
assumptions of ancient nations with regard to animal existence, on the
one hand, as on the other, from the unfeeling conclusions of modern
science, which refuses to regard or to sympathize with any pains, and
absolutely is unable to conceive the sufferings of any being which does
not possess the character of rationality exactly in the same manner and
degree as man. As greatly, on the other side, does the Hindoo theology
err. Its dogma of the metempsychosis not only ascribes an immortal soul
to animals, but it also further teaches that human souls are imprisoned
in animal bodies, as the penalty of a guilt incurred in a previous state
of existence. Beautiful, however, as is the compassionate sympathy with
the sufferings of the brute creation, which this theory has occasioned,
and confirmed by the sanction of a religious duty, still the assumption
on which it is founded is wholly arbitrary, and the extension of the
immortality of the soul to these creatures of our globe is an
unwarrantable exaggeration, and has no foundation in observed phenomena.
Moreover, the hypothesis of such a migratory state of departed souls is
inconsistent with every notion of the divine government of the world;
inasmuch as such a temporary punishment can produce no salutary effect,
either of purification or of preparation, and consequently would be
wholly motiveless and absurd.

Very questionable, moreover, does it seem, whether, with propriety, an
individual soul can be attributed to animals. With those that are most
closely domesticated with man, there does undoubtedly arise, as it were,
by a sort of mental contagion, the appearance of individuality and
difference of character, just as the artistic structures of certain
species form a kind of analogy to human reason, and as the melodious
intonations and feelings of some others seemed to me entitled, in a
similar sense, to be termed reverberations of fancy. In all those kinds,
however, which remain undisturbed in their natural state, the whole
species possesses the same character, and have, consequently, the same
common soul.[30] The species itself is only an individual; and,
consequently, the several species must be considered as so many living
forms of the general organic force of animated nature, since an
immortality of individual souls can, in the case of animals, neither be
assumed nor allowed to be assumable.

Among those perplexities, or, as I termed them, questioning feelings
about nature and its animating principle, I turn now to the
consideration of the last instance, that of the maggots of putrefaction.
Is not this one of the clearest possible proofs that all nature is
animated?[31] So much so, and so eminently is this the case, that even
in death and corruption, in foulness and disease, it still livingly
operates and produces life--the lowest grade, undoubtedly, of life--or,
if any so prefers to call it, a false life--but still a life. Now, can
such morbid productions of nature, the worms, _e.g._ [_entozoa_], which
in certain diseases are engendered in the bowels, be regarded as real
creatures? Naught are they but the dissolving and crumbling matter of
life, which even in dissolution is still living.[32] And this fact is
not confined merely to organic corruption and disease. Even the
element--the fresh water from the spring--is full of life, and it is the
more so the clearer and the better it is and the purer from the
microscopic animalculæ, which swarm in it more and more the longer it
stagnates and becomes foul, until at last, as frequently happens when it
has been kept long on shipboard, with the growing foulness of the water
they increase in size, and swim about as worms of visible magnitude.
Many other instances might be adduced in proof of this origination of
worms and vermin out of corruption, and testifying to it as a general
principle of nature. And are not those swarms of locusts which in
Asiatic countries are a general plague of the lands over which they
sweep with their thick and dark migratory hordes, a sickly proof that
the atmosphere that has engendered them is passing, or has already
fallen into corruption beneath the influence of some other contagious
element?

That the air and atmosphere of our globe is in the highest degree full
of life, I may, I think, take here for granted and generally admitted.
It is, however, of a mixed kind and quality, combining the refreshing
and balsamic breath of spring with the parching simoons of the desert,
and where the healthy odors fluctuate in chaotic struggle with the most
deadly vapors. What else, in general, is the wide-spread and spreading
pestilence, but a living propagation of foulness, corruption, and death?
Are not many poisons, especially animal poisons, in a true sense, living
forces?

Now, may we not give a further extension to this mode of view, and
apply the fact of a diseased propagation of a false life, as in the
worms of putrefaction, to other unsightly productions of nature. May we
not, for instance, consider serpents and snakes as the entozoa or
intestinal worms of the earth? That the evil spirits are not without
some influence on our terrestrial habitation, and that in many places
their malignant influence is distinctly traceable is, at all events,
undeniable. And accordingly, some have supposed the monkey tribe not to
be an original creation of the Deity, but a satanic device and malicious
parody upon man, as the envied favorite of God. That the “Prince of this
world”--which expression, in its latter half, is surely not to be
understood exclusively of man’s fallen race, but very evidently and
expressively alludes to the existing fabric of nature and the corrupted
world of sense--that the Prince of this world can exercise a certain
degree of pernicious influence on the productive energies of the natural
system in its present corrupt and vitiated condition, and that also,
there is in nature itself a power to produce evil, are facts which do
not admit of denial, and are noways inconsistent with revelation. Only
we must not suppose that this baneful influence is not confined within
certain limits. He to whom the Prince of this world, no less than the
world itself, is subject, has, in His infinite wisdom, set a definite
limit both of quantity and duration to this pernicious influence, as, in
general, He does to every permission of evil.

At all events we must not for one moment suppose that in the book of
nature we have a pure and uncorrupt text of God, and such as it
originally came from the hands of its Author. It is of the highest
consequence, for a due and right appreciation of the divine economy in
nature, that we give full consideration to this fact. On this account it
is important to keep in mind the distinction implied in that expression
already quoted from the Mosaic history--“Let the earth bring forth.”
For, according to this, it does not seem indispensably necessary to
ascribe immediately to the good and wise Creator every thing that the
earth brought forth; no, nor every thing that is produced by a nature
now so imperfect--so diseased, too, in many parts--and visibly
constrained to submit to hostile and foreign influences.

Many writers who, with the best intentions, undertake the task of
indicating the divine wisdom in the existing order of things, and of
defending the ways of Providence against the objections of human
presumption and conceit, generally err by taking too narrow a view of
their subject, and rigorously insisting on some one general principle,
which, by means of very hazardous assertions, they succeed in finding in
the whole and every part of the system of the universe. They leave out
of sight altogether that Mosaic distinction already alluded to, which in
appearance indeed is trifling enough, but yet in reality most
essentially important. Consequently, the good work which they take in
hand, instead of producing that general concurrence and conviction that
it otherwise might, gives rise rather to fresh doubts and objections.
The best solution of all such doubts--the most satisfactory answer to
all such or similar questions or questioning feelings--lies in the final
cause of the present constitution of things, considered as a whole and
in general, and judged of from a regard to its triple character and
triple destination. Now, according to this triple principle, we have, as
already shown, to regard the present system of nature as being primarily
a tombstone raised by Almighty benevolence--a bridge of safety thrown
across the gulf of eternal death--a bridge, however, which we must not
think of as quite so simple, broad, and straight as a bridge made by
human hands, but an animated and ensouled bridge of life, and multiform,
with many arms and branches, and presenting in some parts nothing more
than a narrow footing, where the first false stop precipitates into the
abyss beneath. But secondarily, according to this view, nature is
grounded on and devoted to progress; a wonderful laboratory of manifold,
diversified, and universal reproduction; and lastly, a glorious scale of
resurrection, ascending up to the last and highest summit of terrestrial
transfiguration. Now this laboratory lies in the hidden womb of nature,
while in the noble outward structure of its organic formations this
gradational scale manifests itself with a warning, a prognostication of
the height of excellence to which it eventually leads. But now, if
nature--as, judging from its original design, we may and must
assume--were a Paradise for the blessed spirits of the previous
creation, for the first-born sons of light, then most assuredly has it
not continued so, any more than the first man has remained in the garden
of Eden. No doubt, over a few favored spots of the existing globe, a
rich fullness of ravishing beauty still hovers, awakening in the heart,
as it were, the fleeting images of Paradisaical innocence--dying strains
of a primal harmony--mournful reminiscences of the happy infancy of
creation. For the powers of darkness and hostile spirits broke in upon
the fair beauty of primeval nature, and laid it waste and wild. The
garden of the earth in which the first man was placed, “to dress it and
to keep it,” is, no doubt, called Paradise; and assuredly it was
infinitely more beautiful, more wonderful, purer, and fuller of life,
than the loveliest scenery which meets the eye in the fairest spots of
the earth, and seems to be of an almost celestial beauty. But this is
said only of the immediate inclosure, the immediate habitation of our
first parent; the spot chosen and blessed by God--the garden watered and
surrounded by the four streams. All the rest of nature, the whole of the
world besides, must have ceased at that time to be a Paradise; for,
otherwise, whence could the serpent have come? So that even according to
the simple sense of the expression, “that old serpent,” he was already
there, in the midst of the natural world. And was it not probably a part
of the destination of man--at least, in its natural aspect--that,
setting out from this divine starting-point of a Paradise prepared for
and given to him, he was to go forth and convert the rest of the world
into a similar Eden?

But this destination he did not, however, fulfill, and consequently lost
even this beginning and model of the first Paradise. The names of the
four streams which watered it are indeed still preserved in those
regions of Asia, which even to this day are the richest and most
fruitful, and, according to history, were the earliest inhabited. But
the one source out of which they all took their rise has disappeared,
and no vestige of it remains. With the loss of Paradise all is changed,
not only in man himself, but in the earth as his place of abode.

The way of return out of this bewildered nature, or, if men prefer so to
speak, out of this sunk and degraded, not to say unsound and sickly,
state of the earthly and sensible world (and this way of return is even
the way of obedience to the course of the divine order in nature), is
indicated even by these three grades of its inmost character, its
tendency, and ultimate destination. And in these, and in the final cause
of the whole constitution of things, is contained its true key and
interpretation, as well as the answer to so many questions about nature,
which engage not merely the curious intellect of man, but also attract
the sympathies of his soul, sweeping across it either with dark doubts
and fears, or with bright intimations of life and glorious anticipation.

I spoke deliberately when I said to _many_ of these questioning feelings
and perplexities of the human mind, and not all of them. For to expect a
satisfactory answer to them all in the present state of science, or
generally in this terrestrial life, brief as it is, and limited on all
sides and short-sighted, would be agreeable neither with the course nor
whole constitution of human affairs. A thoroughly complete and perfectly
systematic demonstration of the wisdom in the divine order of nature,
which should meet and explain every difficulty, would, even on account
of such a pretension, command little respect, and be of slight
influence. Much is there in nature which is to remain long hidden from
man; much, too, which we shall see first of all in the other world, when
death shall have opened our eyes and made us clear-sighted in one
direction or another. But the beginning and the end are even here and
now placed clearly and intelligibly before us, if only we are ready and
willing to walk by the light that is so graciously given us, and here,
as elsewhere, invariably to refer the first cause and the final
consummation to the Creator and to God. Without such a reference,
without thus, as it were, placing its two poles in God, the right
understanding of nature is absolutely impossible, and every scientific
attempt to attain it apart from and independently of God, must simply as
such prove vain and involve itself in absurdities. Hence it is, however
paradoxical it may sound, that we can recognize more distinctly, and
better understand the end of nature, its meaning and significance as a
whole, than we can the final cause of many a single object in it, which,
however, as contrasted with the whole, appears inconsiderable and
trifling. For the clear perception that we have of the final cause of
nature comes immediately from the divine illumination, which therefore
we can, so far as it is given to us, see and understand. But in the
darker levels, in the subterranean shaft of the obscure sensible world,
the prophetic candle of an antlike burrowing science, even though it be
originally kindled at that higher light, can not reach to every quarter,
can not illuminate every object in this mine of darkness.

But this final cause of creation, such as it is given to us clearly and
intelligibly, will be rendered most clear by a comparison and contrast
with the conceptions of the end of nature which human reason has put
forth. If the proposition already quoted from one of the latest of
German philosophers, that the essence of mind consists in the negation
of the opposite, be now applied (which was the application I then had in
my mind) to the Creator of the world and uncreated Intelligence, then
the following must be the meaning involved in it. That which is the
opposite of God or the Creator is nothing; and so far the proposition is
quite true, since man can not but admit that the Almighty has created
the world out of nothing. For if, with some of the ancient philosophers,
we were to suppose a matter existing from all eternity, out of which God
did not so much create as form the world, then in this case we should
have two Gods, and both imperfect and finite, instead of the one
all-perfect and self-sufficient Being. But if, on the other hand, the
Deity be regarded as merely a not-nothing; if the final cause of
creation be simply the negation of naught, then would such a view
ascribe a sort of imaginary reality to the nothing, and it would seem
that the world was created solely in order to get rid of the nothing,
which comes pretty much to the same as saying--if we may allow ourselves
so Lessing-like a boldness of expression--the Infinite made the world
out of _ennui_. Thus, in every case do the skeptical views and empty
negations of idealism lead to a contradictory nothing.

But, in reality and truth, it was out of love that God made the worlds;
and, indeed, out of a superabundant love. This we may well venture to
assert, and even to call it a fact; and that the divine love is also the
final cause, as well as the beginning of creation. A superabundance of
love in God we must, however, call the final cause-ground of creation,
inasmuch as He stood in no need of it; no need of the love of the
creature, nor absolutely of the world itself, or created things. For in
His inmost essence, where one depth of eternal love responds fully and
eternally to the other, He was perfectly sufficient for himself. And yet
it is even so: there is in God the superabundance of love, for He has
created the worlds, and it is the divine will to be loved by His
creatures. For this end and purpose has He created them; and because He
would have their love, He has created them free, and given both to the
pure spirits and to men a free will. The whole secret in the relation
subsisting between the creature, and man especially, and the Creator,
lies even in this great fact, that He has created them out of love, and
requires in return the service of their love. There is, perhaps,
something awful in this requisition, and in the relation thus found to
subsist between a weak and imperfect creature and the infinite and
omnipotent Being. But it is even so: we are really free, and are really
required by God to give him our love. But now a finite and created being
can only be free so far as God leaves him free; and this is only
conceivable in the light I have already set it in by the simile of a
fond mother teaching her babe to walk, and in order to tempt it to make
the first essay with its little limbs, stepping back from it a few
steps, and leaving it a moment to itself. No creature could be free did
not God, in a similar way, leave it to itself, and, after the first
impulse of creation, withhold from it His controlling energy. But if He
did not do so--were He, on the contrary, to act upon His creatures
without reserve, and with the whole infinite extent of his might--then
the liberty of the latter, overwhelmed in His omnipotence, must be
destroyed, as being only possible through the spontaneous limitation of
the divine power, which results from the superabundance of creative
love.

Now we can, it is true, distinguish in the essence or energy of God,
between His intelligence and His will--His omniscience and His
omnipotence; but they can not be absolutely separated from and opposed
to each other, for in Him and in His operations, they, as indeed all
else in Him, are one. It would, therefore, be nothing but a foolish and
unmeaning subtlety to demand, “Why, then, has the Omniscient created
rational beings, of whom He must assuredly have known beforehand that
they would fall and perish?” For it is but a logical illusion, when we
transfer from the human to the divine mind a form of thought fluctuating
between the conceivably possible and the apparently necessary. Man’s
freedom undoubtedly consists in the choice between one possibility and
another, or in that indefinite possibility which subsists half way
between one necessity and another. But God’s freedom is not as man’s: in
Him there is neither contingent possibility nor unconditional necessity.
All in Him is truly actual, living, and positive. His freedom lies even
in the superabundance of His essence--the fact, viz., that He is not
bound by any law of necessity to remain contented with this His own
internal fullness. For otherwise He were a Fate rather than a free God,
and to that conclusion the doctrine of the Stoics consistently enough
arrived at last. Extremely difficult must it ever be, in such a system
and with such a conception of an intrinsically necessary God, and one
bound by this necessity, consistently to account for the creation of the
world, which, in appearance, is so irreconcilable with the idea of the
self-sufficiency of the divine Being. On this account some of the
similarly rationalizing systems of ancient times had recourse to the
ingenious device of ascribing the work of creation to a spiritual being
of an inferior order, and degrading this secondary deity far below the
infinite perfections of the supreme and all-sufficient God. But by this
expedient men did but fall, as is, alas! but too commonly the case, from
one error into another still greater and even more monstrous. It is, in
short, nothing but a mere logical delusion and an illegitimate
transference from our limited faculty of thought to the divine
intelligence, which gives rise to these pernicious doctrines of an
absolute and unconditional predestination, which fundamentally amount
and bring us back to a blind and heathenish fatalism.

Thus much, as connected with our subject, will be sufficient on the
difficult subject both of the freedom of the pure created spirits and
also of man’s will, as regarded solely from its philosophical aspect,
and without any reference to the moral theory, and solely in relation to
the system of the universe. Difficult, however, is this subject, merely
on one account. The logical illusion, from which springs all error,
strife, and confusion, and which we are too apt to transfer to the
divine mind, is so far innate in the very form of man’s finite
intellect, than even when we have recognized it for what it really is;
yet, so long as we confine ourselves to mere logical reasoning, and are
seduced by its seeming rigor of consequence, we are ever ready to fall
anew into this dangerous error without even remarking it.

In the same way, now, that the existence of free beings follows
naturally from the love of God, as the final cause of creation, so, on
the other hand, the permission of moral evil is a mere result of that
freedom in and through which these created beings have to run their
appointed time. For this freedom, as considered with a reference to God
and futurity, or to the immortality of the soul, is nothing else than
the time of trial and the state of probation itself. But, perhaps it
will be asked, “Why, then, does not God, by one nod of retributive
justice, by one breath of His omnipotence, annihilate forever, as He so
easily might, the whole company of evil and rebellious spirits, together
with their leader, the Prince of this world, and so purify the whole
visible creation, and release external nature from their desolating
influence?” To this the answer is simple and at hand. Man is placed in
this world on his trial and for a struggle with evil, and this warfare
is not yet ended. But by such an annihilation of evil, the living
development of nature would be precipitated in that course which God
originally designed it to advance through, and cut short before the
appointed time of final purification, when, according to His promise, He
will, as Holy Writ expresses it, create new heavens and a new earth, and
make perfect the whole creation.[33]

Man is free, but utterly unripe as yet; and thoroughly incomplete also
is nature, or the sensible world, and material creation; consequently,
the immortality of the soul is the corner-stone and key for
understanding the whole. For the mere beginning of creation is perfectly
unintelligible so long as we do not take into consideration the other
extreme or end--its final completion and ultimate consummation. Just as
the half of human life on this side the grave can not be understood
unless we contemplate, at the same time with it, its second half on the
other side of the tomb, as its complement, and as a necessary element
toward the elucidation of the whole.

As, then, the permission of evil finds a satisfactory explanation in
man’s probationary state, and in God’s love, as the final cause of the
creation, so also the physical evils and sufferings to which the free
being is liable are fully accounted for on that principle. This is the
key of the enigma of their existence. None of the sufferings of the free
being, on either side of the grave, are unprofitable and without a
motive. They all serve, either in this preparatory state of earthly
existence, for probation, for discipline, or for confirmation, or else,
after it, for the perfect healing of the soul, and its purification from
all the remaining dross and taints of earth.[34] Scarcely ever can the
diseased matter be got rid of and expelled from the organic body with
out a struggle, and very seldom without pain. Gold is purified by the
fire, and pain is the fiery purification of the body. This belief is one
which ought least of all to have been called into question, inasmuch as
it is only consonant to the simple feelings of human nature. For
otherwise, how narrowly must the hopes of the future be confined, if
nothing that is unclean shall enter into heaven--the Holy of Holies--the
immediate presence of the pure and holy God!

It is not, however, my intention to make this consolatory and blessed
hope of a loving and longing heart the topic of dispute, especially
since it lies altogether beyond my present limits. I will only allude to
the words of the Savior, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.” By
the “Father’s house” we must, it is clear, understand the future world.
On other side, therefore, of the grave, as well as on this, many
divisions, many degrees, and many different states, and also manifold
transitions, are not merely conceivable and possible, but must of
necessity be assumed as actually existent, even though we can not be too
cautious in avoiding all hasty decisions as to what is going on in this
hidden world. Only we must ever remember that any absolute line of
demarcation which on one side has nothing but white, while all that lies
on the other is black, is very rarely the line of truth. And this
principle holds good, it is plain, in every relation and every possible
application. For such a trenchant line of sharp and unmitigated contrast
between black and white is even one of those intellectual deceptions
connatural to man, which disposes him too hastily to transfer to all
without him the limited form of his own finite intellect. All the pains,
therefore, and all the sufferings of the creature, whether on this or
the other side of the grave, serve either to exercise and strengthen, or
to heal and purify, the yet imperfect being, with the single exception
of that bitterest of all agonies--the pain of being left eternally to
ourselves. But even here, although there is no hope of a salutary
effect, a species of converse propriety seems to hold.

It is, we remarked, the problem of philosophy, leaving to physics the
whole development of life that lies intermediate between the beginning
and end, to explain the two extremes of nature. As, therefore, we have
examined one of these extremes, and have discovered in the whole
terrestrial creation a Paradise as the blessed state of the still
innocent infancy of nature, before the revolt of the rebellious spirits
and the fall of the first man, the present seems the place for a few
words touching the opposite extreme--the regions of outer darkness. We
can safely admit that the figurative representations, not merely of
painters and poets, but occasionally also of the preacher, are so
horrible, and heaped together with so little consistency--the dark
colors laid on so thick, that the whole assumes to the feelings an
appearance of improbability, and, on this account, makes, for the most
part, no very deep impression. But the spiritual significance of these
sufferings, and the sort of propriety and design which holds, even in
this unnatural state, on the utmost borders of creation, may, perhaps,
be made clear by a very simple illustration. Most reluctantly, and with
a heavy heart assuredly, would an earthly parent resolve to turn out of
his house, and formally to disinherit, his first-born and beloved son,
even though he should have proved himself utterly worthless and
hopelessly depraved. But even if an earthly parent might be too hasty in
his anger, and actually be harsh and unjust, still we may boldly assume
that the love of our Heavenly Father, in patience and gentleness, far
transcends the truest parental love that is to be found on earth. But
when it actually comes to this point of offended mercy and justice, then
the disinherited, cast out into the regions of darkness, joins the band
of robbers who in the night lurk about his father’s house, seeking where
they may break into it. No other choice is left him than to become a
robber, and, whether he will or no, he must obey the leader of the band.
But better taught and as yet softer of heart than the rest, he must go
through many hardships and sufferings ere he becomes quite like the
others--as hard-hearted as the “murderers from the beginning,” who the
while look down upon him with scorn and contempt.

What I would say is this: many degrees, and undoubtedly extreme degrees,
of pain and torment, are necessary before the man cast out from the
presence of God can be wholly and completely transformed into an evil
spirit. And this is, perhaps, the proper meaning and essential character
under which we are to think of these endless torments of spiritual
death and ruin. If, moreover, this eternal death is often described as
an unquenchable fire, then unquestionably there lies in this figure,
even physically considered, a certain truth, inasmuch as even in this
world and in visible nature, fire, when left to itself and to its true
essential character, is the proper element of destruction. In the sun’s
genial influence, indeed, and in the blood of the living soul, it is
constrained and moderated into the wholesome warmth of life; but in
itself, and working in its elementary state, it is destructive and
opposed to all the other elements. To the light all that has life turns
instinctively, and in the air it breathes and pulsates, and from water
it draws a part at least of its nourishment. It is only incidentally
that the air and water become destructive, but the fire is so in its
proper nature. A perfectly organized animal that lived in fire would, in
a greater or less degree, fill every mind with horror and alarm, as
having no part in and wholly alien from that nature which is known to
and friendly to man. On this account, many even of the ancient
philosophers taught that the end of the present visible and the external
and sensible world, would be brought about by a general conflagration.

The permission of evil is an immediate consequence of the creation of
free beings. But although it may be regarded as a fact, that God has
created free both the spirits and man, still we must be on our guard how
we introduce into this matter any notion of necessity, and suppose that
God must have made them free, and could not have created any other. For
man is only too prone to transfer his own imaginary conceit of necessity
to the Deity himself, and to feign to see it in Him. This, however, were
a most grievous error; and yet it is one into which men almost
inevitably fall when they adopt either a rigorously systematic or purely
logical view of the matter. Could not God in his omnipotence have
created powers and dominions which, even though they were living
energies and ensouled principalities, should, nevertheless, be without
the property of self-determination and a true liberty, and which would
consequently require some other nature, but similar to themselves, to
rule and direct them? In this sense we read of the spirits of nature,
ensouled elementary powers and living forces, which are described as
being seized and taken possession of by the power of evil, but as
hereafter to be set free by the efficacy of redeeming love, and again
subjected to and united to God. Now, as connected with this subject, it
is deserving of consideration, that in all the declarations and
allusions of the Eternal Truth this present earthly nature is spoken of
as the battle-place of invisible powers, the debatable ground on which
the two armies of good and evil spirits and elements are posted in
hostile array against each other, and perpetually coming into
collision.[35]

Could not God, had such been His pleasure, have created other beings,
and by the fiat of His all-mighty will have raised them at once above
all the dangers of liberty, and enduing them with perfect holiness, and
exempt from all liability to fall, have drawn them to Himself in eternal
love?

I have hitherto, wherever it has been my object to give a clearer and
sharper characterization of the human consciousness by means of a
comparison with the faculties of intellect and will possessed by
superior but created spirits, confined myself to the idea of the pure
spirits, genii or angels. But if it should have been the divine pleasure
to create other spiritual beings with an organic body--one, perhaps, not
like the human, but still of a very noble though animal form, endued of
course with an immortal soul and with a knowledge of God--who is there
in such a case to set limits to the omnipotent will? Now if, as already
supposed, they were created in perfect holiness, and exempt from the
liability to fall, it is easily conceivable how in this respect they
would be higher than frail and imperfect man, and must be regarded as a
part of the spiritual world, rather than as belonging to the human race
or to the existing system of nature.

All these are not so much inappropriate and impertinent conjectures and
idle fancies, as calmly mooted questions for explanation, which arise
out of and are suggested by certain traditions and points of revelation.

Lastly, if the Almighty had resolved to create a perfect being, so far
above and before all the other creatures of His will, as to stand next
to Himself, and be, as it were, the mirror and reflection of His own
infinite perfections--and many a word in Holy Writ seems to allude to
something of the kind--then it is not difficult to see how the
already-quoted expression of a soul of God would receive a better sense.
This being, so superior to all other created spirits, must in any case
be regarded as a soul, and for the most part of a passive essence, for
otherwise it would stand too close and near to Deity itself. And it is
manifest, that even here the ever-immeasurable interval which separates
the Creator from the most perfect of creatures must be most carefully
kept in view. And at all events this expression must in no case be
applied to the second or third persons of the Godhead, nor be confounded
therewith, otherwise this designation would not only be false, but
altogether an abomination.

Revelation contains an inexhaustible mine of verities, and I have only
wished, by the way, to call attention to these as yet unexplored
treasures. But it is above all important, for the philosophical point of
view, steadily to insist upon and enforce the truth, that in no respect
can we form a notion adequately grand and lofty, or rich and manifold
enough, of the Creation. The compactly-closed and orderly-arranged
system is almost always the death of truth. So also is that line--which,
however, seems to be a connatural fault in the very form of man’s
faculty of judgment--that straight line between black and white, for
even if it be not radically wrong, it yet leaves much on both sides
unconsidered and ill understood.

With this impression, I shall allow myself to notice an opinion but
little known, which, moreover, if I had not met with it in writers who,
in this province of inquiry, are of the highest authority, I should
scarcely have ventured to adduce. In this department of spiritual
knowledge, a man would much rather confine himself to the simple primary
truth than call attention to mere opinions. The opinion I allude to is
to be found in St. Jerome, _i.e._, in that very Father who, for
theological judgment, is acknowledged by all to be the first and the
greatest. It was held also by St. Francis de Sales, that holy saint of
spiritual love, and who, even on that account, is so superior to the
many hundreds of the schoolmen before him, as also to so many
ideologists after him. Lastly, it occurred to Leibnitz, who, of all
philosophers, was most possessed of a true and fine intellectual tact to
perceive and discover all the most secret, delicate traits of a great
system, even though most remote in character from his own. But still,
with this array of great authorities, it remains nothing more than a
wholly problematical opinion, on which, as an article of positive faith,
nothing is or ever can be decided. Now this opinion is, that in the
revolt of the rebellious spirits, while those who remained in their
state of innocence and in their allegiance rallied only the closer round
their Creator, a considerable number, fearful and undecided, vacillated
between good and evil, and, as we might justly say, with the weakness of
the human character, remained neutral in the conflict, and thereby lost
their original place in the hierarchy of the heavenly host, without,
however, being counted among the utterly lost. As a fourth authority for
this opinion, I might adduce Dante. He is indeed a poet, but still a
theological poet, and deeply versed in theology, who would never have
arbitrarily devised or invented, or even adopted such a notion, had he
not found it existing among others before him, and had he not been able
to adduce a good and valid authority for it. As a good Ghibelline, he
was, moreover, no friend of neutral spirits, either in this world or the
other; and he passes the most severe sentence upon those beings whom, as
he says, heaven has cast out, and hell would not receive.[36]

But what--if we may propound the question with something more of
philosophical indifference than the poet--what, according to the analogy
of the divine economy and merciful justice, as elsewhere displayed, are
we to suppose the doom of these undecided and wavering spirits? In the
first place, we may well suppose that they would be submitted to a new
probation: just as a general gives another opportunity to the troops,
who in some evil moment have shown a want of spirit, to retrieve their
honor. Now, if it be allowable to assume that this, or some similar
idea, or some tradition of the kind, had an influence on and gave rise
to the doctrine of the pre-existence of men, which is so generally
diffused among the Hindoos, and which was also held by the Platonists,
and even Christian Platonists, of the first centuries, we can then
conceive how this otherwise so arbitrary assumption and groundless
hypothesis could have arisen. Groundless, however, it may well be named,
not only because no cause or explanation of it is adduced, but as being
agreeable neither to the nature of the soul nor to the constitution of
things; so that, regarded even in this light, it must be looked upon as
a singular instance, and consequently as an exception from the laws of
nature and as a miraculous intervention of divine power. But a mere
pre-existence of spirits would, however, be no true pre-existence in the
sense of the Hindoo theology, or of the Platonists, since, by its union
with and by the accession of a soul, it becomes a wholly different and
quite a new being. Moreover, in this hypothesis, as it is further worked
out in the Hindoo and Platonic systems, the whole character and true
destination of human life is entirely misunderstood, inasmuch as it is
represented as a place and period of punishment; whereas, rightly
conceived, and even philosophically contemplated, it appears rather as a
battle-place, and the time of discipline and preparation for eternity.

It is the problem and vocation of philosophy not merely to set forth the
truth clearly and simply, but also, whenever it can be done incidentally
and easily, to account for and explain great and remarkable errors,
especially such as were prevalent among the earliest nations and ages.
Now, among those errors which are most remarkable in ancient history,
this of the Hindoos and Platonists holds in my eyes a very prominent
place. But philosophically to explain an error, means not to reject it
at once as absurd and undeserving of notice, but requires rather that we
should first of all really understand it, _i.e._, that we should study
it, and, to a certain degree, enter into its spirit, and seek to
discover its best significance, or, in other words, that interpretation
which is nearest to the truth, and then in conclusion accurately to
determine the point where error begins and truth is violated.

All this, however, may now be left to its own merits. In touching upon
it, my only object has been to call attention to the wonderful variety
of God’s creative power, even in the copious theme of the immortality of
the soul. And in this view it appeared to me not unprofitable to notice
even the most discrepant theories on the subject, as being nevertheless
well calculated to throw a clear and steady light on the simple truth.
In the last age, since the Hindoo metempsychosis, as it is now
accurately and authentically known, appeared too serious and sad a
doctrine to meet with the welcome and concurrence of the existent
generation, a brighter and more fanciful theory was propounded. In it
this life has been astronomically depicted in the brightest and most
attractive colors as a walk among the stars, continually ascending from
one sidereal existence to another. In the limited range of human
knowledge, it is alike impossible to deny or to prove the possibility of
such a migration among the stars. But it is evidently a wiser course,
and one far more agreeable to the nature and limits of man’s powers of
understanding, for him to confine his views to his own immediate
home--the earth--investigating, sifting, and divining its mysteries,
than to lose himself in airy dreams amid the whole starry universe. For,
perhaps, that which man is seeking so far off he may find much closer to
his own doors than he suspects. For it is not improbable that this
planet of our earth contains in its interior many subterranean courses
and secret chambers of death, together with the seeds of light which are
to spring up into the future resurrection.

But this may be reserved for consideration in another place. Here I will
only add, in conclusion, that opposite to that gradational scale,
already so often mentioned, which the vast pyramid of nature forms in
relation to God and its own living development, stands another scale for
man, adapted to his needs and suited to his narrow position and limited
intelligence. In this scale, nature, _i.e._, in this sense, the nature
which most immediately surrounds and environs man, this planet of our
earth which bears and nourishes the human race, is first of all man’s
habitation, teeming, indeed, with life, and even itself a living thing,
in which, however, he is ever meeting here and there with something that
tells him it is not his proper home. In the second step of this view of
nature, which contemplates it principally in its relation to man and
man’s wants, the natural world in its present form appears as the
battle-place and debatable ground of the still undecided, or, rather,
not as yet terminated, struggle between the good and evil powers, and
the fiercer the strife again begins to be, the more necessary is it not
to overlook this aspect of the matter. The third gradation in this view
of nature, considered relatively to the mind or spirit of man in his
finite existence, is that which teaches him to look upon it as the
visible veil of the invisible world, covered all over and richly
ornamented with significant symbols and hieroglyphics. And even because
nature itself is even a symbolical being, therefore, when we speak of
its inmost life and its spirit, or its meaning as a whole, _i.e._, when
we attempt to study and to understand it, not physically only, but even
philosophically, we can only hope to convey our meaning symbolically, by
employing scientific illustrations and living symbols.




LECTURE VII.

OF THE DIVINE WISDOM AS MANIFESTED IN THE REALM OF TRUTH, AND OF THE
CONFLICT OF THE AGE WITH ERROR.


God is a spirit of truth; and in the realm of truth, therefore, the
divine order, and the law of wisdom which reigns therein, shines forth
with an especial clearness--with a higher degree of evidence or greater
perspicuity than even in the region of nature, which for us is for the
most part half-dark, or at the very best but a _chiaro-oscuro_--a
mixture of light and darkness. But man, formed out of the dust of the
earth, placed, as it were, in the very center of nature, as its
first-born son or its earthly lord, is in this respect himself a natural
being. Even in his susceptibility for higher and divine truth, man is
tied to and is dependent on a similar and collateral grade of
development in the life of nature, which can in no case be violently
broken, nor a step in it arbitrarily overleaped, without involving the
most disastrous consequences as the penalty of so unnatural a course.
Even in education there reigns a similar law of gradual development
according to the natural progression of the different ages of life. With
the boy of good and natural abilities, who shows an aptness and
willingness to learn when knowledge is presented to his mind, and
implanted in a true and living form, the teacher’s first care is to
improve this disposition, and to strengthen and to foster it, and, by
furnishing it with the due measure and the right quality of intellectual
culture, gradually to develop its powers. At this age the moral part of
education will wisely confine itself to laying a foundation of good
habits, to the careful exclusion of all evil communication and the
deadly contagion of wicked example. In the soft and yielding character
of the child there can scarcely be as yet any question about principles
or sentiments. But the case is very different with youth. If at this
time of life the moral character be not carefully formed simultaneously
with its scientific cultivation, then is the good season irreparably
lost, and rarely, if ever, can the deficiency be afterward supplied. For
when this stage of intellectual and moral culture is once passed, when
the mind has begun at last to move with greater freedom and to mature
itself, the young man is at once admitted to the full light of science,
or enters into the busy course of active life, to be there brought to
the touchstone of experience.

And a similar series of gradation may be observed on a larger scale in
the historical succession and development of the ages of the world. For
such is, in every case, the gradual expansion of man’s consciousness, as
he is at present constituted. His senses must be first excited and
expanded; then, and then only, with any good result, can the soul be led
to the good and divine, which, however, not content to dismiss them
after the first look of wonder and amazement, it must rather dwell upon
with the full and deep feelings of admiration and reverence; until at
last, being wholly filled with them, it derives from their inspiration a
new stimulus and excitement, and thereby is forever and permanently
directed to the true end and aim of existence. And now at last can the
free spirit apprehend aright the divine truth, and, in the spirit of
this knowledge, act with vital energy, conformably to that position in
God’s great world which has been assigned and allotted to him.

And this order can not be transgressed with impunity. None of its
intermediate steps can be overleaped without involving the most fearful
consequences. If the senses be not first of all excited and expanded,
then will it be lost labor to attempt to win and fortify the heart, or
to turn the soul toward the never-setting sun of divine truth. And,
accordingly, how many attempts, both on a large and a small scale, at
the moral regeneration of mankind have totally failed even for want of
the first step of a forerunning light and previous illumination, by
which the observation should have been roused, the senses stimulated,
and the eye opened. But when, on the contrary, the full light is
imparted to or gained by the mind, while the soul still remains
enveloped in darkness and fast wedded to its evil habits, without
attaining to a higher exaltation, then, indeed, the result is equally
grievous, though different from that which follows from the mistake of
overleaping at the first step. It has an effect; it does not remain
without an influence. So long as the moral part of man is wholly
neglected, and is either left rude and barbarous, or suffered to become
degenerate, then science works indeed, but only as a destroying element.
In so bad a soil the true knowledge is ever transformed into false, and
the more profoundly it is apprehended--the more vividly and vigorously
it is pursued--the more fatally, perniciously, and destructively does it
work. The examples and the proofs of the injurious consequences of too
rapid and premature development of scientific enlightenment amid a
general prevalence of moral depravity, and the subversion of those
principles which are the foundation of national existence and
prosperity, might easily be found at no great distance from our own age.
And they admit also of being demonstrated as clearly and convincingly by
earlier instances from the history of the Greeks and Romans. The
production of these proofs, however, would carry us beyond our present
limits, and the truth they would establish is not, moreover, the end to
which our present disquisitions are directed. The theme of this Lecture
is the course observed by eternal wisdom, or the divine order in the
realm of truth. My object is to call your attention to the care with
which Providence observes a gradual progression in its mental
development of the human race, lovingly suiting and adapting itself to
the weakness and finiteness of humanity, and to the imperfection of
earthly creatures, according to that principle of divine condescension,
so often mentioned already, which, throughout the divine operations in
the world, and His influence on man, is distinctly visible.

Thus, then, in the knowledge immediately imparted to man by a higher
providence we may discern a preliminary period--a previous illumination,
in order to reopen the eye of man, which heathenism had blinded to the
truth, that it might be able to see and discern God. This first step of
revelation was little more than a preparation for the future; but the
second was, or has been, an illumination of the soul--a vital renewal of
it--a total conversion of it from the state of darkness to the
Everlasting Light and the Sun of Righteousness. But in this living
development of the highest life, which is even the divine light of the
Spirit, the third and last step (which indeed commences in and is
involved in the second, even as it also had its germ in the first) is
the full enlightenment of the spirit or mind. And accordingly this full
revelation is in Scripture itself, as being the close and completion of
the whole, expressly described, and named the last time.

Before attempting, however, to point out the divine order in the
education of the human race, by the gradual revelation of truth, two
general and preliminary remarks seem called for. I observe, then, first
of all, that when we speak of sense, soul, and spirit, as the successive
terms in the growing capacity of the human consciousness for a higher
knowledge and heavenly training, and for truth in general, but more
especially for divine truth, then the general sense of truth, which such
an hypothesis supposes, and which indeed is its essential foundation,
must be understood as comprising all those other particular species,
branches, or departments which we have already enumerated. I mean the
common sense of sound reason. For that susceptibility for the
impressions of nature, and the understanding, which, as I said before,
constitute the sense for the revelation of spirit, or the spirit of
revelation--whether written or historical--are alike comprised in that
one and common sense for truth. Or perhaps we may rather say, that by
their joint operations they form it; while, however, in its special
application, now this now that constituent preponderates--or perhaps
that this one and universal sense for truth is called into action, and
made to co-operate now in this direction and now in that. Moreover, that
internal concurrence and assent of the will, which I have endeavored to
show is the proper sense in man for God and for divine things, belongs
also, as an essential and element of its constitution, to this general
sense for truth. For that the opposite fault of self-will and obstinacy
is in the highest degree a hinderance of good, even in the acquisition
of knowledge and the recognition of truth, is found by experience in the
earliest essays of education. But not only in the elementary principles
of learning, but even in the most highly-finished and elaborate systems
of metaphysical ideas, constructed by the profoundest thinkers and
philosophers, does this spirit of negation and contradiction show
itself, and prove the greatest obstacle to truth and the most fruitful
source of error.

The second remark which we have to make before entering upon the
immediate subject of our Lecture refers to the natural progression of
the living development of the human consciousness. This gradation, we
would observe, holds good, and is applicable, not merely to the moral
education of man, but also to the intellectual improvement of man’s
capacity, as at present constituted, for all higher and divine verities.
But, however true this may be, where the general sense for truth is not
from the first open and full of light, where the soul is not already
perfectly free and pure; yet on the other hand there is nothing
against--on the contrary, every thing favors the supposition, that the
earliest revelation imparted to mankind--the illumination which was
given to the first man, and bestowed upon him as his heavenly
inheritance on earth, was a full and perfect enlightenment of his mind
[_geist_]. For his senses were open and clear, his soul as yet
incorrupt, pure, and free. Both were directed to God, and being one with
and at unison with nature, were keenly alive to and deeply impressed by
every token of God’s glory and majesty in creation. It is quite an error
to assume, or, rather, to fancy, that this state of purity and innocence
was a state of ignorance like that of the child or of the wild man. The
tree of life was given to him entirely and without reserve, as also
dominion over the earth, whose first-made living creatures the Lord
subjected to his dominion, bringing them before him to call and to name
them. The knowledge of death was indeed designedly withheld from him, as
also the existence of the evil spirits, even because it was exactly
therein that his trial and probation were to consist. And so both are
perfectly reconcilable: that height of knowledge in the clearest light
of nature, which the sacred traditions of all primitive nations so
positively and unanimously assign to the first man, is in nowise
inconsistent with that ignorance of death which is no less expressly
ascribed to him. Moreover, had man but preserved and kept alive in his
heart this feeling of God, he would immediately have recognized his
enemy, and even thereby have triumphed over him, and become the redeemer
of nature, instead of requiring, now that he has failed in that his high
destination, a Redeemer for his own fallen race. This first revelation,
therefore, was, we may well assume, in the beginning as it will also be
in the end, a full enlightenment of the spirit of man, but which,
however, was soon darkened by his disobedience and fall. This, too, is
the shape which the matter assumes in the legendary history of all the
primeval nations of antiquity, and these are the threads of light which
in the labyrinthine confusion of legends, symbols, and tongues of
earliest heathendom, carry us safely out of its mazes and back to the
clear starting-point of the pure and undefiled revelation of God. It
were not difficult to show how, through the first two millenniums and a
half, or five-and-twenty centuries, a higher providence and divine
guidance was ever quietly carrying on these luminous threads of original
truth, and from time to time renewing them. But this history of the
human mind in the primeval world, however highly attractive, would take
us out of our proper limits. Upon the eclipse of man’s soul, when
spiritual darkness universally prevailed, the senses originally open to
a higher light were closed against it. His better perceptions were
overwhelmed or buried beneath a chaos of true and false or half-true
images and symbols. Then it was that the natural law of spiritual
development commenced in its full force. It followed the progression
already described. In the first term the numbed and deadened sense had
to be awakened and quickened again, and in its second the soul renewed,
purified, and converted, before either could become susceptible of the
full and perfect illumination of the Spirit. To trace this natural law
in the human consciousness and in the divine education of mankind, and
to ascertain the progressive steps in the divine revelations, expressly
given and designed to effect that gradual development, is the object of
the present Lecture.

The first step or term thereof was the selection of a single people to
be the schoolmaster of the whole human race.[37] When the heathenish
mass of legends or myths and symbols had reached the height of
confusion, and the evil had become otherwise incurable, one nation was
chosen and set apart by God as His instrument in opening the eyes of men
to the abyss of error in which the whole world was plunged, and to
direct their looks exclusively to the future. Many prophets were sent to
the chosen people, and it was at first guided and ruled by none but
prophets. And, perhaps, we can not form a more correct notion of the
character and history of this people, so peculiarly distinguished from
all the other nations of the ancient world, than by thinking of it
absolutely and in its destination as the _prophetic_ people exclusively
intended to point to a distant future, and whose leading ideas and
inmost feelings were to be attached to, and to look far into, a remote
futurity. Three strokes or words, at most, comprise the highly-simple
revelation of the first stage--the first ray of light at the
beginning--in which, however, lies contained the hidden key and solution
for the chaos of legends, and all the enigmas of the primitive world and
of primeval history. But this brief and simple revelation was
accompanied with a strict line of demarcation between the Gentiles and
the chosen people, who were separated from all the heathen nations by
customs and laws, while a long ray of hope reached far into the distant
future. This point of light at the beginning was, however, but little
considered and ill-understood; the line of demarcation, too, was often
transgressed upon the slightest pretext and most ordinary temptations.
And when at last it was more strictly kept, it was observed, not in its
spirit, but in the letter; and, in consequence, even that high and
lofty-hope which irradiated it was totally misunderstood, being
interpreted, in a narrow spirit of national exclusiveness, of a temporal
Redeemer, and a political redemption from the yoke of the Roman
oppressor. This delusion, and the extreme ingratitude with which,
consequently, the Light that came into the world was, on the whole,
received by those to whom It was in the first place communicated, has
been often painted in the darkest colors of indignant censure by the
stern pen of history. The stiffneckedness of the Jews has been a
fruitful theme for virtuous indignation. But, for my part, I hardly know
whether, in this respect, a different and more favorable sentence can be
passed on the generations which have witnessed the subsequent steps of
divine revelation in its further development. Full time was allowed to
the prophetic people to develop itself; and, after the lapse of
twenty-fire centuries, which make up the first age of the world, a
millennium and a half was allowed to this initiatory step of revelation.
And now, at length, after forty centuries of preparation and hope, when
the long, dark winter of the olden idolatry was over, the historical
development of the human race reached its culminating point, and with
the vernal solstice [_Fruhling’s-Solstitium_] of this new manifestation
commenced the second term in this series of revelation or of the divine
education of the human race. Even from its very first opening, every
thing characterizes this second term of development as not intended for
a complete and final revelation of spirit and knowledge. Promising, and
reserving to the future that final manifestation, it forms, in this
respect, a marked contrast to the highly-cultivated science of the
Greeks, which, however, in spite of its high pretensions, did but become
continually more and more sensuous in its character. The immediate
object of this second enlightenment of the whole human race was to be a
total conversion of the soul from its previous earthly darkness to the
everlasting light and the one and only Sun of Truth, and thereby to
effect a complete renewal of life, and a reformation of all its habits,
customs, and institutions. This alone did God require; and glorious, and
noble, and deeply-touching was the conflict in which this wholly new but
heaven-descended sentiment had to engage with the opposing spirit of the
old world.

But men soon relapsed into their former discord; and it is now our
painful task to point out the rise and growth of this dissension through
the succeeding eras of history. For thus only--by considering, in every
period, man’s relation, or, rather, his opposition, to the divine
revelation--is it possible, amid the rapid progress of the widening
disagreement, to trace the divine order which rules amid the anarchy of
mind, and to follow it along its path of light up to its appointed end,
and to its close and conclusion.

In the first three or four centuries of Christianity, this spirit of
opposition showed itself in two different forms. In the one, the new and
simple faith was first of all perverted into a chaos of philosophical
fictions of an old Asiatic character.[38] In the other, a secret and
half infidelity hid itself behind a veil of words,[39] against which the
faith must defend itself behind an outwork of words also; and in this
period of history, a subtile and refined logomachy first of all attained
to a great and lasting importance for mankind. In this dispute, the
simple foundation of the faith was indeed maintained and defended, in
its purity and integrity, against all hostile attacks; but the
first-love lost much of its freshness and ardor. Consequently the new
life, which sprung up with the new faith, was unable to fulfill the
hopes which at its first rise men had reasonably entertained of it, and,
by reforming the corrupt civilization of the old Roman world, to renew
it entirely in God. Accordingly, an alien and purely physical element
had to be associated with it. The northern nations were called in to
infuse fresh energy into the worn-out races of England.

In this work of physical regeneration three centuries were again spent.
But at the close of this first period, it was seen, on a sudden, how
little the olden spirit of dissension had been really conquered, or even
mollified. The faith, it was said, may, in all essential points, be
perfectly identical, but a division may be, and still subsists,
notwithstanding. But what does that mean, but that the God and Savior
of the world worshiped by the East, is different from Him whom the West
acknowledges? And thus the one God and the one faith was in the life of
man again divided into two; and this singular schism, without any
adequate cause, still subsists to the present day.[40] In the following
great period a fresh life blossomed in rich and manifold expansion out
of that revelation of love which, properly speaking, now first of all
put forth its full vital energies, giving a new shape to all the
institutions of human society, and impressing on art, as well as on
moral and political science, a new character, totally different from
that which they possessed among the most enlightened nations of
antiquity. Viewed in its loving aspect, _i.e._, in its chivalry, there
is much in this period to attract and engage our enthusiasm and
sympathies, but for the fearful discord which broke out within it, and
set one half of the world in hostile array against the other. The two
powers which ought to work together for one divine end--the two swords
of which the Lord had said, “It is enough,”[41]--the spiritual sword of
the kingdom of faith and truth, and the civil sword of earthly justice,
were drawn and held in threatening attitude against each other, by
which, however, the minds of men were torn and distracted by the inward
struggle of conflicting duties in a far greater degree than the external
peace of society was disturbed. But it was not merely in such a
collision that the strife alone showed itself; but it extended even to
the confusion of the two domains, and a forgetfulness of their proper
duties and respective positions.

In the instance, it is true, of the mailed ecclesiastic, however, at
first sight, the union in one person of such opposite characters as the
soldier and priest may startle the mind, the gallant and noble bearing
of the spiritual knight soon reconciles us to the strange phenomenon.
So, too, when he whose vocation it was to hold the pastoral staff began
also to sway the scepter of a civil prince, the eminent skill and
judgment with which the difficult task of discharging the double and
often conflicting duties of so mixed a sovereignty was accomplished,
silence every murmur of a protest. But when he who ought to carry the
crosier of peace hoisted the pennon of war, such a sight naturally gave
great offense, and sadly perplexed the minds of men.

Thus, then, passed seven centuries more, making, with the eight already
described, fifteen altogether that have elapsed from that great center
of the world’s history, when the spiritual sun reached its meridian
altitude in this earthly life. These, added to the fifteen which had
previously passed from the first shining of the light of revelation,
make no less than three millenneums. And to these, again, three
centuries more are to be added. Such is the extremely slow course of the
divine guidance of the world, as regulated by the inexhaustible patience
and long-suffering of God in the education of his human creatures.

In this last period, however, the spirit of discord has become still
more general, and has broken out in all its violence, gradually
attacking and drawing into the dispute every institution of society and
every department of life. In the wonderful coincidence of many and great
discoveries, simultaneously made in widely-distinct and independent
branches of science, the spirit of man read the proclamation of his
majority. Conscious of this intellectual ripeness, in the first use of
its new powers it assumed toward the faith an attitude of estrangement
and controversy, instead of calmly advancing along the assigned path
toward perfection. Even at the very commencement of this period, the
hostile relation between the new science and the ancient faith is
perceptible enough. But it soon showed itself more distinctly, as the
rupture became wider and more general, till at last the discord extended
to the very faith itself, which was henceforth broken up into bitter and
opposing parties. Still later, a newer and deeper animosity divided the
faith in general from the whole civil and political life, from which in
many places its religious foundation was altogether removed. And now
that life was thus deprived of its higher and spiritual significance,
the strife became universal and complete. Involving science and life
into the discord, it set them also in deadly array against each
other--for life thus unspiritualized could no longer reconcile itself to
the dreamy ideal of a science which at most was but partially true,
while life itself could not satisfy the requisitions of science. And
fearful was the outbreak in which this last antagonism of principle
openly displayed its animosity.

This fourfold schism, then--first, between science and faith; secondly,
in the faith itself; thirdly, between life and faith; and lastly,
between the new science (which usurped the place of the faith it had
discarded) and life itself--this fourfold schism, with its several
branches and ramifications, extending to every department of human
existence, lies now before us, in the present age, as the still-unsolved
problem of life.

And who but God alone shall or is able to solve it? As a question of
dispute, this problem--and especially its inmost root, the schism in the
faith--can be profitably discussed only in the spirit of love and mutual
forbearance between cognate and kindred minds, who, while they think
differently on a few points, yet agree in most. Many works might be
adduced on both sides, composed in that conciliatory spirit of
approximation which is most accordant with true philosophy, whose first
effort is, in all cases, directed to reconciling and removing the
deeply-rooted animosities of human nature. To a complete decision,
however, of the whole matter in question, we shall never arrive on the
road of disputation. Even though the dispute were maintained with the
most valid reasoning, and were conducted with the most dignified
forbearance and mildness, the attempt would only be lost labor. For
there exists no supreme court of appeal to whose sentence both sides
would be ready to submit. On the one side, the reason--which advances
with unlimited freedom in its investigations--and faith on the other,
with its assumed authority to decide in the last instance, would alike
refuse to acknowledge its adversary as a competent tribunal.

Thus deeply piercing into the very marrow of humanity, and thus mortal
is the conflict. Indeed, a man can scarcely touch upon it without being
carried almost involuntarily into the very midst of the strife, and very
fortunate may he account himself if he retires from it unscathed. And if
it were only from a mere human point of view of a scientific dispute
that I had to consider it, good reason should I have to be on my guard,
lest on this matter my mind should be, as it were, forcibly rent and
divided into two halves. I have, however, at present no anxiety of the
kind. For my purpose is solely and entirely to trace out the divine
order in the revelation progressively given to mankind, and following
this luminous thread to lead reflection up to the finishing close of
God’s education of the human race, where, in the full shining of the
perfect day, there shall be no more controversy and no more doubt.
Viewing the matter in this light, I see but little to attract my
sympathies in the publicly-conducted controversy, however highly
important and pre-eminent a place it may hold in the history of the
world. Far more attractive to me are those isolated and retiring spirits
on both sides who, taking but little, if any, part in the prevailing
dispute, have their eyes directed rather to the future, in watchful
expectation of that full and final illumination, with all its attendant
promises--among which we must reckon, first and foremost, the peace and
joy of believing--in the last revelation of divine mind. Of these calmer
spirits, however, some have actually fallen, and others have been on the
very brink of falling, into the plausible error of regarding this third
step of enlightenment as an absolutely new revelation, whereas it is
quite clear that it will be nothing more than the simple completion of
the earlier steps. For a revelation which should give itself out as
perfectly new, apart from and independent of that saving illumination of
the soul which marks the second step, and which we are already in
possession of--which should disavow this earlier divine revelation of
the heart, of love and life in faith, which is withheld from no one, and
which every one knows, would, even by such an announcement, proclaim its
own falsity. New heavens and a new earth are indeed expressly promised
among the blessings of this last age. Mention is also made of a Gospel
that shall be preached “unto all them that dwell on the earth, and to
every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.”[42] This Gospel,
however, is nowhere called a new one; since in the old one there is
enough for life, if only it be duly observed, and also for knowledge, if
only it be rightly understood. But it is called the “everlasting”
Gospel; and by this term it is plain that nothing is to be understood
but this full light of divine knowledge now made perfect in God, and
which has become one with faith, and, consequently, fully reconciled
with life also. In this domain, and in this spiritual sense, it is not
necessary that the fair morning-star of faith, which has guided us
through the dark night, and lighted us to the day-spring, should become
extinct when the sun ascends the heavens in his full meridian splendor.
On the contrary, it shall burn the more brightly; or, rather, to speak
more correctly--for here no such contrast finds a place--it is the
morning-star itself that shall expand into the full sun, and illuminate
the whole world with its light.

Waiting, therefore, for this manifestation, we must endure with the more
patience the existing discord so long as our lot is placed amid it, and
show greater moderation toward it, since we are subject to it in hope.
Only let me not be thought of as recommending a spurious impartiality,
which, in truth, is little better than a culpable indifference to
questions the most important that can agitate our own generation and all
humanity--or the indiscriminating contempt of an arrogated superiority,
which is even still more offensive and baneful to truth than the most
vehement adoption of either of the conflicting views, if associated with
honesty of purpose and conviction. As little, too, would I be thought to
favor the presumptuous decisions of individuals, which, adopting a
peculiar principle, or, as it is styled, a higher point of view, even
though occasionally it does justice to each in part, yet on the whole
materially wrongs them both. In the first ages of this intellectual
disease, great names were arrayed on either side; and that through all
its variations brilliant talents and scientific attainments maintained
the conflict, while there was much that was false and wrong in both
parties, is equally unquestionable. But what avails the unrighteousness
of man against the righteousness of the cause, when, as we must, we
regard the latter as the cause of God?

The painful feature of the conflict is the fact that, in a certain
measure, God Himself has become the object of man’s rancor and
animosity. In sacred lore and tradition, but pre-eminently in
revelation, God Himself became as it were a child; and in the childlike
language of the heart, and in the most confiding manner, gave Himself
into the hands of men. But now, even this marvelous child and the divine
word is near being torn asunder by the disputants, like the child in the
old story or parable. Two mothers, we are told, came and stood before
the king, disputing violently whose was the child that had been
overlaid, and whose was the living one. But the true mother, for both
had fallen asleep in the night, was recognized by her prayer that the
child might not be divided in two by the sword of justice, but preferred
that her son should live, even though she must lose it by resigning it
to the other. Whereupon the king ordered his officers in no wise to slay
the living child, but to give it to her who by her love had proved
herself its mother.[43]

But for us the great sentence which is to decide all controversies, and
can alone put an end to this discord, is not yet pronounced. But, in
truth, the more confirmed symptoms of the deepening intellectual strife
which mark the present generation, furnish one proof the more of the
near approach of the day of final decision. And then the perfect triumph
of divine revelation and the fiery baptism of the Spirit, which in those
last days shall be administered, shall bring with it the long-promised
universal peace of the soul when under a divine leader--the invisible
One now become visible--all that hope in Him, of all kindreds and
families, shall be reunited in Him in one love and one fellowship. A
universal and perfect peace like this, which, according to revealed
truth, is the last that is to be imparted to the human race, and is even
to continue for ever, must, it is natural to suppose, be preceded by a
violent but closing conflict. And do we not in our own age see such a
one developing itself in a manner unparalleled by all that have gone
before in it? To this conflict of our age, then, I must now devote a few
words, and consider pre-eminently the relations subsisting between it
and science.

In many and various ways, unquestionably, was the spirit of man called
upon in this beautiful era of the restoration of science to consider
itself ripe and mature; its feelings, too, answered to the call, and, in
some respects, perhaps it was even so. But let us examine the matter by
the same law of sound reason that we should judge of a corresponding
case in ordinary and social life. Let us suppose a youth to have
attained his legal majority, or, perhaps, by his father’s will, declared
of age at a still earlier period. Is it right for him, all at once, to
forget the love wherewith his mother has nursed and reared him? Is it
right in him, misinterpreting altogether the motive of his father’s
dying wish, to cast off and trample under foot all the wise and useful
lessons with which, according to the measure of his years, his mind was
stored at school, merely because he has remarked or experienced that
there is much in life which was not touched upon in his school-learning?
If we saw this in private life, should we not form a very bad opinion of
such a youth who so suddenly throws off all restraint, and take care
that sooner or later he should fall under another and stricter
oversight, since he has all at once outgrown parental control. Why,
then, should we form a different judgment in the realm of science and
truth? All eyes and universal expectation were directed to this
restoration of science. And these hopes were right in so far as through
the lapse of these last times which are hastening to a close, the course
and trial of human nature are even to lie therein. But if, as already
pointed out, they fell into a grave error, who, even while they kept
within the bounds of faith, looked upon the promised completion and
final triumph of the divine and eternal revelation in the light of a new
manifestation of truth, and almost as a new religion; far greater was
the aberration of those who formed the conception of, and hoped to
attain to, an ever-advancing science altogether without God, or at least
one which, proceeding side by side with Him, should never come into
vital contact with Him! But men can not thus pass along by the side of
Omnipotence, without coming into contact with him; and every effort to
rise into the higher regions of truth, which is begun and intended to
remain wholly without God, will, sooner or later, be directed against
Him. And every branch of knowledge, and more especially the highest, if
it be without God, is but a false light of the mind [_geist_], which
will only too soon beguile it into the olden darkness of the soul. And
so it came to pass then. For under this smooth surface of a seeming
moral mildness, the lurking poison suddenly broke out, as it were, by a
fearful conspiracy of the times, spreading its contagion far and wide,
and corrupting every thing that came within its reach--even as it had
been predicted of it in the second book of the future.[44]

For even out of the struggle of good against evil, the latter suddenly
arose again in a new and unexpected shape, coming forth, as it were, out
of the sea, and the moral world was transformed into a sea of blood. And
so, indeed, in these prophetic pages, it is predicted of the enigmas of
the last days. Now, throughout this great catastrophe of the world, so
far as it can be regarded as a peculiar and especial, but historical
warning from God, and a revelation of the divine will, we may trace,
among the better disposed, the same gradation of illumination, advancing
through the ascending series of sense, soul, and spirit, that we have
already noticed, on a larger scale, in the course of the history of
mankind. The senses of many individuals become, indeed, more and more
open, the more clearly they recognized, by its historical characters,
the fatal abyss to which the age of the world was drawing nigh. The
epoch of the restoration was, moreover, followed by a general revolution
in the sentiments, the moral principles, and prevailing pursuits of men.
The third step, however, of a right and true knowledge which, from the
position of a full scientific enlightenment of the mind or spirit,
should penetrate into the profoundest depths of truth, is still wanting,
or at any rate exists as yet only in a very imperfect degree. This
property is the defective point in the problem of the age, and in all
attempts hitherto made to solve it.

The false science, even that unhuman and godless science which has been
already described, can only be overcome and conquered by the true. The
mere method of negation--which, generally, indeed, is seldom the right
one--is here, too, insufficient for the purpose. And so, in fact, when
clouds of dust darken the air, or swarms of noxious insects fill it, it
may suffice if the goodman of the house shuts to his casement, as he may
lawfully do, even because it is his own; but when the fearful
thunderstorm is lowering in the heavens, the closed window will but
little insure the safety of his dwelling, unless he has more wisely
provided against the danger, by a good lightning-conductor. But what is
that? And how came man first to think of it? Why, by studying the
electrical phenomena, and arriving at a full understanding of its
nature, and so, in obedience to its laws, contriving a counteracting and
diverting agent for the electric current, and converting the natural
action of the threatening element into an instrument of protection. And
just in the same way will a true wisdom proceed in the domain of science
and truth. It is only by a good power, of a like kind and similar action
to its own, that the supremacy of evil can be overcome. Even, therefore,
and to this purport was the earnest warning uttered by the mouth of
Truth Itself against those who, although they sat in Moses’s seat,
neither went in themselves nor suffered others that were entering to go
in.[45]

And what a different picture does Holy Writ set before us in the noble
example of Moses! No doubt the preparation for the work to which he was
to be called, of leading successfully the people intrusted to him by God
out of their Egyptian darkness through the fearful Red Sea and all the
wanderings in the wilderness, to the borders of the promised land, was
even the forty years of solitude among the noble pastoral people with
whom he spent the long period of his exile. But still it is not without
a deep significance that it is written that the daughter of the Egyptian
monarch, having adopted the foundling of the waters, brought him up and
educated him as her own son. So, too, assuredly is it not without design
that it is said so emphatically of him, that he “was learned in all the
wisdom of the Egyptians.”[46] In the first place, we have good reason to
rejoice at and to acknowledge the comprehensive spirit and wide standard
of judgment which Holy Writ here sets up. For whereas it passes a
severer sentence of reprobation on the Egyptians than on any other
heathen nation or people, for their moral depravity, it yet acknowledges
that they possessed a scientific wisdom, which amply rewarded the labor
of its acquisition, while it proved the very errors wherewith in their
extreme corruption they had overloaded it, to be only the more culpable
and deserving of punishment. Shallow and superficial skeptics may,
indeed, as many have already done, avail themselves of such an
admission, and cry, “There! it is plain enough--Moses borrowed every
thing from Egypt and the hieroglyphics.”

But this is not the case. No doubt both the first ten and the last
twelve letters of the Hebrew alphabet are hieroglyphics, as their very
names indicate; but in its primary natural roots, nevertheless, and,
above all, in its whole spirit, and structure, and tone, this language
differs widely from the hieroglyphical Egyptian. Certainly Moses did
learn from Egypt all that there was for him to learn. And this learning
enabled him the more easily to disperse the thick Egyptian darkness, and
the less cause, consequently, had he to fear the false arts of the
Egyptian magicians and serpent-charmers. He took from them all that was
available for his purpose, but he made it quite new again, and gave it
another nature by the end to which he employed it. He despoiled them of
their “jewels of gold and jewels of silver,” by a theft permissible in
the realm of science and truth. For it is lawful for man to wrest from
the evil power all that may be converted into a means of honoring the
things of God and His revealed truth, and which thereby is better
employed, spiritualized, and invested with a higher and better
significance. This is true even of our own days, as it was then, and,
indeed, always has been.

Oh, that the many great men who, in our own generation, have deserved
so well of mankind, by devoting themselves to the noble work of
re-establishing right sentiments and principles, had, in this their good
design, followed the great example set them by this man so highly
preferred of God! But, with one or two exceptions, it is impossible to
boast of them that, like Moses, they were “learned in all the wisdom of
the Egyptians.” And hence the fact is at once explicable why, with such
ardent and unbounded zeal, they should have effected comparatively so
little against the modern Egyptians, and the new Egyptian darkness of
our own days.

An intellectual conflict about truth, and, indeed, about divine truth,
is the struggle of our age. This fact is already seen and admitted by a
few, but, ere long, it will be still more generally acknowledged. God is
a spirit of truth; and even on this account is His adversary, the spirit
of contradiction, termed “a liar from the beginning;” and, of all the
powerful instruments and wicked devices of that evil one, the lie is the
first and chiefest. And this suggests to me to notice, in passing, a
point in the moral systems of our day, notwithstanding that it does not
properly lie within our prescribed limits. In most of our ethical
treatises the question of falsehood and untruth is but carelessly
treated, and seldom discussed with that prominence and gravity which its
great importance demands. Overt transgressions of the laws belong rather
to jurisprudence than to ethics, which properly treats of and analyzes
the leading faults of human character as so many diseases of the soul.
Now, the worst among these are usually denominated mortal, _i.e._,
likely to bring the soul unto death; but the lie, in the full import of
the term--the intrinsic proper lie of the soul, as the predominant fault
in a character of untruth--a whole life become, as it were, one great
lie, is far more than mortal--it is even death itself. And it is even of
this sin--this secret revolting against and wounding of the Spirit, even
the divine Spirit of Eternal Truth--that is said in Holy Writ, that it
shall be forgiven neither in this world nor in the next.

On this point, then, I think that moral theory and teaching can never be
stern and rigorous enough in its precepts, especially as regards
individuals. It is not, indeed, a question about words, but about their
interpretation, and what is meant by those who use them; and in this
respect there may be, and often is a false and over-scrupulous delicacy
of conscience. When, however, we remember how, in particular ages of
history, oaths have been played with--millions of oaths lavishly
proffered and shortly retaken in quite a different and opposite sense,
and soon again abjured with as little difficulty; and when we consider
the evil effects this trifling with the most solemn of obligations must
have had on the moral character of a people, we can not but see some
excuse in this monstrous fact for certain small communities of
Christians who absolutely refuse to take an oath in any case. For when,
in the important point of truth and falsehood, a grave error has been
committed on one side, it is better to meet it on the other by too great
strictness. A rigorous severity can never entail such fearful
consequences in such a case, as the opposite fault of an over-indulgent
laxity, or, what is even still more false and erroneous, the regarding
the matter as trifling and indifferent. But the further prosecution of
this topic would lead me out of my proper province, and I have only
touched upon it in passing to that which lies more immediately before
us.

If, then, there is nothing so dangerous to the character of an
individual, both inwardly and outwardly--if there is nothing that works
so insidiously, conveying its secret poison to the very lowest roots and
extremities of the moral character, as untruth and the spirit of lying,
how much more fearful must its malignant influence prove when it is
become the universal and prevailing fault of an age which has not only
wandered far from the truth, but is even animated with a deadly hatred
of it!

It is to this spirit of lies, and the false splendor of his colossal
empire, and to the final conflict which truth will have to wage with it
on earth, that the most awful of the prophecies already alluded to
refer. And the application is easily made, since a greater part of their
warning denunciations have in our age already come to an actual
fulfillment. If, then, this giant spirit of destruction and untruth was
strong enough even in his cradle to throttle two quarters of the
world,[47] what must it be now that the permitted interval of rest has
passed away without being profitably employed to the cause of truth, and
now that this same spirit of murder and lies, with a far greater body,
and endued with far more magical powers, is let loose again to tread
the earth for a while with iron feet, and to deceive the nations?

Those whose responsible position in public life, or comprehensive sphere
of intellectual activity, enable them to take in at one glance all the
various elements of evil and pernicious principles and destructive
tendencies which are so actively at work in our days, will not, perhaps,
be disposed to regard these remarks as groundless or exaggerated;
others, perhaps, may make a mock at them--but they may go on in their
delusion for a while.

In conclusion, I have but three observations to add. The first regards
the divine permission of evil, and is intended to form a supplement to
that Theodicée which I have attempted, in the only way that such a
justification of the divine ways is permissible to man, by appealing,
viz., to his feelings, rather than by attempting to force his conviction
by the rigor of demonstration. The full justification of the ways of
Providence is reserved for a future day, when all mouths shall be
stopped, whether that awful crisis be near at hand or yet tarries for a
while. If, now, the human race be actually sick and in a sickly state,
as indeed can not well be denied, then must God’s overruling providence
in the affairs of the world be judged of in the same light as, and be
compared to, the wise treatment of a skillful physician. For as the
latter, in the case of a patient whose death was to be apprehended from
a total prostration of his bodily powers and energy, might wish for or
even venture to super-induce a violent paroxysm, in the hope that in it
he might perhaps be able to throw off his fatal lethargy; even so, in
God’s government of the world, those predetermined counsels, which seem
so singular, but, nevertheless, are so expressly foretold, may have a
somewhat similar design. In the times of the last struggle the power of
darkness will probably work itself to death on the earth; and while the
remnant shall come out of the crisis and fiery trial purer and
healthier, the divine truth is to gain a complete triumph over sin and
death.

The second remark I have to make applies to ourselves and all the
well-disposed among our cotemporaries, and refers to the disunion which
subsists in these evil times even among the best of men. Were two
nations threatened in common by a formidable enemy, would they not,
however widely they might differ in, or perhaps be estranged from each
other by their respective constitutions languages, and customs, forget
in the moment of danger their characteristic differences, and, laying
aside all previous feelings of jealousy or estrangement, unite for their
mutual protection and safety? My heart’s wish, therefore, is that all
the truly pious and well-wishers of truth, on whichever of the two sides
of the now divided faith they may stand, would unite together without
sacrificing those more intimate differences which can not at present be
got rid of or reconciled, and, making a righteous peace of mutual
forbearance, join together in a firm alliance against the common enemy
of all truth and all faith. For that the dearest interests of religion
are in our generation exposed to a violent assault, and menaced with
great and immediate danger, will not be denied by any lover of truth,
even though his conception of the truth may differ from mine.

Lastly, the third observation that I promised will not take the form of
the utterance of a wish, as rather of the expression of the firmest
conviction, that, however awful and severe this final conflict may
prove, the good cause will not eventually be lost, but that the great
battle will have a favorable issue in the complete victory of divine
revelation, and the celestial wisdom in the government of this kingdom
of truth will be fully manifest both to men and angels.




LECTURE VIII.

OF THE DIVINE ORDER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD AND THE RELATIONS OF
STATES.


“The history of the world is the world’s tribunal,”[48] says one of our
most famous poets. If by these words he meant to convey an opinion that
no other tribunal of judgment is to be expected than that which is even
now set up in the history of the world, then such an opinion, implying
that the human race is to live forever in its present state, and in this
particular terrestrial life, would be even as groundless as that of the
fanciful conceit that the human race had existed from all eternity, if,
in sooth, any of the philosophical dreamers of antiquity had ever fallen
on such a fancy, or, in modern times, any of the antipodes to the usual
current mode of thinking should ever stumble upon it. The poet himself,
as dramatist and artist, would but have taken it ill had any one laid
before him a great drama, composed of several acts and scenes, from
which, however, the beginning was torn off, and which, ever going on,
untied the existing perplexities only to fall again into new and fresh
complications; or like a poor journal ever referring to a continuation,
had no true end, no conclusion or proper termination. But unquestionably
a better sense is also contained in the poet’s words. He may have merely
meant to say that the mind which rules the course of mundane affairs is
a mind that inflicts retribution on the world; and that all the great
epochs and incidents of history have a retributive character and
vindicatory significance.[49] Such an interpretation of the words,
which indeed suits well with the author’s serious mind and character,
would bring them in perfect unison with my own sentiments, and
adequately express the truth which forms the theme of our present
consideration on the divine order in the history of the human race.

The human race, then, as it had a beginning, so also will it have an
end; it will not continue forever in this present form, but must
eventually come to a termination. But, to speak according to the measure
of a divine chronology, where a thousand years are but as one day, who
can say, who shall dare, off-hand, to decide whether six or seven of
these great days of God are fixed for its duration? Enough to know that
we stand on the borders of the fourth age, and on the passage from the
third to the fourth. And not unimportant is it, on the other hand, for
the clear understanding of the whole, to form a right conception of each
of these, its great divisions and epochs. The first age is made up of
the twenty-five centuries of obscure primeval history. The second, which
we called the age of preparation, is formed by the fifteen hundred years
which we reckon from the end of the first up to the center and
turning-point of the history of the world as known to us, and from which
modern history takes its commencement. Even in the oldest traditionary
history of the Gentile nations of antiquity we do not meet with any
statements that can be relied upon, or any tenable data beyond, if
indeed so far back as, the fifteenth century before the epoch of the
commencement of modern history. The fifteen centuries which follow this
epoch form the third age, in which this principle of a new life in the
spiritual, moral, and political world had to develop and completely to
unfold itself. In the last Lecture I also reckoned in this period the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries of our era. But if it
seems to any more advisable to consider these as the introductory
portion of the fourth and subsisting age, there is nothing positively to
condemn such a mode of reckoning; only, for my part, I can not but
regard it as less correct and more inaccurate than the one which I have
proposed. In one case as well as the other the same important
consideration will be involved. Reckoning from some point or other
within these last forty years, we have, it must be acknowledged by all,
entered upon a grand and decisive epoch in the history of the world; and
our attention can not be too often or too strongly directed to the fact,
that we stand at the critical point of transition from one great period
to another.

Now one of the most characteristic signs by which such important moments
of general revolution in the history of the world are, for the most
part, known and distinguished, is a number of great events pressed
closely together and following each other in rapid succession; or, in
other words, the accelerated course of time. It is no new remark, that,
in the political history of our own age, modern Europe has, in the short
space of two-and-twenty years, ran through all the epochs of the old
Roman world, from the first party struggles of the republic, and its
long wars with Carthage, that mistress of the seas, up to the imperial
rule of the Cæsars, in the first reigns mild and indulgent, but at the
last so fearfully oppressive and cruel; and even up to the final
immigration of the northern nations. Such a simple remark is alone
sufficient proof that another law now rules in the history of the
world--a quicker life pulsates in its arteries than beat in the calmer
days of old. Whether, however, this life be thoroughly sound, or, on the
contrary, sickly and feverish, that is quite another question.

But not only in the political world, but also in the intellectual domain
of science has the same accelerated course been noticeable. Only, as
compared with that of antiquity, the course or direction pursued by
modern science is altogether different. We have traveled with equal
celerity, but in quite an opposite course to the ancients. Starting from
the last term, we have reversed the series of their mental progression.
First of all, in the last decades of the preceding century, the
Epicurean cast of thought, or one very nearly resembling it, was the one
chiefly predominant in the philosophical world. And then, together with
but subordinate to it, came scholastic subtilties and hair-splitting
distinctions, similar to those of the later Greek schools, not
unaccompanied, perhaps, with the same patient industry of research and
extensive erudition, and exercising altogether on the minds of men an
influence no less wide, nor less pernicious, than did the most brilliant
of the sophists of Greece. All the erroneous systems which it was
possible for the human mind to embrace, and which are grounded in its
essential qualities, or which could possibly originate in any (so to
speak) of its inborn misconceptions, which it took the Greeks several
centuries to evolve in slow succession, our age has rapidly, and almost
simultaneously, run through in as many decades. And in this fact, if I
do not greatly deceive myself, there is much ground of consolation. It
encourages me to hope that this inverse progression is leading us back
again to the truth--that in this ascending line we are gradually coming
nearer to the better times of the first great philosophers of Greece--of
a Plato, a Socrates, and a Pythagoras. It must be self-evident, that in
this case, and still more so in that analogy of political history which
I have so recently noticed, as generally, in all such historical
parallels, nothing more is intended to be asserted than a general
resemblance, which, however, as such, is eminently remarkable. It would
not, perhaps, be difficult anxiously to work out the general resemblance
into points of detail, but such an overwrought assimilation could only
lead to false conclusions and results.

Now that the conflict which our age has to go through is eminently
intellectual is implied simply in the prevailing notion of a _public
opinion_ and its influence. But, at the same time, we must observe, that
in the very notion of opinion, and in the word itself, there is involved
a certain character of extreme vagueness and uncertainty. No doubt that
which man can properly be said to know is extremely limited and
confined. Of very much all that we can have is merely an opinion, and
with that must we be content to put up. Nay, inasmuch as all scientific
certainty admits not of being imparted to all men, very much of that
which we do properly and certainly know is best and most beneficially
set forth to others merely as an opinion, in order that we may not seem
to force their minds to the admission of this higher certainty. And what
is there that the passions of a prejudiced or excited multitude can not
be made to adopt as an opinion, which, if presented to them as a sober
conviction of reason, would never make an impression? So devoid are
they, generally, of that intelligence and accurate knowledge of men and
things which are essential and necessary to the formation of a right
judgment. If, instead of public opinion (which, unquestionably, is a
great power, but which, if it takes a wrong direction, is also a very
dangerous one), the appeal were to be made to a public conscience, this
would be, to my mind, far more impressive and serious. To illustrate my
meaning:--the impression which the events of 1793 made on the general
feeling of all Europe, and the universal movement of discontent which,
among all European nations, preceded the great political catastrophe of
our own days, are instances to which the old maxim, _vox populi vox
Dei_, may, without hesitation, be applied. Such feelings are founded on
a true and higher judgment--often on a correct presentiment of evil and
wrong--even though, as we must admit, that in their utterance more or
less of passion and exaggeration reveals itself, and that individual
prejudices are not unfrequently mixed up with them. But now seldom, in
the ebbing and flooding tide, in the ever-changing course of the stream
of public opinion, flows there aught that truly deserves to be called a
public judgment. And yet public opinion is even that on which, in this
respect, and relatively to the theme of our present Lecture, every thing
mainly and principally turns.

In discussing the theory of consciousness a chasm remained, or, rather,
was intentionally left open, and the present seems the appropriate place
for filling it up and supplying it. The power, or, rather, the faculty
of judgment has not, as yet, had its place assigned it. The reason, with
its immediate subordinates, memory and conscience--the fancy, with its
subordinates, the senses and inclinations, form six faculties of the
inner man, with which the understanding and will make together eight.
The ninth is the living, loving, feeling soul, which, although it be the
center of the whole consciousness, must, nevertheless, be counted as an
independent and peculiar faculty. As for the heart [_Gemuth_]--as some
peculiarly designate the collective sum of the tender, moral emotions of
the soul, and which, at any rate, must be carefully distinguished from
the conscience, and also from love--it is, however, a kind of
application of the triple relation and function of the soul rather than
an independent faculty. But the tenth faculty, which completes the whole
cycle and theory of the human consciousness, and which may be regarded
as its crown and perfection, is the judgment, or, in other words, the
judging mind [_geist_].

But now, if this term judgment be understood purely in a logical sense,
as that process of thought which forms combinations and deductions, and
by means of which we ascribe to a subject A a predicate B, this would
fall very far short of the signification in which I here intend it to be
taken. Moreover, it would be, in truth, quite a superfluous task to
separate this cogitative relation, or this relative cogitation, from
the other logical functions of the understanding, and to make of it a
special and independent faculty. The judgment is something higher than
this mere coupling in the thought of some special A with some general B.
Understanding is the cognition of spirit and of that which it has
uttered; and judgment is the decision between two things understood, or
the “discerning of spirits.” Of how great a multitude of intellectual
relations does a scientific or even an artistic judgment imply the
coincidence and concurrent action! And yet these are merely private
judgments, which involve an assenting feeling in the individual, but
beyond that can not pretend to any valid authority. In practical life
the judicial function in the state alone furnishes an adequate standard
for estimating the high rank which the faculty of judgment holds as the
center of the human consciousness. For, in the deliberative sentence of
the judge there is comprised both the mature art of the
understanding--which has taken due cognizance of the matter, and
impartially discerned between two objects equally well understood--and
also a determination of the will: for, though the actual carrying into
effect--that which properly and peculiarly constitutes a willing--belong
not to, but is independent of, the judge’s office, still the conclusion
of a positive judgment implies the existence of the first determining
motive of the will. In this one act of judging, therefore, there is
contained both functions of the mind [_geist_], understanding and
willing; and as the loving soul is the center of the consciousness, so
the judging mind, or spirit, is the highest of all its operations.

In the Book of Truth there is a sentence which admits of application
here. “There is none good,” it is there written, “but one, that is,
God.” However harsh and severe this judgment may sound at the first
hearing, still, upon a little reflection, we shall see ample cause to
admit its justice. Man is not wholly and purely good; at the very best
he is not free from faults, and more or less of imperfection cleaves to
all that he does or is. And even granting that a man might be found
devoid of all admixture of imperfection, and quite faultless and
thoroughly good, still he was not so always and from the first. And even
if any should here urge that the angels, who have continued such as they
were originally created, were good from the beginning, we must remember
that, at least, they are not good in and by themselves, but that, that
they are good, comes from God, who is the source of all goodness. Now,
just in the same sense can we also say, Who judges rightly? There is
none that judges rightly but one, _i.e._, God. He is Himself the truth;
and, therefore, He alone has the standard of truth in Himself, and all
truth has its ground and principle in Him alone. Every individual
judgment and decision, in all important matters, has its ground, either
mediately or immediately, in this divine basis, and its rectitude must
be estimated according to this standard. But this latter condition need
not make us foolishly anxious, for nothing impossible is required of us
by God; and this requisition, like every other which He lays upon man,
is modified by, and adjusted to, the measure of human finiteness. The
conscientious judge, who, after a patient investigation of the cause as
it is laid before him, and after a careful weighing of all the possible
reasons and motives, nevertheless errs, or is deceived by a rare
coincidence of circumstances, stands, nevertheless, exonerated, even
though he should have passed an unjust sentence, and have had the
misfortune to condemn the innocent. Although, when he becomes aware of
it, the thought must be painful enough to his own feelings, yet who, in
justice, can reproach him merely because he was not omniscient? He who,
in thought, in science, and in faith, adheres to this divine
foundation--the best and most certain that he can find, or that is any
where offered to him, may rest calm and composed; he has done the utmost
that lies in his power. He alone, who makes a bad use of what he has and
what has been given to him, like an unjust steward, need fear to give an
account of his stewardship.

This reference of all judicial sentences to, and their foundation in a
divine authority, is an idea which was not unknown even to the
republican states of antiquity, as is evident from the way they
expressed themselves on the irrefragable sanctity of the laws and the
inviolability of the supreme judicial power, and also in the maxims
which they practically advanced on this subject. They honored herein a
higher and a diviner principle, of which, however, in theory they
possessed no clear and perfect knowledge, though in practical life they
were taught by a correct feeling of sound reason and the natural
conscience accurately enough to recognize and steadily and distinctly to
respect it. With us still more generally is it become an admitted
doctrine that all sovereignty and kingly power is of God, and that all
obedience to the laws and to the supreme authority in the state rests
ultimately on a divine foundation and sanction. If very recently men
were for a while disposed to argue that political institutions must be
founded on the reason and its unconditional liberty, yet bitter
experience quickly convinced them of their error, and it was soon fully
refuted by the convincing argument of actual fact. And, accordingly,
theory has for the most part reverted to a right principle, and
recognized the divine authority as the true foundation of political
authority.

But the principle being thus generally recognized, it is, I think, still
necessary to distinguish with care and accurately to define in what
sense the supreme ruler of the state is the vicegerent of God. The
indefinite titles which are assumed by Eastern despots have always been
alien to the habits of the West. But it is not enough to avoid such
exaggerated titles of honor, if, nevertheless, the appeal to divine
right be made so very vaguely, and simply in general terms to God
himself. In His absolute essence, God is wholly inconceivable; it is
only in his operations on man and nature, and in His relations to the
human race, that we can at all think precisely of Him. It is only as
Creator of the world, as the Lawgiver of nature, or as the Benefactor
and Redeemer of mankind, and so forth, that we can form a clear and
distinct notion of the Godhead.

Now, is the supreme ruler of the state God’s deputy as Creator of the
world? Who would venture to assert any thing of the kind? It is true
that the paternal rule of the earthly parent, and the universal feeling
among all peoples and nations of the sanctity of a father’s authority,
rests on a resemblance--which is, however, only symbolical--between his
relation and that of our unseen Father which is in heaven. And it is no
less true, also, that the reign of a truly paternal monarch over his
people may be regarded as a mere amplification of the father’s
government of his family; a good king is the father of his people. But
such remote, although most significant analogies, furnish us with no
precise notion of right; and it is on such alone that the whole question
here turns. No doubt when a people is governed well and wisely--which is
even the same as to say, paternally governed--it exhibits a wonderful
power of natural development; productive industry flourishes, population
increases, and its physical and mental cultivation advances rapidly.
Unfavorable seasons may undoubtedly check this tendency, and it will be
entirely stopped as soon as the subject refuses to follow with loving
confidence the guiding hand of the paternal monarch. Whenever they whose
duty it is to obey seek to be supreme, then are the natural energies of
a great people transmuted into a fearful element of universal
desolation.

If now we inquire in the next place how far it is allowable to compare
the highest authority in the state to the Lawgiver of nature, we shall
find that even in this respect the difference is so very great that
analogy almost entirely fails us. Holy, unquestionably, are the laws of
every political community in respect to the duty of obedience which they
suppose and require; but this is not paid spontaneously and naturally,
but needs to be enforced and maintained by pains and penalties. And not
to speak of the stem laws of retributive justice, but rather of those
mild and equitable enactments designed for the general benefit and the
improvement of the whole community; these are still more subject to the
imperfection and manifold changes of human things. Suppose, for
instance, a measure promulgated in any country with the design of
balancing in some degree the agricultural and the manufacturing
interests--however wisely designed, it is found within a few years to
have totally failed; under it misery has but increased on both sides,
and the law must be repealed or modified. But it is not so with the laws
which God has implanted in the system of the universe: they never fail
of their intended effect.

Do we further ask in what, if in any respect, the earthly sovereign is
the deputy of God, as Redeemer, Emancipator, and Liberator? A notion of
grace and mercy does, we must admit, attach itself to our idea of
supreme authority; and in this respect it presents a sort of analogy and
resemblance to the idea of the Godhead. Properly speaking, however, the
exercise of grace and mercy forms an exception to the general rule of
man’s sovereignty, and belongs to him only in his special function as
administrator of justice. Moreover, the most paternal and beneficent of
earthly rulers can at most provide only for the physical happiness of
his people. He may alleviate or avert heavy calamities, or procure many
temporal blessings and advantages for his subjects; but the unhappy soul
can be helped by One alone. The distinction I have just made will become
more apparent by means of a contrast. Wherever the clergy are not
regarded merely as teachers of the people, but as is the case in the
greater part of Western and of Eastern Christendom, as priests speaking
with a divine authority, this their public vicegerency relates primarily
and immediately to the _Redeemer_; its judicial functions over the
conscience ought to shun a visible publicity, and to be left entirely to
the conscience and guarded by its seal of secrecy. And in this respect
lies the distinctive peculiarity of the relation subsisting between the
supreme authority in the state and God, which, however, refers
pre-eminently to His attribute of _justice_. And here it is no mere
remote analogy and weak resemblance, dependent on the principle of human
weakness and imperfection; but it is a true and real vicegerency,
publicly admitted and recognized, and exercising consequently a great
public influence. And therefore it is, that among the divers elements or
branches of the supreme political authority (which, however,
fundamentally and in its essence is one and indivisible), a special
sanctity is, as I have already remarked, ascribed to its judicial
functions. In a word, the earthly head of the state is the dispenser of
the divine justice, the vicegerent of the Judge of the world; he is a
divine functionary, and, so to say, the supreme judge in the world’s
tribunal. And this is the point of view from which all matters and
questions connected with this subject may most fully be answered and
most correctly determined. But that this exalted dignity of the earthly
ruler may not be interpreted too literally, I must here observe, that
the divine Judge is one who allows mercy to take the place of justice,
not merely occasionally, and by way of exception, but always and
invariably; so long, at least, as it is in any way possible. And here
comes in the application of the principle which we previously
advanced:--That God is in nowise absolute, but that on the contrary His
justice is in every case limited by His love and grace; while the latter
again is restricted and modified by His justice, and both, indeed,
reciprocally by each other. Whoever has formed in his heart the least
vivid notion of God will not entertain the slightest doubt of this union
of justice and of mercy in the divine essence.

When, however, we speak of kings being the dispensers of divine justice,
we mean it in quite a different sense from that in which, during the
great immigration of the northern hordes of Asia, the barbarian
conqueror proclaimed himself the scourge of God. By assuming this title
he merely meant to terrify his adversaries by the thought of having to
encounter in himself a fearful and destructive power of evil, whom, in
order to chastise a degenerate world, the Almighty had permitted to do
as he pleased and to let loose his fury on the nations of the earth. And
phenomena of this kind are not confined to the period of the great
migration; for the true notion of the representation of the divine Judge
of the world by the supreme power in the state combines together with
the sternest severity of justice, which in this respect is both
wholesome and necessary, the greatest clemency--for where is there, or
can there be, a clemency greater than the divine? But most especially
does this idea imply that which is here pre-eminently requisite, and
insists with a prominence proportionate to its great importance on the
strictest conscientiousness in the discharge of the duties of this
vicegerency. But the superior excellence of this idea over many other
explanations of a similar kind, but laboring under the defect of extreme
vagueness, consists even in this, that it comprises and inseparably
combines those two important conditions, both that the supreme governor
is responsible to God alone, and, as following therefrom, that he is
unquestionably responsible to Him, and that it also determines in what
sense and in what way he is so.

Every great and remarkable event which marks an epoch in the political
history of nations and the world, may, perhaps, be regarded as a
dispensation of justice. If, then, such an event, however partial and
confined to a single people or empire, or at most extending to an entire
age, may be looked upon as a sign of judgment already commencing, or at
least of a retribution threatening, but mercifully suspended, the same
mode of consideration may, with as good reason, be applied to every
resolution of the political world on the grave questions of peace and
war: for the power of making war and peace is, at all events, the
peculiar and characteristic prerogative of the supreme authority in the
state. Now, the simplest standard, perhaps, of judging of the justice of
either is, if we may so speak, to ask, Is the proclamation of war or the
treaty of peace so entirely founded on truth, so perfectly correspondent
to the righteous and judicial character of God, that man need not fear
to lay them before the Judge of the whole world for His ratification? If
such be the case, then most assuredly are they right and righteous,
whatever be their consequences, or whatever be the judgment that men
may pass upon them. But, otherwise, if the manifesto of war contain
nothing but shallow and specious pretexts painfully raked together, or
of fine-colorable phrases which even the eye of the world can see
through, if a light touch of truth be only thrown over it in the hope of
concealing the conqueror’s lust of aggrandizement, or the equally
destructive principle of an old national feud or jealousy--if, in the
pacification, under ambiguous terms and cunningly-devised phrases, the
seeds of a future war be carefully sown, and thus the worst disease of
the political world be propagated and multiplied from generation to
generation, then most assuredly the guardian eye of Eternal Justice has
not watched over its completion, and bestowed on it His blessing, but
another and a very different coadjutor has had his hand in the game--the
spirit of untruth, viz., and of corruption, of strife and ruin, whom no
name so exactly describes as that of a “liar from the beginning.”

Now, as not only the annihilation of the race of giants in the universal
deluge, with which our sacred history opens, and to which the ancient
traditions of almost every people allude, more or less directly, but
also the partial overthrow of a single nation, the tragical closing
catastrophe of particular ages, is, as it were, a prelude of the final
judgment of all nations and peoples of the earth at the end of time; so,
on the other hand, the original corruption of the primal lie is
propagated as an hereditary evil from millennium to millennium, and from
century to century. For even now, may many a fertile spot, the seat of a
happy and united community in the midst of prosperous times, and of
peace unbroken at home or abroad, be considered, if not a garden of
innocence, still the blissful dwelling of peace and quiet. But into
these happy precincts the evil spirit of untruth and discontent ever and
anon steals, to repeat over again in the history of the human race the
same scene of temptation which marked its commencement. Upward and
downward, and in a twofold direction, does the lying spirit of strife
ply his seductive arts. Now, on the one side, he whispers in the ear of
the rising generation, “That is the true knowledge and the real science
which men are most anxious to withhold from you; but seek first of all
to be free--shake off this unworthy spirit of slavish obedience, then
shall all that is noble and intellectually great be at once yours. In
this way, and thus only, was it attained by the great and good in
ancient times.” But, on the other hand, he directs himself to the
individual invested with authority; and if the potentate be unrighteous,
his ear is already more than half open--and even if he be upright,
still, as a man, he is not always inaccessible to such whisperings.
“Why,” he insidiously asks, “dost thou draw back so fearfully before
that which the people call their rights? These are nothing but childish
notions which the school-boy may do well to declaim about, but
practically they are worthless and unreal; no one means them
seriously--the whole world puts no faith in this comedy. Rule your
subjects with an iron hand, that is all they know how to respect; nay,
they even admire the bold spirit that defies them, and they will
suppliantly reverence thy greatness of mind and strength of character
if, betraying no infirmness of purpose, you boldly and sternly encroach
upon or disregard all their pretended rights and privileges. If only
your sovereignty be solidly established from within, and well rounded
from without, then, besides a great name with posterity, you will also
secure to yourself the present enjoyment of very great and solid
advantages.”

In this wise, from the original source of the one lie, is the
inheritance of the old evil transmitted from generation to generation in
the political world, in the two opposite forms of popular anarchy, and
the despotic lust of power and aggrandizement. These two forms of evil
are more closely allied than at the first look they appear to be in
reality; but history, the great teacher of truth, gives its sure witness
to their affinity. Nothing is more common in great republics, than for
the discord of the citizens to be put an end to by some victorious
general, whom all parties, weary of their dissensions, hail as the
benefactor of the whole community. But how seldom is the pacificator
content with the glorious title of the restorer of domestic peace, and
does not go a step farther, and become the scheming tyrant and the
aggressive conqueror. The whole history of the world is, in short,
little more than the continuous struggle between the purifying fire of
the divine retribution and this spirit of political lying, which is ever
renewing itself in these twofold forms of anarchy and despotism.

Moreover, while we acknowledge the divine authority invested in the
supreme ruler of the state, we must take heed how we mix up with our
conceptions on this head the notion, so highly dangerous and so pregnant
with fatal errors, of the absolute and unconditional, which, as we have
already remarked, can not be applied even to the Godhead without giving
rise to misconceptions. If, therefore, in any country a party--for
now-a-days even justice is made a party matter--if any where a party of
otherwise well-disposed men call themselves “absolutists,” such a
designation is of itself sufficient to excite our apprehension, lest,
with so absolute a way of thinking, some spark of evil be slumbering
beneath the ashes; inasmuch as one absolute, _i.e._, one unconditional
element of destruction invariably calls forth another.

Absolute, if this pernicious term must be used, the supreme power of the
legitimate sovereign of a state may indeed be called in so far as he is
responsible to God alone. For were the supreme ruler responsible to man,
then the only difference would be, that instead of one, the many to whom
he is answerable would be absolute. But in another sense, it is
impossible to call the supreme power, wherever lodged, absolute or
unlimited; for it is limited in many ways. Its exercise is checked and
controlled by the treaties subsisting between it and other powers--by
the laws which it finds in existence from the times of his predecessors,
and which are still in force by the family laws of succession, and all
matters pertaining to or connected therewith. If he who is invested with
the highest power in the state, is determined to interfere with all
these institutions, and violently to subvert existing customs and
compacts, then is there, in such a case, no one really justified or
entitled either to make objections to his measures or to oppose them. By
such arbitrary and violent proceedings, however, he is himself
undermining the very foundation of his own power. And a regard to and
consideration of the possible consequences of such injustice will in
most instances furnish the necessary and salutary check. Lastly, if we
look a moment from the right itself to its actual exercise and
influence, how often and how greatly are the latter limited by adverse
circumstances and evil times. Nothing, in short, is more at issue with
and opposed to nature and to life, than the very notion of unlimited
power, and generally all that is absolute or destructive.

But there is yet another side on which the supreme political power is
essentially checked and controlled. It is bound to consider and pay
respect to the principles of religious society, which rests no less than
itself on a divine authority. For the church, although very different in
its nature, and flowing from a wholly different origin from that of the
state, is, nevertheless, equally inviolable. If, however, the civil and
political ruler, not content with a co-ordinate jurisdiction and the
revision of ecclesiastical affairs--with a joint authority and
influence, should attempt to make the religious polity also entirely
subject to his own arbitrary will, no one perhaps will be able to oppose
force to force, and probably no one would be justified in so doing. But
by such an attempt, as indeed by every act of religious oppression, the
supreme civil power would most fatally undermine the very basis of its
own authority. If, for instance, the ruler of a great nation places the
third estate in the painful alternative of making, what in any case must
be most pernicious, a choice between divine and human authority--or,
rather, to speak more correctly, between two claims to its allegiance
equally divine, he does but smooth the road which must lead at last to
his own ruin.

And here, too, in the spiritual community of the faith, in the same way
as in the political body, man’s patrimony of original evil branches out
into two directions. In the one it turns longingly back toward the past,
and in the other it tends restlessly forward into the indefinite future.
Both of these aberrations are wholly independent of the outer form as
well as of the subject-matter of belief. They are consequently to be
found in the old covenant, as the first grade of divine revelation, no
less than in the second. The first of these hereditary faults of man’s
nature is deadness, or, in a somewhat different phase,
lukewarmness--manifesting itself outwardly in a close and literal
adherence to the old in its mere external forms. In a word, it is
spiritual death. For though in the abundance of His love, God may have
made a revelation of His will to man, and even died to make an atonement
for him, still it is left to the free will of the individual to receive
it or not; and its retention and observance is the trial of his
goodness, and, consequently, in this point, as in others, his hereditary
and inborn spiritual death strongly manifests itself. The second of
these hereditary faults, or, rather, the same in a different form, is
the spirit of innovation, or a false semblance of life, by which, in
fact, this inner death is merely propagated.

On both these faults and erroneous ways of thinking on religious
matters, Revelation expresses itself equally in the tone of stern
reprobation, though perhaps its language with regard to the former is
even still more severe. As regards the spirit of innovation, all
changes in this domain, which are merely human, and not visibly and
manifestly of a divine spirit and origin, must simply on that account be
opposed and condemned. Now, in both the parties into which the faith is
unhappily divided, there are many who are captivated and led away by
this spirit of change. For among those who were originally seduced by it
not a few are now animated with a sincere and profound respect for
whatever is old and sterling, while of the innovation-mongers of our
days, many are to be found in the ranks of those who originally strove
to stem the tide of alteration and change. Oh that all who are pervaded
by this evil spirit, and are ever casting their views forward into the
future, would only advance a little farther still in their thoughts, so
as to take in the end and conclusion of all. In the knowledge of the
final judgment of the world (and what is this philosophy of revelation
but such a reminiscence of death and the end--in which light philosophy
was even in olden times explained--not, indeed, in a narrow-minded
limitation to ourselves, but in a far wider sense, embracing in its
universal sympathy the final catastrophe of the whole human race), in
the warnings and allusions to this last day of account, so long and so
often given, men will find all the information that they seek, and will
no longer need any human innovations, since by this key all that is old
and eternal shall receive a trebly-exalted significance and a doubly-new
life.

But besides the political body and the religious community, the world of
letters forms a third society. Though numerically smaller, yet in its
effects on the minds of men, whether it moves freely and diffuses itself
without the rigid restraints of form, or is narrowly confined to the
formalism of the school, it is, perhaps, as great as either. Spiritual
in its matter and in its dissemination, it either renounces a divine
sanction, and stands under the protection and supervision of the
state--such, at least, is the predominant relation in recent times--or,
as was formerly the case, it grows and flourishes beneath the shelter
and through the fostering care of ecclesiastical institutions. Holding
an intermediate place between the two other bodies of human society--in
its subject-matter more akin to the one, but deriving from the other its
external support--it is also of a mixed nature and partakes of both. But
the inborn and original sin of science is exactly similar to that which
infects political life. Manifesting itself in a twofold aberration, it
either assumes, in the spirit of anarchy, an hostile position toward all
that exists from without, or is given to men from above, or, perhaps,
comes forward in a predominant love of system or scientific
sectarianism, which not unfrequently is as fanatical as the political
party-spirit with which, moreover, it is often very nearly and closely
allied.

The nature of the divine order which rules the history of the world, and
its stern, retributive law, must, in all essential points, be now
apparent from the preceding remarks. It is an all-pervading alternation
between the purifying fire of God’s punitive justice and the inheritance
of the old evil, which breaks out, now in anarchy, now in despotism--at
one time in spiritual deadness and lukewarmness of faith--at another in
the pernicious lust of innovation and change. This purifying fire, it
must also be clear, while, confining its immediate operation to single
nations or to marked and distinct epochs of history, it gives them a new
shape and form, invariably gains for itself a wider extension, so as, at
last, to embrace the whole world. Moreover, every one must feel that, in
investigating the fiery track of this judging spirit in its stern course
through centuries, we must reverently follow at a respectful distance to
learn from it what it is and how it manifests itself, and take good heed
how we presume to confine it within any narrow law, or reduce it to any
precise and rigorous definition. We can not be too carefully on our
guard against ascribing to Providence in its guidance of mankind many
and subtile designs, which, after all, perhaps, are nothing but the mere
fancies and conceits of man. In general, however, it may safely be said
that the subordinate views and higher ends which are visible in the
leading catastrophes of nations and empires, or even of entire ages,
have especial reference to that gradation in the divine revelation which
I explained to you in the previous Lecture as having a regard to, and
comprising the whole human race in, its comprehensive design. By way of
exemplification, and as an instance of the right application of the
ideas here advanced, I will now, in conclusion, add a few words on those
events and catastrophes of universal history, which, in this respect,
seem the most important.

The universal deluge, of which the whole surface of our globe presents
so many and so great traces and proofs, forms a partition-wall, sternly
separating the earliest races of men from the subsequent generations. Of
the former it is only probable that they were very different from the
latter, not only in their manner of life, but also in their physical and
intellectual powers and endowments, and likewise, perhaps, in the nature
and mode of their moral corruption and depravity. My remarks, therefore,
may well be confined to this side of that great partition-wall. The next
great catastrophe, which is both expressly given out as a divine
retribution (and, as such, can be proved from profane history as much,
though not so universally, as the former), is the so-called Babylonian
confusion of tongues and the dispersion of nations. This, and that which
is so inseparably connected with it, the confusion of mythical ideas and
legends, is rather hinted at than fully and clearly detailed. The time,
too, is not given, though the locality is expressly mentioned. It is the
same one which, according to all other historical statements, was the
very spot of Western Central Asia, where that contagious malady of the
lust of conquest first arose, or, if we may be allowed the expression,
where this unhappy _invention_ was first made. This dispersion of
nations, however, was its natural punishment, since every unity which is
either politically false or intellectually untrue, must terminate in
chaotic dissolution. This historical fact is distinctly traceable in the
world of the ancients among the West Asiatic, South European, and North
African nations which dwell around the shores of the Mediterranean. Here
we can scarcely find our way out of the labyrinth of traces of
reciprocal relationship which abound, in their medley of cognate
languages and their chaos of legends, so remarkably agreeing, and yet
frequently so inconsistent in their ideas of nature, their far-reaching
theogonies, and the divine origination of their heroic families. These
chaotic contradictions, however, in which the poetry of heathendom
indulged without restraint, gradually undermined the old popular belief,
and led, consequently, at a later period, to a very favorable result.

For by this means the Greeks--to whom our present remarks apply
especially and pre-eminently--gained free space for the unshackled
development of a philosophy which, though it may have run and wandered
through many systems of error, yet in so far as it was an honest and
sincere search after truth and certainty, served and deserves to be
considered as a preparation and introduction to a higher knowledge and
the adoption of revelation. For because of this intellectual development
(and the fact serves to prove that a pure sensibility to the beautiful,
and a clear and pregnant thought on human life and on nature, is ever
highly pleasing to God), the Greeks were chosen as the second people of
the world, to be the medium and the instruments of the further diffusion
of revelation in the course of the development of humanity.

In political life, the erroneous tendency of the Greek mind was to the
abuse of liberty and to anarchy. When this evil had been carried to its
wildest extreme, it was overtaken by its natural penalty (which inwardly
follows close upon its track), in the armed supremacy of Macedon (which,
however, was only a brief paroxysm), and the final subjugation of Greece
to the Roman yoke. Among the Romans both forms of political evil met
together, and were closely connected with each other. To escape from
domestic anarchy, they entered on a victorious career of foreign
conquest and aggrandizement; and when intestine dissension had reached
its greatest height, a perfect despotism was established, both at home
and in the provinces.

We recently remarked that the whole of that mixture of ideas, confusion
of legends and traditions, and that continual alternation between
anarchy and despotism, which in the olden times of heathendom ran
through its whole course of development, from the first dispersion of
nations to the establishment of the Roman empire over the world,
immediately applies to and is only to be understood of the West Asiatic
and South European races. In the East of Asia, two great nations or
empires, which together make up a third, if not the half, nearly, of the
population of the whole earth, have remained in a great measure free
from and uninfluenced by it. It would almost seem as if the Almighty,
with some special design, had kept and reserved them unto these last
times. For three if not four thousand years India has preserved
unchanged its institution of castes, and all its essential customs and
laws. The very fact that this ancient empire, so extensive, so abundant
in riches, and so singular in its nature, and with a civilized
population equal to that of the whole of Europe put together, should be
now conquered and held in subjection by the sea-ruling isles of Britain,
which the ancients named the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands, and described
as the ultimate limits of the habitable world, is one of the most
remarkable signs of our days. That in such great historical events, and
such singular juxtapositions, there rules some grand and mysterious
design of the Mind which regulates the course of human affairs, we can
not but feel; only we shall greatly err if we precipitately determine
its particular nature. The wiser and the safer course is to look forward
with attentive expectation to its further development. Already has this
remarkable approximation of the extreme East and West led to important
consequences. The enlargement of our historical information, by the
sources discovered in the East, has alone been so considerable as to
give greater coherence and consistency to our knowledge of the earlier,
and, indeed, of the very earliest times, and of the origin of mankind,
and to have afforded a growing testimony and a strong confirmation of
the truth of the sacred narrative.

The Celestial Empire too, with its monosyllabic language, remained until
very recently within its walls separate from and never mixing with the
rest of the world. Although China has been several times subjugated by
northern conquerors, it has, nevertheless, continued in all essential
respects the same. But now, in these modern times of universal ferment
and of change throughout the political world, China, too, has been set
in movement, and has become so far a conquering power, that she who in
the earlier centuries of Christianity was only known by name, through
fable, has become the immediate neighbor of two great European powers.

The close of the ancient history of the Eastern world, in its westerly
regions, is formed by the tragic overthrow of the Jewish people and the
fearful destruction of Jerusalem; events which are properly described,
as also they were long previously announced, as a partial judgment on an
individual nation. And in this light and in similar colors they are,
moreover, depicted even by heathen writers. Few things in the whole
course of history furnish so singular and striking a phenomenon as this
total dissolution of the Jewish nation. The dispersion over all parts of
the earth, for so many centuries, of a people that has exercised so
great and so decisive an influence on the progress of ideas and the
higher cultivation of the human mind, both naturally and scientifically,
makes a sad and melancholy impression on our minds. With so much the
more of reason, then, may we regard it as a sign of the times, and one,
too, full of good promise and of bright and cheerful hope, if this long
and cruelly-oppressed people seems suddenly to be aroused again or
awakened from its degradation, and in manifold ways evincing an
intellectual, moral, and social activity, begins to partake of a more
liberal development and culture. And on one account the fact appears
still more consolatory. Such a reawakening of this long ill-treated and
degraded race is, in their oldest prophecies, fixed for the last
decisive days of the world’s history.

In the medieval period of modern history we meet with all the elements
of the Christian state. The idea of a pure monarchy also was here
carried far higher toward perfection, and much more manifoldly developed
than in heathen antiquity. But the civil and spiritual powers soon came
into collision, and in their mutual conflict were alike guilty of
despotic encroachments on each other. In this sad dissension the whole
state of things fell more and more into a new kind of anarchy. And in
the same way, in our own times, after a great part of the Christian
world had, in sentiment at least, reverted to heathenism, then as a
natural consequence of the ruling tone of thought and opinion, there was
a great relapse into the double evil of a wild and fatal popular
anarchy, and of a still more destructive military despotism. And the
whole history of the old heathen world is nothing but one continual
alternation between these two evils.

In the Christian West, indeed, both now and in the middle ages, the
predominant tendency to error inclined toward the side of anarchy. Among
the Mohammedan nations, on the contrary, from the very earliest days of
their religion, the despotic lust of conquest has been, as it were, an
inborn and homebred hereditary failing. It was indeed fed and encouraged
by their national creed. But here also the greatest changes have taken
place. The largest and most powerful of all the Mohammedan empires,
that, viz., in India, is entirely overthrown, and scarcely a vestige of
it remains in these times. By a natural revolution of things, the first
irresistible conquerors are now themselves conquered and brought under
the yoke of others. And so, too, on the other and western side of their
once wide rule, they who formerly threatened the existence of civilized
Europe are now dependent upon, essentially mixed up with, and owe their
political existence to, European policy and the balance of power. This
total change of the relative position of the Mohammedan states in
general belongs undoubtedly to the characteristic signs which so
peculiarly mark and distinguish our own age.

In the three centuries of modern history which fill up the interval
between the middle ages and the revolutionary epoch of our own days, the
moral constitution of the monarchy has been far more fully and clearly
developed than in any previous era. But the most striking event of this
period of history is furnished by the sad and melancholy phenomenon of
the religious wars. These were the lamentable consequence of the schism
in the faith, not indeed by any indispensable and necessary law, nor
even as its natural, but still its perfectly explicable, result. In
those lands where, as in England and France, there existed a weaker
party of either side, which had either been fully conquered or was kept
under by oppressive civil disabilities, this unhappy phenomenon assumed
the most revolting appearance. But the same state of things took a very
different turn in Germany. Here the religious disputes terminated in a
higher and a nobler result. In a long and fruitless struggle of thirty
years, which wasted and consumed the best energies of the nation, the
two contending parties were taught, that with so nicely-balanced
strength, no decisive result either way was to be expected. Coming at
length to a wiser mind, they acknowledged their respective rights, and
by a peaceable compromise they agreed to live together in the same
social community. This great and famous religious peace, which,
considered merely in the light of a treaty of general pacification, is a
master-piece of policy, without equal or parallel, and serving for the
basis for all subsequent treaties and questions of peace, is become for
Germany a species of inborn national necessity, and, as it were, a
second national character. She finds in it a full and perfect
compensation for many disadvantages she labors under as compared with
other lands, while she has acquired from it a great and important
position in the world of the future. Considered with regard to the whole
world, one can not well avoid ascribing to this indestructible religious
peace in Germany a still higher importance, however little it is
commonly understood or regarded in this light. Indeed, we can not but
look upon it as the precursor, with hopeful promises, of a far greater
and completer religious peace--a peace, I mean, which shall reconcile
not only all differences in the faith, but also that more universal and
more pervading dissension between faith and unbelief; the quarrel
between science and faith being first adjusted, and unity restored
thereby between them, and, consequently, also to life. But to effect
this object, God, who wills nothing but peace and unity, must take the
upper hand and be stronger than man, who loves and desires strife, or,
at least, without loving and seeking it, is still ever relapsing into
it.

In such or some similar way a religious view of universal history, and
of the divine order therein, admits of being developed; which, however,
can not be truly done with too much of scientific rigor, or by violently
introducing into its plans any arbitrary and, consequently, false
designs and purposes.

My prescribed limits compel me to confine myself to these few hints, and
in these I have wished principally to call attention to their reference
to our own age, and to exhibit them in the light in which they appear of
universal interest and to possess an eminent and remarkable destination.
Comprised, then, in one result, the following are the characteristic
signs of the present age: the two greatest heathen nations, which for
thousands of years stood by themselves apart from the rest of the world,
have lately come into the closest contact with Europe--the Mohammedan
empires are every where falling into decay, more rapidly than men had
been led to expect their fall--the Hebrew race is beginning to rise from
its long degradation--in Christian states and communities there is here
and there visible a strong inclination to the old evil of anarchy--and
if the great human peace, which has now lasted twelve years, appears in
some points insecure, or at least endangered from within, it is only
because it is devoid of a firm foundation of the internal sentiment of
men. What event, then, could be more happy for our age, what better turn
could the present posture of affairs take, than by bringing about such a
triple divine peace as we have already sketched, to give a new
foundation and a firmer basis to the external peace of society? May not
this, in God’s good purpose, be the theme which is to occupy the next
era of the world?




LECTURE IX.

OF THE TRUE DESTINATION OF PHILOSOPHY, AND OF THE APPARENT SCHISM BUT
ESSENTIAL UNITY BETWEEN A RIGHT FAITH AND HIGHEST CERTAINTY, AS THE
CENTER OF LIGHT AND LIFE IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS.


The philosophy of life can not be any mere science of reason, and least
of all an unconditional one. For such does but lead us into a domain of
dead abstractions alien to life, which, by the dialectical spirit of
disputation connatural to the reason, is soon converted into a
labyrinthine maze of contradictory opinions and notions, out of which
the reason, with all its logical means and appliances, can not extricate
itself. And life, consequently--the inner spiritual life, that is--is
disturbed and destroyed by it. And it is even this disturbing and
destroying principle of the dialectical reason that most requires to be
got rid of and brought into subjection. In the mere form, however, of
abstract thought there is nothing in and by itself opposed to the truth.
There is nothing in it that it is absolutely and invariably necessary to
avoid, or that never and in no case admits of application. It is, no
doubt, most certain that every system of philosophy is on a wrong track
which borrows its method exclusively from mathematics, and copies it
throughout from beginning to end. Still, in the progressive development
of philosophical ideas certain points may occur--there may be certain
places in the entire system--where occasionally and by the way such
formulas and abstract equations may be profitably employed. Such a case
may happen in the present Lecture. But by thus employing them only by
way of illustration, and episodically in passing, I hope to establish
such a use of them, and to make it evident that the perspicuity of the
exposition does not essentially suffer thereby.

Philosophy, as the universal science, embraces in its consideration the
whole man. As, therefore, it evidently involves the occasion, so it is
not unlikely that cases may occur where it can happily borrow, now from
one now from another of the sciences, its external form and peculiar
formularies. It can, in short, advantageously avail itself of all in
turn. Only, such a use, to be profitable, must be free. And this freedom
will best evince itself in the deliberate choice and the diversity of
the images. The method of free speculation, _i.e._, of philosophy, must
not resemble a coat of mail with its infinite number of little uniform
chains and rings. It ought not, as is the case nearly with the
mathematical method, to be composed, by mechanical rule and measure, of
simple propositions scientifically linked together, and then formed
again into higher logical concatenations. In short, the method of
philosophy can not properly be uniform. The spirit must not be made
subservient to the method; the essence must not be sacrificed to the
form.

Philosophical thought and knowledge, with that diversity of illustration
and variety in method which follows from its universality, is, in this
respect, somewhat in the same case with poetry. Of all the imitative
arts poetry alone embraces, and by its nature is intended to embrace,
the whole man. It is, therefore, free to borrow its similes or colors,
and manifold figurative expressions, from every sphere of life and
nature, and to take them now from this, now from that object, as on each
occasion appears most striking and appropriate. Now, no one would think
of prescribing unconditionally to poetry, and compelling her to take all
her similes and figures either from flowers and plants, or from the
animal world, or exclusively from any one of the several pursuits of
man--from the sailor’s life, for instance, or the shepherd’s, or the
huntsman’s--or from any of his handicrafts or mechanical arts. For
although all such similes, and colors, and expressions, appropriately,
introduced, are equally allowable in every poetical composition, and
none of them need be rejected, still the exclusive use of any one class
of them as a law would hamper the free poetic spirit and extinguish the
living fancy. In the same way, philosophy is not confined to any one
invariable and immutable form. At one time it may come forward in the
guise of a moral, legislative, or a judicial discussion; at another, as
a description of natural history. Or, perhaps, it may assume the method
of an historical and genealogical development and derivation of ideas as
best fitted to exhibit the thoughts which it aims at illustrating in
their mutual coherence and connection. On other occasions, perhaps, it
will take the shape of a scientific investigation of nature--of an
experiment in a higher physiology--in order to test the existence of
the invisible powers which it is its purpose to establish. Or again, by
the employment of an algebraic equation, or of a mathematical form
(which, however, it regards as nothing more than a symbol and visible
hieroglyphic for a higher something that is invisible), it will,
perhaps, most conveniently attain to its loftier aim. Every method and
every scientific form is good; or, at least, when rightly employed, is
good. But no one ought to be exclusive. No one must be carried out with
painful uniformity, and with wearying monotony be invariably followed
throughout.

The philosophy of life, then, can not be any mere absolute philosophy of
reason. And as little can, or ought it to be purely and absolutely a
philosophy of nature; not, at least, an exclusive one, that is, exactly
such and nothing more. Such a philosophy of nature may, indeed, in its
physiological aspect, possess unequaled scientific wealth, and be full
of profound and ingenious thoughts. But still the right principles and
the regulative ideas of human life can never be deduced from it easily,
and without having recourse to forced constructions. For even man is, in
his life, something higher than nature; even he is something more than a
mere physical being. Still less possible, then, were it, from such a
philosophy of nature, to derive, establish, and to render clear and
intelligible the idea and being of God--the pervading reference to whom,
however, makes man what he is. The idea of God deduced from such a
source alone would, and indeed could only be, some great final cause of
the system of nature.

Neither the conclusions of sound reason, and least of all those of the
conscience--no, nor even dialectic itself (so far as it is profitably
employed, by the knowledge of it being made available for the detection
of error), nor physical science, when cultivated in a noble and lofty
spirit, ought in any way to be excluded from the borders, or even the
very domain of philosophy. On the contrary, she may, in her own peculiar
way, adopt them all, and, giving them a more extensive sense and spirit,
employ them for her own higher aims. In its primary and most essential
respects, the philosophy of life is a thoroughly human science. It is
nothing less than the cognition of man. Now, even on this account, and
because it is only by means of his all-pervading relation to God that
man stands above nature and is something superior to a mere physical
being, and something higher, too, than a mere rational machine,
therefore is the philosophy of life actually and in fact a true
philosophy of God. The philosophy of life attains this high dignity
beyond a mere philosophy of reason, or of nature, simply on this
account--that the supreme life and the ultimate source of all other
degrees of life is even God. Now this Supreme Life, which has its life
in itself, is the subject of my present disquisitions. For it is even
with the correct and complete notion of this Supreme Life that the
Spirit of Truth first enters the human consciousness; and then, in the
inner world of man, which before was “without form and void,” that light
begins to shine which never shall become darkness, and of which even
this Spirit of Truth has said “that it was good.” This divine but
initiatory illumination is the first step in that progressive
development of the internal light and truth in human life and
consciousness, and which, as starting from this point and passing
through its successive stages of advancement, it will be our object to
trace in the last seven of the present Lectures. In the eight preceding
disquisitions I have endeavored, by advancing step by step, to arrive at
this last end of all. We have now reached the culminating point; and the
Supreme Life, which, according to what has been already said, is the
primary source of all other life, and which has life in itself, is now,
together with the full and true notion of this life, to occupy our
common consideration. And then again, descending from this summit of
light and truth--for which, in the mean time, I entreat your entire and
closest attention--I propose, with hasty step, to retrace our way
through all the grades of man’s spiritual enlightenment, to carry back
your regards and mine into all the several spheres of life and
consciousness.

But now, it has been said that the philosophy of life, in every case and
instance, invariably ascends to the highest object of every sphere that
it contemplates, and that that supreme object is God. From this,
further, it has been argued that it is even and truly a philosophy of
God. How, then, does it differ from theology?

At the very commencement of these Lectures I confessed that philosophy
in general, and especially a philosophy of life, by reason of the common
object which they both treat of, could not avoid coming into frequent
and close contact with theology. But, at the same time, I asserted that
the former, in its whole essence, is completely and materially
different from the latter, and requires to be carefully restricted
within its own limits. We must take heed lest it either violently
encroach upon the proper domain of theology, or, on the other hand,
become its servile handmaid at the sacrifice of its own peculiar
character and destination. The true relation of these two kindred
sciences, as occupied with a common subject, which is often entirely
identical, and their, nevertheless, so strongly-marked and distinct
limits, may perhaps be most clearly illustrated by a comparison with the
mathematical sciences.

Dogmatic theology, or the science of positive belief, resembles pure
mathematics. Its ideas and formularies can not be too strictly, or too
simply, defined; nor, where it admits of demonstration, can its proofs
be carried out with too rigorous and mathematical a precision. For in
these matters it is impossible to give the least room or influence to
individual caprice without hazarding the loss of all that is most
essential in the positive articles of faith. Philosophy, on the other
hand, in treating of such subjects--or, at least, that part of it which
is occupied with these matters--resembles rather mixed geometry in its
several applications, such as practical mensuration, or the science of
fortification and the art of war. For philosophy is, if we may so speak,
an applied theology. Adopting the universal ideas of the one living God
and his overruling Providence, and, what is so closely connected
therewith, of the soul’s immortality and man’s free will, it adapts
them, in many valuable practical applications, to the whole and almost
boundless field of historical knowledge and the development of the human
race, as well as to all physical and experimental sciences, and even to
the wide domain of scientific disputes and merely human opinion, with
its several conflicting systems. In this course of practical application
philosophy needs not, in its expressions and formularies, scrupulously
to confine itself to the terminology of its sister science, or to repeat
its words with a careful exactness. On the contrary, its best and wisest
course is to move with freedom, changing and varying its expressions at
pleasure. For inasmuch as it is not itself so rigorously tied up as
theology is to authority, so it can not appeal to it with equal justice
in order to enforce assent to its own teaching. In the same way, too,
that in algebraic equations a mere hypothetical calculation is
oftentimes introduced, which, moreover, afterward suggests many a
valuable practical application, so, also, a similar hypothetical use of
the theological magnitudes or axioms, if we may so speak, is quite open
and allowable to philosophy in the pursuit of its merely scientific
ends. It is only the most general articles of the faith that philosophy
makes use of. At least, the minuter and sharply-defined determinations
of a positive creed are not immediately and indispensably necessary for
its object. Now, an overruling Providence, the soul’s immortality, and
the freedom of the will, are articles of universal belief, which,
although, perhaps, not couched in express words and definite notions,
yet still as germs and vague feelings exist, however deeply they may
slumber, in every human breast that is as yet pure and uncontaminated by
that captious skepticism which frets and corrodes itself with its
seeming perplexities. These, philosophy may safely take for granted.
Nay, it is its duty so to do; and where it does so in the right way,
then will it never, on that account, meet with any considerable obstacle
or opposition. On the contrary, by pursuing this course it will the more
surely arouse and awaken these universal feelings from their slumber in
the human mind, and gradually shape and convert them into fixed and
stable points from which to carry on the further progress and
development of the principle of faith.

And it is even herein that philosophy will most display its art, or,
rather, its intellectual power over the minds of men. It is in this,
pre-eminently, that lies its vocation. But if, on the contrary, it makes
this mission to consist rather in demonstrating, in a strictly
scientific form, the existence of a Deity, with its natural train of
those eternal verities--the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of
the will, then at the very first outset it will lose sight of its true
aim, and set up a false one. For, were such a demonstration possible,
still nothing essential would be gained by its actual attainment. For,
in such a case, the existence of God, and God himself, would naturally
become dependent, in thought at least, on that from and by means of
which the proof was established, and would, consequently, appear to us
no longer as the first cause of all, but, rather, a secondary and
derivative being. In such the primal essence would be made to depend on
our human knowledge and science of reasoning, so to speak; the latter
must, in the plenitude of its power, first confer upon and guaranty to
the former its existence. This would, indeed, be a complete inversion of
the true and natural order of things, such as, alas, has but too often
occurred and manifested itself in actual experience.

These remarks, however, must be understood as applying to a strict
demonstration of this great verity, or at least to all attempts of the
kind. To point to this truth, to trace every indication of it, to
elucidate it, to confirm it by analogy or other corroborative evidences,
is quite a different matter. All this is perfectly allowable. But God
does not allow his existence to be proved. By force of reasoning such a
belief is not to be impressed on the mind of that man who is unwilling
spontaneously to admit it. As life generally, so also this supreme life
must be learned and concluded from every man’s own experience; it must
be adopted with the vividness of a feeling.

Let us now, for a moment, revert to the old scholastic forms and the
designations usually given in the schools to the several philosophical
sciences, and compare with them the division on which our present
disquisitions are based. We might, in this respect, say that the first
five sections of our treatise have been exclusively devoted to
psychology; though not indeed in the ordinary narrow sense of the word,
but in one far more extensive, and embracing the whole universe.
According to this wider extent and signification of psychology, we have
considered the soul relatively, first of all, to the whole of philosophy
and its several systems; secondly, to moral life; and, lastly, to
revelation, to nature, and to God Himself. The three following Lectures
were devoted to an examination of the divine order of things in the
several spheres of existence, and to the indications of a ruling
Providence discoverable therein. They constitute, therefore, a species
of theology; but one, however, empirically conceived and historically
worked out from observations in nature and in history, not only in the
annals of the external world, but also in the spiritual history of the
progressive terms in the development of truth. Such a theological essay
exactly corresponds to that notion we so lately advanced, of an applied
or mixed science of theology as the peculiar sphere for this part or
branch of philosophy which concerns itself with the doctrine of the
supreme essence, and the right understanding thereof.

Now if, in compliance with olden forms of division and a scholastic
phraseology, it be necessary to deliver a scheme of ontology as the
philosophical science and cognition of really existent things, and also
of their true and real essence, it is clear that such is only
conceivable and possible by means of such an applied theology. For how
can things be truly real, and how can they as such be known in their
inmost essence, except so far as they have their existence and
determination in God, and, in this respect, admit of being known by us?

In any case, however, the name of _natural_ theology, which ever and
anon we still hear applied to the philosophical cognition of the Divine
Being and His existence, ought carefully to be avoided. Such a
designation is based on a thorough misconception and total inversion of
ideas. Every system of theology that is not supernatural, or at least
that does not profess to be so, but pretends to understand naturally the
idea of God, and regards the knowledge of the divine essence as a branch
of natural science, or derives the idea simply from nature, is even on
that account false. Missing and entirely mistaking its proper object, it
must, in short, prove absolutely null and void. Properly, indeed, this
inquiry needs no peculiar word nor special division and scientific
designation. The name generally of philosophy, or specially of a
philosophy of God, is perfectly sufficient to designate the
investigation into science and faith, and their reciprocal
relation--their abiding discord, or its harmonious reconciliation and
intrinsic concord. And this is properly the point which is here in
question; it forms the essential part of the topic which we have at
present to examine.

The internal schism in the faith itself I formerly excluded from our
inquiry, as not lying properly within the limits of philosophy, and
belonging to a higher tribunal. I at the same time expressed my
conviction that God alone could universally and totally reconcile it. By
this, however, I would not by any means wish to be understood as
asserting that works on this subject, written with a thorough knowledge
of historical facts, and in a luminous and instructive style, can not
contribute much to the refutation of error. Works of this nature may, in
their degree, tend to bring about a mutual approximation of sentiment.
For they serve to elucidate and clear up points which, even though they
do not involve the essential articles of positive belief; do,
nevertheless, greatly and extensively co-operate in keeping alive a
mutual spiritual alienation and estrangement of mind. The great merit of
treatises of this kind, when composed with high intellectual powers and
in that noble spirit which is at once just and desirous of peace, must
not in any case be denied or depreciated. Nevertheless, it is idle to
pretend that the influence of such essays, whether greater or less, is
not confined to a limited sphere, extending to a few individuals, or at
most to classes.

To judge by the usual course of the divine order in the realm of truth,
a total conversion of the whole mind of the age, or a reawakening of
entire nations, is only to be expected from a higher and universal
impulse imparted from above. As a preparation, however, for that divine
peace in a universal unity of faith, which so repeatedly and so many
ways is promised most distinctly even to this life, nothing can be so
effective as to remove, if possible, or at least to reconcile, that
triple discord already described as dividing and distracting the inner
man. And this is a matter which, as lying within the sphere of human
consciousness and science, unquestionably belongs to the domain of
philosophical investigation. And it is even the duty of philosophy,
whenever it follows its prevailing mediatory and atoning tendency, to
attempt scientifically to bring about the reconciliation of that strife,
and, undiscouraged by repeated failures, still to labor to re-establish
the perfect and profound harmony of consciousness and of life.

Now the first dissension, that, viz., between science and faith, whether
actual or apparent, requires for its removal before all things a mutual
understanding and compromise. The second dissension between faith in
general, even a mere philosophical and natural faith, and that unbelief
which is so general and prevalent in our age, can only end with the
perfect triumph of the truth. For only by the full light of divine
knowledge and truth--by the triumphant exposition of this true light,
and by the magic power of such a display on the minds of men--shall
doubt and infidelity be fully eradicated and destroyed. The third
dissension, between both faith and science on the one hand, and life on
the other, needs, for the removal of all misunderstanding, something
more than a mere peace and compromise on the disputed points. For this
purpose there is required a thorough union of both carried out into
fruitful and practical application, by which the living faith and the
living science may evince themselves as such, and manifest their true
and wholesome influence on life, however at present estranged from and
adverse to it.

The second and the third of these dissensions are reserved for
consideration in the two following Lectures; but the first, that, viz.,
which subsists between faith and science, is to form the subject, and
its reconciliation the problem of our present disquisition.

Now, is this dissension necessarily and really grounded in the thing
itself, and in the nature of the thing? Or, rather, does the blame of it
lie with men, and in their defective apprehension and form? I have no
hesitation in saying that a living faith and a living science will never
be at issue together, at least on essential points. In three cases, no
doubt, a dissension, a reciprocal misunderstanding, and endless conflict
between both is perfectly conceivable. It is possible, either when the
faith is a mere matter of memory and of a few acquired notions, rather
than a deeply-rooted conviction of the soul. Or, secondly, since all the
faculties of the human mind ought to co-operate in giving a full
internal development and an external shape to the truth thus divinely
imparted, it may spring up even when the soul receives it with a full
love, but is nevertheless principally, or at least too much, under the
dominion of a lively fancy, to the exclusion of a due admixture of
clearness of understanding, and the circumspection which belongs to the
distinguishing judgment. Or, thirdly, it may arise, on the other side,
when a conceited and presumptuous science seeks to establish itself
rather than truth, and places more dependence on its own conclusions
than on its announcements.

What, then, is faith, taken in itself, but the reception into the soul
of the divine and divinely-communicated verities? And what is science,
more than the apprehension thereof by the mind [_geist_]? Are there,
then, two truths, of which, however, one or the other is not true?
Undoubtedly there exists, along with the spirit of truth, another
spirit--that of contradiction and negation. But the latter is no spirit
of truth, but the spirit of untruth and delusion so often described,
which invariably triumphs whenever the mind of man, in its pursuit of
knowledge, seeks itself rather than the truth, and consequently finds,
perceives, and retains nothing but its own Me. And this evil spirit the
soul even meets half way whenever it is incapable of embracing and
retaining the life and the spirit of the holy faith, and when,
consequently, these quickly flee away, and nothing but the letter and
the empty form remain behind. But where the spirit of truth has once
departed, error in manifold shapes and forms finds, one way or other,
an entrance into the soul. Is it not one and the same truth which, on
the one side, speaking from the one revelation, impresses itself on the
soul of man as the commanding voice of love enjoining faith, and which,
on the other, condescendingly offers and presents itself to the mind or
spirit of the believer as a mystery, in order that he may, if he will,
investigate it in order to discover and adopt the meaning and the light
that are veiled and inclosed within it? Is there, then, to be a party
feud and a civil war in the heart of man, between soul and spirit, the
two elements of his existence; just as if it were some ill-organized
state where, in opposition to the supreme political power, some
insubordinate body sets itself up in authority, and presumes to give the
law? Ought, forsooth, the soul in secret to be liberal, and, in
half-unbelief, to grant immunity to all manner of lusts and desires,
while the spirit is legitimist in sentiment and constitutional in
language? Or ought the soul to be honestly _ultra_ and a thorough
legitimist in its established faith, while the mind, on its part, by its
liberal measures, is perfectly falling into error? So far is this from
being allowable, that even these names and these parties would soon
cease and disappear altogether, if, instead of party, the knowledge, and
the might, and the inspiration of life--the supreme life, _i.e._, or
God, were once to take full possession of the minds of men, and so
animate them anew and ardently inspire them with the common spirit and
ardor of the one faith and the one science.

Now, the intermediate link which unites science with faith--the mean
function between both which admits of demonstration within the limits of
the consciousness and of philosophy, is discernment [_erkennen_]. Of
this there are two kinds: the one distinguishes between right and wrong,
and, consequently, as a separate function, directs itself outwardly in
its operation, and observes differences. By the other we see and
comprehend, or understand and discern, that two objects apparently
different, are properly and essentially one and the same. It is with
this intrinsic and inwardly-directed discernment that we are here
concerned. For it is by this highest function of thought, which
penetrates into the inmost essence of each of two ideas, and by its
sentence declaring their similarity, that we perceive and discern that
this science and that faith are essentially identical. Discerning in
this sense is something different from knowing; it is, as it were, a
second knowing; or, if we may be allowed to express ourselves
mathematically, “knowing raised to a higher power.” It is this that
discovers the essential unity of Science and Faith, and that must bring
about the restoration of concord between them, and reconcile them with
each other. If, however, this second and higher knowing, or this science
of science, be referred and confined to one’s own Me or Self, as is too
often done, such a course will only lead us out of the common error of
the ordinary self-delusion into one still more profound, which will
prove the more complex and aggravated, the more scientifically it is
evolved, and which I have already depicted to you in its true colors.

Now this unity of science with faith can only be found and discovered in
their common object--in truth, consequently, and _i.e._ in God, who is
the sum of all truth. Mere negations--like that of the idea of the
infinite, or the notion of the immeasurable, which is applicable even to
nature itself, or that of the absolute or unconditional, of which many
palpably erroneous applications might easily be made--no such pure
negations, nor even any mere enumeration of predicates and properties
devoid of intrinsic coherence, can furnish us with an adequate
conception of the Deity. But now if a cognition, an understanding of
life in general, be attainable (and no skeptical perplexities have yet
been able to deter or seduce man’s sound common sense from entertaining
and acting upon such a supposition), then it is clear that there is no
reason for holding the notion of the supreme life in and by itself to be
impossible or utterly unattainable by man.

Now, this is the path which a profounder science and philosophy has
invariably marked out for itself in this respect; and in the three
different powers, which, however, are at the same time but one, in the
trine energy of the one first cause of all, has it ever sought and
discovered this highest notion. In this notion belonging to the supreme
science, as advanced by philosophy in very different ages of the world
and among widely-remote nations, there is a remarkable resemblance,
although in the subordinate statements there is a greater or less
admixture of error. In the midst of many subordinate aberrations, it has
recognized the one great fact, that in the Supreme Life, who has His
life in Himself, and is the prime source of all other life, there is, at
the same time, a creative intelligence and thought which from the
beginning issued therefrom as the Eternal Word self-subsistent and
ordering all things, and that the Light which proceeded therefrom was
itself also the first life. But now, just as this original life, which
was from the beginning, was not simply Infinite, but even the source of
all finite and infinite existence, and as this Life is an illumination
which illuminates Itself and all other things, so is this Light also a
living entity, and not merely spiritual and immaterial (for as such even
It might still be a part of nature), but one thoroughly supernatural and
holy, and, if man will have it so, an awful light which repels all
darkness from itself, and, eternally rejecting, annihilates it.

Now, this Life, this Word, and this Light, these three different powers
in the same energy and in the one substance, which even, therefore, is
called the Supreme, is at once the highest object of all science, and
the center and fundamental source of all faith. And this science of the
Highest, even when regarded exclusively from this single aspect of
knowing, does not exhibit itself as entirely separate from, and
independent of, faith, but even, as such, is from the very first in
contact with it, and, taken simply as knowing, involves in it a
concurrence and co-operation of faith.

In very many and different, not to say infinitely various ways it may be
shown, pointed out, and established, that without this full and correct
notion of the Supreme Being, every other species of existence and of
knowledge must be without coherence and proper significance. However, as
has been so often observed already, there is not involved in it any
strict necessity. It does not possess any rigor of logical sequence,
constraining the assent of one who in his heart is otherwise disposed,
and in his sentiments has otherwise determined. For so must it ever be:
the final resolve of conviction is left to the free assent, that quiet
internal concurrence of the will already mentioned, which in general
brings man into actual communion with God, and opens and enlarges his
sense for the divine--since such assent is itself even that sense, or,
at least, the principle and commencement of it.

And this complement of the highest science, which is furnished by the
free internal assent, is even of itself nothing less than an act of
faith. Consequently, the complete and correct notion of the Supreme
Essence is the mystical ring in which science and faith are at the first
beginning indissolubly connected. Nothing but the perversity and
shortsightedness of men in regard both to science and faith, tears them
asunder again, and, separating what in God is one and what He has joined
together, sets science and faith in hostile opposition, mutually
obstructing and destroying one another. Moreover, this highest notion of
the highest science is the scientific vertex or the scientifically
culminating expression of man’s universal belief in the one living God.
For if this one God is necessarily to be conceived of as endued with
life, it will be sufficient for me to appeal to the fact, that physical
science knows not, and no one even can conceive or comprehend or think
of a mode of life in any sphere of existence, without implying a
plurality, or, at least, a duality of co-operating forces. But if,
further, we are to think of it as a perfect life, then must there be in
it a third living energy or operation. Thus, therefore, on this side
also the highest notion of a science which has attained to its end, and
to the summit of all existence and all knowledge, is in perfect unison
with the universal feeling of truth and the natural and simple faith of
man.

But now, if the highest science and a divine faith intrinsically and
essentially be properly one, it will naturally turn and depend on the
preservation of the true ratio and correct proportion between the two
powers and elements of human existence, whether or not in their further
application and actual life they are to continue at unity, without
coming into hostile collision and discord. The believing soul, like the
mistress of a family, ought to hold and retain the chief place in the
house; the spirit that knows, or that aims at knowledge, as the master,
may pursue out of doors whatever avocations it pleases, only it must be
continually returning to the domestic hearth, and there warm itself at
the pure ascending flame of devotion and pious meditation. And if in its
wanderings it should most love to stray in the rich and blooming garden
of nature, then of the rare aromatic woods and seeds it there gathers,
it may throw one or more into the fire, in order to add some sweet,
ethereal incense to its warming and illuminating flames.

Or, leaving figure, to express myself in more precise and exact
terms--the believing part of the consciousness observing its due
proportion, ought not to refuse and reject the true and Godlike science
together with that which is Godless, pernicious, and false. So, too, the
cognitive or scientific portion ought to abstain from all hostile
attacks on the other domain and on positive faith, which in all
probability it has not sufficiently studied, and still less perfectly
understands. And thus, also, when this cognitive part (as it ought, and
as is essential to its truth and correctness as science) carefully
watches itself and rigorously abstains from all arbitrary, presumptuous,
and egoistic opinions and ideas, suggestions or beginnings of ideas, as
involving the first disposition to false science and every species of
error, then there is no need for it to be held in check by the other
part, nor to be limited by it.

But in any case we must be ready to admit that the fault lies in man,
and on no account suppose that the dissension has its ground in the
thing itself. For the thing here is nothing less than truth itself,
which can not be twofold, since God Himself is this truth and the sum
thereof. It is therefore important, on the one hand, by means of the old
spirit, to be ever giving new life and energy to faith, by carrying it
back continually to its own eternal foundations, in order to avert the
danger, which is ever threatening it, of spiritual deadness and of the
ascendency of the letter that killeth. And, on the other hand, we ought
never to cease from or to become weary of refining more and more the
higher philosophical science from all the egoistic dross of arbitrary
opinions and fancied apodictic conclusions, laboring the while to
complete it according to the threefold dimensions (to hazard the
expression) of this so utterly immeasurable essence of everlasting
truth, by keeping incessantly in view the unfathomable depth, the
inaccessible height, the inexhaustible center of bliss of the one
inconceivable and ineffable Being. For the fault and the cause of the
dissension must in no case be ascribed to the thing itself, but
invariably either to a dead, imperfectly enlightened, and untelligent
faith, on the one hand, or on the other, to the arbitrary assumptions or
one-sided conclusions of a science, which in this respect and degree at
least is false and erroneous.

But inasmuch as the fault and origin of the dissension has partly its
foundation in human imperfection and finiteness, we must rest content,
even if we can not all at once get rid of and remove it. We must be
satisfied if in this ceaseless struggle with man’s hereditary and
connatural fault of error, the progress though slow is sure. It is
enough if in this surely advancing progression, each step, however
short, brings us nearer to the truth, and to the perfect cognition of
the unity of the highest science and divine faith. But this is a point
on which even individuals, with the most perfect honesty of purpose and
a sincere love of truth, too often go wrong. Unable, perhaps, to
reconcile to their own minds some conflicting claim of science and of
faith, and to see their way clear out of their perplexities, then to cut
the knot of the problem to which they despair of soon finding a
satisfactory solution, they precipitately adopt some partial and
overhasty conclusion. But slow, extremely slow, is the advance of man’s
mental enlightenment in the realm of truth. And if the course of
Providence, according to the very gradual progression of divine order in
this domain, must be counted by millenniums, then in the life of
individuals, years and decades must be reckoned as days and hours. Even
though some grave doubt, distracting the inmost feelings, but scarcely
definable in express terms--some oppressive problem suggested by the
peculiar mental temperament of the individual, can not be resolved in
three hours, or even three days, still it may perhaps in three years;
and if three years be too little, then thirty years may probably
suffice. While in spite of this inward doubt we follow uninterruptedly
our vocation in outer life, many a silent change is effected in our
minds, and so at length with altered views and enlarged experience we
attain to a calm and clear conviction on the points which at an earlier
period had appeared to us obscure, had held us in suspense, and
oppressed us with perplexing difficulties.

This is the only road that can be safely trod by those who desire above
all things to retain a divine faith, but at the same time not to
renounce the pursuit of higher science. And is not this the difficult
position in the present day of every well-disposed person who is in any
way connected with science, or whose pursuits in life require him to
occupy himself with it? But now, in the case of physical science, we are
all content to observe this law of tardy progress; indeed we think it
quite natural, and hold it to be the only correct method. And it is only
by following a similar course in the internal investigations of
philosophy that we shall ever arrive at a stable position and the firm
ground of eternal truth. By any other method, we shall most assuredly
lose ourselves among the ever-shifting systems which change with the
fashions of the day, or be carried away by the baseless hypotheses of
this or that sect or school, which, like the sterile blossoms in the
spring, fall fruitless to the ground.

In respect to this tardiness of progress, which most assuredly is at
least not inconsistent with true philosophy, I can appeal to my own
instance, which in such a case is, I hope, allowable. It is now
nine-and-thirty years since I first read, with indescribable avidity,
the entire works of Plato in the original; and ever since, amid many
other scientific studies, philosophical research has been my principal
and favorite avocation. In this pursuit many and various have been the
systems of science--of discord and of error--that I have had to wander
through. Satisfied neither with the opinions of others nor with my own
views, I felt reluctant to come forward with a system of my own. In the
mean while my view of philosophy has been in a state of inchoation and
of tardy but progressive development. Slowly and incompletely, little by
little, incidentally and fragmentarily, at different epochs, has some of
its principles come to the light, or escaped me in my earlier literary
works and compositions--an explanation which I do not consider
superfluous, even for those who are best acquainted with them. But the
more I held fast to the two poles of divine faith and of supreme
science, which as such is also divine, the firmer footing did I gain in
that point and that center in the everlasting Beginning, in which both
are one and cease to be at issue, but rather intimately cohering, do but
lend fresh life, strength, and elevation to each other. And now at
length I believe I have attained to that point when, fully persuaded
myself of this unity of science and faith as grounded in God, I may
safely indulge the wish to impart to others this important truth,
publicly to set it forth, and develop it to the whole world. And it is
to me no slight cause of congratulation that I am to enter upon this
task in the present place and in the present manner.

Besides those points of correlation already pointed out, between the
highest science and faith, there is still another way in which the
former, in its all-embracing notion of the triple life of the primal
cause and force, is referred to faith, and even to its positive articles
and its divine authority. It is obliged to appeal to this, in order to
find and maintain its guiding rule and correct standard for the further
application and development of this highest and fundamental notion, and
to keep it dear of all erroneous and extravagant excrescences. The
necessity of this will be best and most simply shown by a few historical
instances.

When we open any of the ancient writings of the Hindoos, whether it be
their scientific systems, their books of laws and customs for practical
life, or their merely mythological poems, we find them, in every
instance, based on the notion of a divine trinity, and, in some cases,
asserting it in express words and phrases. But inasmuch as, forgetting
to maintain the unity together with the trinity, they abandoned the
simple truth and made thereout three distinct gods, the metaphysical
theory (which otherwise contains so many and distinct traces of ancient
truth) and the trinity of the Hindoos has become a pure mythology,
comprising as long a genealogy of gods as any other. But the retention,
however, of this fundamental notion, their mythology has acquired a
theistic hue and coloring, which forms a strong contrast between it and
the better known mythology of Greece, notwithstanding that in other
respects, and in its purely poetic portion, it exhibits many and strong
features of resemblance and affinity. Thus, in this wonderful chaos of
distorted truth, of monstrous error, and pure fiction, we meet with ten
fabulous creations of men, instead of the single true one with which,
only within the last three centuries, the Hindoos have formed a more
thorough and permanently-based acquaintance. Moreover, in life and in
practice there is exhibited a renunciation of the world, and a
mortification of the body, which, far surpassing the rigorous
self-denial of the early Christian solitaries in Egypt, is carried to an
intensity and an extreme which it is almost incredible that human nature
should be capable of. But co-existing with all this, we meet with
immoral practices and licentious excesses sanctified by falsehood and
superstition, similar to those we have already become acquainted with in
the more sensual heathenism of antiquity, that, I mean, which prevailed
among the ancient races of this our western portion of the globe. Into
such a frightful abyss of error even the most spiritual system of
metaphysics inevitably falls, or at least easily becomes associated with
falsehood, whenever it is left entirely to itself, and is devoid of a
divine rule for its guidance, and the simple standard of a higher and
heaven-descended authority.

In the history, too, of the development of the Grecian mind we discover
a similar doctrine advanced in one of its latest epochs. The
Neo-Platonists were very well acquainted with this doctrine and idea of
a divine trinity; as, indeed, it may also be traced in the still earlier
writings of Plato himself. How far the expressions and formularies
employed by the former writers scientifically to convey this idea were
perfect and correct is a question which does not concern us at present
to inquire. Moreover, the determination of it would carry us far beyond
our proper limits, inasmuch as its exact solution would require a nice
and accurate classification of the several writers and systems which
belong to this school. It is, however, sufficient to remark that this
profound metaphysical school of the Neo-Platonists, which reckoned among
its adherents the Emperor Julian, stood in direct and hostile collision
with Christianity. To adapt to the purpose of their opposition the old
Grecian mythology, a faith in which had sensibly declined even among the
masses, they attempted to mold it according to their own views and
notions, into such a theological shape and direction as would make it
more closely resemble the Indian. By this means they believed it
possible to revive and reanimate the popular faith. But, even if their
ulterior view and their whole object and actuating motive had not taken
a direction so decidedly hostile to the truth, still their enterprise,
even as such, could not but miscarry. No doubt the mythology of Greece,
in its earliest times and original shape, did contain, in some of its
less prominent and more hidden passages, esoterically interpreted, a few
symbolical doctrines and somewhat theistic ideas, as many a profound
examiner of it, in modern times, has recognized and demonstrated. But,
notwithstanding all these traces, which we must regard as the remains of
an older tradition of the primary knowledge and full revelation
belonging to primeval times, still, in subsequent ages, the Grecian
mythology had, on the whole, assumed exclusively and pre-eminently a
poetic development and form, which even subordinated to itself that
political tendency which in so many of its details is so strong. It was,
therefore, nothing less than an absurd and inconsistent attempt to try,
so late in the day, to metamorphose this beautiful world of fable into a
factitious theory of metaphysics, and a colossal system of mysticism,
after the manner and fashion of the Indian. Accordingly, like every
other attempt that is fundamentally false and directly opposed to the
spirit of the age, it passed away at last, without leaving a trace of
its influence.

This inclination to the poetic aberration of polytheism and a
deification of nature, so universally prevalent in the heathen antiquity
of the West, renders it easily conceivable why, in the first and Jewish
portion of written revelation, such great stress is laid pre-eminently
and primarily on the oneness of the living God. All other
expressions--such as that of the eternal creative Word, of the
life-giving Spirit of God--are, as it were, but allusions full of hidden
meaning for the more clear-sighted and profounder inquirers. How
numerous, nevertheless, such indications are; how frequent the reference
to three powers or persons--the time, energy, and property of the one
Supreme Being--an allusion to which is contained even in the different
Hebrew names of the Godhead, is known and acknowledged, even by those
who would, if they could, deny it, both to themselves and others.

The tradition of the Jews, which, lying without the strictly-defined
body of Scripture, yet proceeds concurrently with it, while it possesses
of itself no authority, is, nevertheless, a very useful though too much
neglected source of illustration for the sacred volume. Now, in the
Talmud the doctrine and notion of the divine trinity is expressed quite
fully and distinctly, and without reserve; although in the mode and
manner of conceiving it there is much that is both false and
objectionable.

In that second portion of revelation with which our present era
commences, together with the fulfilling and perfection of the object of
faith, this supreme science is brought prominently and clearly forward.
No doubt a certain caution and degree of reserve on this doctrine of the
Trinity are distinctly visible in the earliest teaching and statements,
so long as the preaching of the new faith was confined within the Jewish
nation, on whose mind the idea of the oneness of God was still deeply
imprinted, even though, like every other principle of their religion, it
was ill understood and had long ceased to be embraced with a living
energy, being taken merely in the dead letter. But ere long this thin
veil was also removed from the All-holy One, and the great mystery of
faith set forth as the introduction to the fourth and last Gospel. From
the latter I have accordingly borrowed that designation of this great
mystery which is even the most appropriate to science; of the supreme
life which is itself omnipotence, of the eternal word which is
ominisence, and of the uncreated light which is the All-holy.

Certain great thinkers, who, however, in many respects can not be
classed among proper Christians, have indeed recognized and acknowledged
the profound significance of this opening of the Gospel. Only they
adopted a spirit of hostile analysis, which, as it attacked so many of
the great works of olden time, did not spare even this divine monument.
They lost themselves in all sorts of superfluous hypotheses as to the
source from which this or that passage was derived, and with what object
it was introduced. Much simpler were it, without having recourse to any
such artificial explanations, to receive the divine truth in sincerity
as it is offered to us. If we must ascribe some special design for its
composition, it will be sufficient to suppose, that after the Evangel of
Life and the new era commencing therewith had been sufficiently set
forth as history in a triple narrative, it was requisite to add thereto
this Evangel of the Beginning--as the Gospel according to the spirit of
the highest science, in so far as this is fully identical with the
divine faith, and henceforward was always to continue one with it. It
was quite in the natural order of things that the word which was uttered
at the beginning of the material creation, and is the basis of the first
revelation, should also at the opening of the second revelation, and the
spiritual creation of a new era, be repeated (though in a different and
far higher sense) for the soul in the realm of truth:--“And God said:
Let there be light, and there was light.”




LECTURE X.

OF THE TWOFOLD SPIRIT OF TRUTH AND ERROR IN SCIENCE; OF THE CONFLICT OF
FAITH WITH INFIDELITY.


In the terrestial creation, in the realm of nature, no sooner did the
behest go forth, “Let there be light,” than the accomplishment forthwith
followed. Scarcely was this light and life-creating word spoken, than it
was succeeded, spontaneously and immediately, without let or hinderance,
by the second word of the joyful conclusion: “And there was light.”
Quite otherwise, however, is it in the life and in the world of
free-created man, in the progression of his intellectual development, in
the history of his mind [_geist_], in his now advancing, now
retrograding thought and knowledge. Here, indeed, the first call to
light and divine truth does not pass over even man’s stubborn and
taciturn heart altogether unheeded and unanswered, and without eliciting
some faint response. But lasting is the struggle between light and
darkness, between knowledge and ignorance, between faith and infidelity.
Ever wavering from side to side, and fluctuating from one extreme to
another, the victory long remains undecided. And centuries often, nay,
thousands of years, pass away ere with perfect truth that word of
fulfillment and completion can be uttered, and we can go on,
undoubtedly, to say, “And there was light.” Even when the true end is
pursued along the direct road, the right track is often lost amid the
endless strife and controversy of men, while a long train of useless
discussion raises so thick a cloud of dust as shuts it entirely out of
sight, and so a new route has to be sought and opened from quite an
opposite quarter.

How deeply was the Gentile world sunk in wild and cruel superstition,
when the Great Prophetic Spirit and the Disperser of that Egyptian
darkness, which hung over it, repeated or wrote down those first words
of light for the spiritual no less than the material creation! Assuredly
he had in view thereby a new genesis for his people--a new life and a
new beginning of light. Then followed fifteen centuries of probation.
And what was this long period but one ceaseless though alternating
struggle between light and darkness? At the end of it, in spite of its
great and noble gifts and superior knowledge, the whole nation had
fallen into the lowest depths of luxury and corruption, on the one hand
a prey to the wilder passions, on the other spiritually dead and rotten.
But, the shadow of its former self, it dragged on a miserable existence,
oppressed by a foreign yoke and torn by intestine sects and parties. The
one claiming to be the only legal sect (and as concerned the letter of
the law, and the outward ritual, it was so in fact), and arrogant and
obstinate, closely adhering to the dead letter, was widely estranged and
alienated from the spirit of love and mildness. And thus the very name
of Pharisee has become odious and hateful, having passed into a proverb
and a by-word. Wholly mistaking the meaning of the revelation imparted
to them, they misunderstood the future to which it referred, no less
than the immediate fortunes of their nation and their own condition.
Consequently they went totally wrong in the interpretation of the
former, as well as of the problem of the present which was laid before
them. For they took it in the narrow and perverted spirit of party. No
doubt the Pharisees reckoned among their members many truly pious,
well-disposed, and right-thinking individuals--men, who in the beginning
of the new era of the world, as appeals from the simple history of those
times, acknowledged the truth, and recognized the hand of God pointing
and leading onward to the future. These men mourned in silence over the
revolting pride and stiffneckedness of their cotemporaries. But though
endued with great learning and talents, and burning zeal for right and
truth, they did not venture openly to oppose and to teach differently
from their brethren, even because in reality the law, the dead and
external law, was on their side.

But the other party was that of the Sadducees. Quite different in
principle, these were the innovators among the Jews. Explaining away the
theological creed of their nation, they went so far in this direction as
to throw into shade, and to question, or, rather, absolutely to deny,
the immortality of the soul. In civil matters and questions of law and
policy, they were the liberal free-thinkers of their day.

From amid these two dark clouds, which, if they shone at all, glimmered
only with the deceptive halo of the false light and hue of party, broke
the new dawn and sun of Truth--at first unobserved, nor understood by
any, so thickly had these mists overspread the horizon. But this new
genesis, and this full illumination, was no longer destined exclusively
for a single people. Accordingly, it gradually spread over the ten or
twelve great nations who occupy two parts of the habitable globe, and
also possess and govern the greatest portion of the third and the most
ancient. And it is, in short, by means of that intellectual superiority
and civilization which they owe to this springing of a new era, and this
first light, that the former bear rule in the remotest regions of the
earth.

Since the dawning of that day-spring eighteen centuries have elapsed,
and sadly torn and distracted is the present aspect of Christianity. We
should, no doubt, give a very distorted picture of the state of
Christendom were we anxiously to trace its resemblance, through every
minuter trait and nicer shade, to the old world at its close and at the
end of those fifteen centuries of Jewish preparation. Such a minute
parallel would be false, whether we were to compare it to the moral
state and character of that nation, mentally blinded and hurrying with
hasty steps toward its ruin, or even to the old heathen world of Rome,
already condemned by anarchy and infidelity. Still it is generally true.
For it is undeniable that man is perpetually relapsing into dissension
and party quarrels, even while the hand which sways the destinies of the
world, in ever-recurring epochs of renovation, is continually presenting
to him anew both truth and life, health and peace. And every one can
answer for himself the question whether this new proclamation of light
and truth, this divine message of peace and salvation, has yet reached
its full accomplishment. Has the Sun of Righteousness yet penetrated,
and cast its bright beams on all the relations of life, to the very
inmost joints of soul and spirit? Can it with perfect truth be said,
relatively to the whole human race, “And there is light”--that light, at
least, which alone is good, even because it shall remain forever? For
those meteoric sparks which flash across the universal night and
darkness, from the systems of man’s wisdom, which, crossing and
recrossing each other’s path, are soon again extinguished forever; or
those clouds of public opinion, charged with electric fluid and with
pestilence, which, for the most part, is but the public outburst of some
party passion; these emit no lasting, no salutary, and, therefore, no
true light. Dark and gloomy, too, perhaps, in its future prospects,
appears the long struggle between divine truth and human discord,
between light and darkness, between faith and infidelity. But the more
difficult and intricate the problem is which forms the theme of our
present disquisition, the more diligently and the more conscientiously
ought we to seek out and dwell upon every bright and quiet spot. For
such alone can cheer us on our way along the rugged path that leads to
the blissful goal of internal and spiritual peace, which will
essentially contribute to give a solid basis to the public and social
tranquillity, and to insure its permanence.

Slowly and gradually is it that the individual mind, distracted and
vacillating between God and a divine faith on the one hand, and a
higher, or even the highest, science on the other, advances in its
progress toward the perfect truth. Arriving, step by step, at fuller and
better convictions, it attains at last to a clear discernment that,
properly and fundamentally, these two apparently-conflicting objects are
not distinct, but in their inmost essence are perfectly one. But for the
final attainment of this end, the most important condition to be
observed is that scientific patience to which I called your attention in
the last Lecture. The chief thing to be guarded against is a precipitate
and over-hasty decision. For by such we should incur the great danger of
sacrificing the sacred deposit of faith to science, or of foolishly
rejecting the treasures of true science, which as such is indispensable
to the higher life, and even necessary and useful for the confirmation
of faith itself. And why, in the pursuit of truth--that proper spiritual
theme and highly interesting matter of the otherwise flat and insipid
drama of life--should we feel indisposed to such a scientific patience,
as I called it? Why should we be unwilling to recognize it as what it
really is--both salutary and indispensable to human frailty, and, as an
intellectual virtue, no less necessary than even moral patience? And the
latter is even the fundamental condition of every great or little
business, and almost every pursuit of life, if it is to attain to a
happy result, and is not to fail of its true end and aim. For patience
is, as it were, the indispensable portion which their earthly existence
brings to all men. Not only is it needed by the invalid on the bed of
sickness, in the long and tedious observance of his physician’s precise
and rigid prescriptions--not only is it wanted by the teacher in his
troublesome task of giving the first development to the intellectual
powers of the child--not only is patience requisite for the judge who
has to settle the complicated quarrel of two litigants, of whom each
claims his sympathy, each desires to win him to his own side and to bias
his judgment--but it is also indispensable to the warrior whom ambition
hurries forward in the pursuit of honor for himself and his country. For
numberless are the hardships and privations, and many, too, are the
miseries which the soldier must undergo before he can gain the object of
his hopes, the hard-fought battle and the glorious victory. The
statesman, too, with his wide sphere of influence and authority, stands
eminently in need of patience. How watchful and comprehensive must be
his vigilance, how deliberate his precautions, lest the organic course
of his administration should come to a check or stop, in consequence of
his having neglected, or failed to provide for any single member of the
great body, or any regulating-wheel in the complicated machinery of the
state.

But, on the other hand, there are also moments in human life where the
final issue turns not so much on a steady and uniform perseverance in
continuous activity, as on a decided resolution and firmness of purpose.
Among these we may place foremost, perhaps, in an intellectual relation,
the dissension between faith and infidelity, and the choice at the point
where the two branch off forever.

It is not here my design to set up, to commend, and to extol faith, nor
to decry, to attack, and to make war upon infidelity. For the former
would take me beyond my present limits; the latter would lead me into a
boundless field of details, and require me to take an exhaustive survey,
not only of all actually existent, but also of all conceivable,
prejudices and delusions. My principal object is rather to sketch a true
and exact picture of both, comprising, at the same time, all their
historical manifestations, and explaining their psychological causes, in
order to exhibit them both in their true light, so that man may choose
for himself and decide between them.

Now the apparent--or it may be real, but still only accidental--schism
between science and faith is, in the first place, internal. It is often,
indeed, profoundly hidden and concealed in the inmost depths of the
heart. It is therefore inwardly only that it admits of being adjusted
and finally reconciled. When this task is once accomplished in the heart
of an individual, and the choice is at least made one way or the other,
then this decision manifests itself outwardly, either as the triumph of
truth in the unity of science and faith, or as infidelity and
skepticism, shows itself in the form of a determined opposition to this
unity, or to faith itself. And the latter is the form it also assumes in
the intermediate case when the schism between science and faith is
declared to be irreconcilable. Openly expressed, therefore, these two
views go far beyond the original dissension, and pass into the second
schism and conflict between faith and infidelity. And although this
problem be itself an original and internal one, still it reveals itself
pre-eminently as a practical schism in actual life, and it is as such,
also, that it develops and manifests itself in history.

But it is our object to make this comparison and parallel between faith
and infidelity, in the full practical meaning of the words, useful and
historically applicable to life. For this purpose we must not regard
infidelity as founded exclusively on caprice, aversion, or
obstinacy--consequently on ignorance--but consider it rather as enjoying
every intellectual advantage, and commanding all the resources of
learning and science. For a purely personal, and merely negative
unbelief, without any deep foundation, and without even an apparently
scientific confirmation, is neither very dangerous to the community,
and, above all, presents little if any interest to philosophy. But, on
the other hand, if faith is successfully to cope with such an adversary,
furnished with all the armor and expedients of science, it must be able
to stand the comparison with it in this respect. It must, in short, be
conceived and set forth in its natural relation to true science, and,
taking its proper place and position, must act in union and co-operation
with it.

I must here, however, premise a second preliminary remark. I can not
bring myself to follow a very general opinion, and look upon faith as a
true and duly moderated medium between superstition and infidelity. On
the contrary, I join superstition with infidelity, and can not but class
them together. If by this term of superstition nothing is meant but some
exaggeration or other, some over-excitement of the moral and religious
feelings in individuals, then such a purely-personal case admits not of
being raised to a general rule, nor elevated into a universal principle.
And in any case it does not fall within the range of philosophical
speculation. For the care of the spiritual health and healthy diet of
the believing soul, which draws both life and love from the deep
sources of faith, belongs to a wholly different province from that of
philosophy. But by this word and notion of superstition there is often
understood a very childish error, which does not duly separate and
distinguish the figurative language and figurative forms of fancy from
the substance of the true intrinsic meaning. This error, which thus
confounds the figurative expression with reality, and takes it to be
something real, may justly be called childish, inasmuch as it is
universally peculiar, almost natural, to the intellect of children. Now,
in and by itself, and simply understood, such an internal _optical
delusion_ results from nothing but a psychological imperfection, or a
mere semblance of intellectual nature. But when this error is carried
out into a system, and applied, on a large scale, to the sum and essence
of faith, then, undoubtedly, it possesses a profounder origin and
significance. This species of superstition belongs to one of those
classes of error which I am about to describe. When, for instance, an
actual positive error is comprised in and understood by this name, then
it belongs to infidelity, which, in general, is rather a false faith
than any mere absence of belief. Infidelity, in short, is an erroneous
belief. And such, also, is every species of superstition, and this
designation of it by the name of erroneous faith, if generally adopted,
would be more correct and accurate, or, at least, less liable to be
misunderstood than its ordinary title.

For, to adhere to the usual term, every species of infidelity is either
a material deification of nature and a worship of the sensible powers of
life, or it is an abstract deification of the absolute subjective Me,
and the pure reason, with its endless thinking and knowing. Even when it
is conceived in a purely skeptical light as an absolute _not-knowing_,
still even in this case it is the understanding that is deified.
Standing apart from, and thinking itself superior to, the weak
prejudices of other men--in its negation feeling and fancying itself to
be instinct with genius--it is regarded and set up as the highest object
of existence, and thereby in a certain intellectual sense is made an
idol of. Even the evil power of perverted genius--for such we may well
call it when it ventures to contemn both law and right, and fancies
itself to be raised high above the voice of conscience and the moral
duties of docility and humblemindedness as belonging to ordinary
minds--even such a perverted genius may be made the idol of a man who
has once turned his back on the simple truth and on God, and has
arrogantly set himself in opposition to both. We may, in short, without
hesitation, advance it as an invariable principle and an unerring rule,
that the man who has lost or abandoned--not to say rejected--the idea
and belief in the one good and righteous God, has enshrined within his
breast and cherishes some more or less dangerous idol, whether it be the
subjective Me or some fearful passion, or, it may be, some firm and
well-finished system of deified reason or nature.

The complete notion or ideal scheme of pure faith, in its organic union,
co-operation, and true relation with all higher and with all natural or
earthly science, must be conceived of and sketched in agreement with the
triple principle of the human consciousness, according to which it is
divided into spirit, soul, and sense. At least it is in this way that it
can most easily be made clear, and being accurately apprehended in its
essential properties and nature, is kept distinct from all foreign
elements and adscititious matters. But infidelity, and that doubt and
absence of harmony from which it takes its rise, as well as that error
which results from it, have their seat in the fourfold consciousness.
These all owe their origin to that disunion in which the mind was
involved by the Fall, and which manifests itself principally in the
dissension which subsists between Fancy and Reason, and eventually
destroys all harmony and co-operation between the Understanding and the
Will. For this twofold schism in the human consciousness is the source
of all philosophical error and of its various false systems. And this
scientific error again, so soon as it attains to a practical utterance,
and in a living form enters into or interferes with life, becomes
infidelity.

Originally, however, the consciousness was not thus rent by dissension.
Throughout, in its triple principle of sense, soul, and spirit,
prevailed one living, harmonious action. Now, in this its natural state,
the soul must be regarded as the principle of faith. And this is a point
especially to be borne in mind. It is, however, too often forgotten. And
consequently the faith, or, rather (for we are not speaking at present
of the subject-matter so much as of the mental act), the believing, is
in an external manner derived very incompletely and unsatisfactorily
from the divided and quadruple consciousness. For generally the act of
believing and its essence is made to consist in a certain internal
reserve on the part of both understanding and will, and a similar
control of the fancy, and even of the reason, as well as in the
recognition of these limits and of such limitation.

We must, no doubt, admit that there may be very much which the human
intellect can not fathom nor see through. This it would by no means be
difficult to prove. And still more easy were it to show that man’s will
can not always give the law, but must often submit to and recognize a
higher and more universal authority. And as regards the fancy, every one
will be ready--not to say forward--to make a somewhat similar admission.
The faculty of imagination, sensuous and material in its origin and in
its operation, and always remaining in the highest degree subjective, is
liable to innumerable illusions, to which we ascribe no value, or,
rather, which we carefully endeavor to dispel from our minds, whenever
we attempt to penetrate into the inmost essence of the highest truth
which it is the object of faith to embrace. That, moreover, the reason,
no less than the fancy, has its peculiar--one might almost say, its
innate--optical delusions, must be but too well known to every one who
has made the slightest progress in the art of logic, and advanced beyond
the mere elements of a philosophical examination of this faculty.

All this, however, is only a negative nature. The mere recognition and
acknowledgment of the fact that we can and ought to restrain our reason
and reserve our judgment whenever a higher act of faith comes into
question--or, in other words, that in such a case the absolute reason,
with its logical processes and laws of thought, is not alone qualified
to decide, but meets with limits which it is unable to surmount--such
concessions do not lead to any positive result. They do but establish
the possibility of a faith which may transcend and is not confined
within these bounds. While, however, they lead to the inference that
such a faith is thoroughly conceivable, and that while it transcends the
reason is, nevertheless, rational, and capable of being brought into
perfect unison with the sound reason, they do not by any means establish
at once its reality. All this is rather the preparatory step to
believing, and not the true living faith itself.

A true living faith (and we are here speaking of the function of
believing, rather than of the particular details of a positive creed),
is nothing else than the reception into the soul of the truth given unto
us by God. And inasmuch as the soul is in its origin loving, and,
indeed, the very faculty of love, a true living faith can not be
thought of or exist without this accompaniment of love, which is even
its distinctive characteristic.

In the case, for instance, of a special form and positive rule of faith,
the incompetency of the reason and understanding to pass a definitive
judgment on such high and divine matters may be acknowledged, and even
the external will may sacrifice its own inclinations and submit to the
requirements of a positive law. But so long as all this remains, as it
were, external to man, so long as the soul within does not concur
therewith--a fact which may be infallibly discerned by the want or
absence of love--then in this case it is but a dead faith, even though
outwardly, and in the judgment of others, it may pass as legitimate and
orthodox. Then only is it a true living faith when it is wholly received
into the entire soul, as manifested by its internal fruitfulness in
spiritual thought and moral action. For it is the soul that
believes--that same thinking and loving soul which we have already
designated the center of the collective consciousness of man and of his
moral life. In this state, however, the soul has undergone a change; is
this higher act of believing its cogitation has become steady and
uniform, and its love perfectly pure and abidingly permanent in God.

But now, if in the triple consciousness the soul be the principle of
faith, then is the spirit or mind [_geist_] that of higher science, of
free thought, of a full and complete discernment, and of the final and
supreme act of distinguishing and deciding. And by this higher science I
mean that which has for its exclusive object the eternal truth, and Him
who is the sum and source of all immutable verities. But, thirdly, the
sensuous faculty is the principle of all lower sensible, terrestrial,
and natural knowledge. And this comprises all human history, and
together therewith all language and art, and every branch of learning
that is occupied therewith. But besides the physical sciences,
mathematics also belong to this department, for these are dependent on
the sensuous conditions of number, weight, and measure, and consequently
on time and space, and on those material properties which fill space,
viz., gravity and solidity.

Now there is nothing, however hidden--nothing, however profound--into
which this sensuous principle of knowledge, which investigates all that
is earthly, natural or human, and historical, may not attempt at least
to penetrate. Only the inquiring senses must not quit their true center.
In other words, they ought not to make a hostile attack on the center of
the consciousness, which is even the believing soul. They must not, by
breaking through it, or passing by it, attempt violently and unduly to
ascend to the highest. For in such a case, attempting to create a
supreme and highest object of their own, raising it on their own soil,
and drawing its materials from their own sources, they will produce
nothing but absolutely false and mere nature-gods, or else some
historical phantoms, or idols of national recollections and patriotic
enthusiasm, such as were enshrined in the heathen worship of antiquity.
For even, without material images and altars, such an idolatry may be
revived in a scientific form, similar to what we have witnessed, or, if
we look around us, may still witness, with our own eyes. And as little
can the free spirit of supreme knowledge look down from its own height
on this center of the soul, and pay no regard either to faith or love.
In the depths of sensuous observation, amid all the rich treasures of
physical and historical science, it can not move as sovereign without
being first invested with the luminous garment of pure faith and love.
Otherwise it only hastens from one error to another to fall from the
first abyss into a second and still deeper one.

The pure and living faith of a loving soul abiding permanently in God,
is properly the center of the human consciousness--the natural passage
of life for the senses as they ascend into the heights, and for the mind
or spirit as it penetrates into the depths. It is the connecting mean
which not only reconciles and adjusts, joins and combines the two, but
also restores them to harmonious unity.

In the preceding Lecture I considered the notion of the truth in which
the supreme science and the divine faith coincide, and are at unison in
reference to their subject-matter--consequently, as the right notion of
Him who is truth itself. Viewing it thus from its objective side
principally, I designated it the sum and source of all truth. We have
now, in the progress of our speculations, met again with this notion in
its subjective aspect. It is chiefly in regard to its form that it is at
present to engage our attention. We have, in short, to answer the
question how the consciousness must organically be formed and fashioned,
and divided, but still harmonized in all its parts, so that in thought
and knowledge, in faith, love, and science, in investigating and in
learning, it may be well-grounded and find a stable resting-point, and
be no longer distracted by dissension and doubt.

Now the more the living faith becomes love the more does it, through the
immediate feeling and personal experience of life, attain to the
certainty of science. For whatever we experience in our own selves, or
whatever our own life brings as acquainted with, whatever we are
immediately sensible of, and feel that we also know and are certain of
it, that at least is a matter on which we are not likely to be led
astray by the seeming dialectical proofs of the opposite, or by all
skeptical attacks, or objections to the effect that such an immediate
sensation and knowledge of a higher object is impossible. Although we
are incapable of refuting them, we are, nevertheless, unmoved by the
doubts which are raised even against the possibility of our own life and
existence. We let them pass by and still live on in the world until, in
some unlooked-for moment, and some unhoped-for way, the true solution,
and the answer to these cavils which call in question the reality both
of man’s inner life and his personal experience, spontaneously suggest
themselves. And in the same way that the highest science, so soon as it
discerns and understands its own nature, also becomes conscious of
faith, and of its own dependence on faith, and being supported,
completed, and perfected thereby, comes into immediate and living
contact with it, so, on the other hand, the higher faith in the divine,
the more vivid and the more earnest it is in love, becomes a more
immediate conviction, and a science founded on the personal experience
of life.

Faith in the soul, as the center of man’s entire consciousness, may be
likened to the outspread canopy of the blue heavens, according to that
olden notion of it as a firmament, which perhaps in its figurative
investiture still contains much that is strikingly true. According to
this old but beautiful conception, the firmament was a definite limit
that divides the heaven from the earth. Above it the free ether of light
diffuses itself and stretches into the wide regions of illimitable
space; while in the lower sphere, inclosed by the firmament, the wind of
life [_Lebenswind_] now plays with refreshing motion, now descends to
the earth in quickening dews or fertilizing showers, or draws out of the
ground and to the light the hidden springs of life and mighty streams.
Faith, therefore, is, as it were, the heavenly firmament in the
consciousness that divides the streams of spiritual life and of external
and internal science that are above it, from those that are under it. If
this boundary be taken away, or violently broken through, the light and
the darkness are no longer held apart, but mingle together in one
confused and orderless mass. The true light grows darker and gradually
becomes extinct, while the darkness begins to shine with a false glare
and the glimmering twilight of pernicious delusion. The old chaos breaks
in again upon the human mind, and it becomes anew what it formerly was,
“without form and void.”

When, however, the triple consciousness preserves its beautiful order
and harmony, then the spirit, as the heavenly height above, the sensible
nature as the deep below, and the soul as the firmament between them,
are indeed divided, but not separated or hostilely opposed to each
other. On the contrary, the height as well as the deep, and the whole
circle of spiritual existence, are organically combined and united
together in this center of faith in the soul. Now this original
constitution of the mind being preserved, the further development and
progress of knowledge and truth may be regarded as the second step of
internal creation, wherein the light begins to shine more and more on
the mind and on science. The first clear insight, on the other hand, and
internal perception that the highest science and the divine faith are
not essentially distinct, but are fundamentally identical, must be
considered as the earliest entrance of the spirit of truth into the
heart of man.

Such is the right notion of faith, and of a mind wherein faith and
science are organically united and harmoniously concordant. But in order
to afford freedom of choice between faith and infidelity, it is
necessary to contrast this living image with the complete picture of a
mind involved in doubt, distraction, unbelief, and error. For all the
motives that can influence a decision must be furnished by a simple
comparison of the two, which, indeed, if made honestly and completely,
furnishes of itself the solution of the problem.

Now I have already more than once called your attention to the tendency
to discord, and to the disposing causes to error which subsist in the
natural constitution of the human mind with its four poles or members.
In particular I directed your notice to the fact that reason and fancy,
such as they now are in their present state of mutual alienation and of
hostile opposition to each other, can not be regarded as original
faculties of the human consciousness. Originally they were both in
unison in the thinking and loving soul so long as living and working in
faith and truth, it was on that account confirmed by the divine Spirit,
and preserved by union with Him. But when it had once lost this center
of unity, and, its light being obscured, it had become a prey to
dissension, it immediately fell asunder into these two halves or
faculties of thought. On the one hand stood the reason--as a mere organ
of reflection--one, _i.e._, which, in lifeless abstraction, thinks over
the objects previously presented to it, or as a mere directive faculty
of thought, without any originative powers of its own; while, on the
other, the fancy presented itself with a blindly-productive energy in
thought and invention, as a wild, but, nevertheless, living sense and
instinct of nature.

Reason and fancy, therefore--those two faculties of half truth, if it be
allowable so to speak--whenever, instead of seeking to escape from
dissension by reverting to a higher center of unity, they stand
isolated, and attempt each by itself to reign supreme, are the real
source and actual seat of all error. Now, one species of error to which
man has been most prone ever since his soul was rent asunder and lost
its unity, is the subjective shape which he gives to material phenomena.
For that fancy, even when most comprehensive, purest, and best,
invariably remains more or less subjective, is a fact which no man will
either wish or attempt to deny, any more than that the imagination takes
its beginning from the sensuous impressions of the material world. And
this subjectivity of the fancy may, I think, be taken for granted, even
without any reference to and without discussing the question of the
possibility of demoniacal influences.

Now, this subjective shaping of material phenomena forms the foundation
of all mythology; it is the general explanation of all the facts of
heathenism. It is, of course, implied in the very principle of its
explanation, that manifold and various shapes or forms and developments
are both conceivable and possible. And, in actual fact, it exhibits the
greatest diversity, from the rude objects of the grossest Fetischism up
to the exquisite creations of a refined and artistic mythology. In its
actual manifestations, however, and in its effects on practical life,
the latter still retains its affinity with the former; at least, it
rests on the same foundation of a poetical religion--some view of the
universe embodied in a real shape--in short, the deification of nature.

We have here taken the olden heathenism in a very simple light, and
quite generally as a materialism assuming a poetic form and expression,
but one, at the same time, in which, as soon as we pierce through its
poetical investiture, we discern many points of contact with Pantheism.
When, however, pursuing a searching historical inquiry into the heathen
modes of conception, we enter thoroughly and deeply into its details, we
meet therein with so many magical rites and usages, that, in spite of
any previous inclination to the contrary, we feel indisposed to deny the
possibility of a demoniacally-affected imagination having, in some
degree, influenced the character of heathenism. And, indeed, even in a
philosophical point of view, there does not exist any sufficient reason
for such a denial. This, however, as we formerly said, is a matter which
needs not to be taken into consideration at present.

It would be a great mistake to suppose that this error of a heathenish
deification of nature is confined to the ancient world, or to those
great and half-civilized primeval races of the remotest East, which,
however, remained, and still continue, as it were, a living monument of
an earlier epoch in the development of humanity. In the more
intellectual ages of the world, physical science, or the philosophy of
nature, may still be heathenish. It may be this, even while abstaining
rigorously from all symbolical language, it comes forward in the highest
elevation of the dynamical theory, and in pure scientific formularies.
This may be the case even when outwardly it appears to be highly
spiritual, or, at least, far removed from all the ordinary features of
materialism. And it is invariably such whenever it recognizes nothing
higher or superior to the infinite vital force and its dynamical play
and law, and, consequently, does but deify nature. Heathenish it must
ever remain so long as it does no more than this. This forms, as it
were, a relapse of science into heathenism, and here, under a different
form, fancy asserts her olden authority. For this purpose she does but
assume a geometrical shape, and, decking herself out with all the riches
of science, and moving with free dynamic action, speaks a thoroughly
mathematical language. The point of indifference, and the positive and
the negative pole of all existence, are now, so long as such a
philosophy recognizes nothing beyond them, the new gods which, in those
scientific fictions, whereof our own age has been profuse enough, may
receive a shifting rank and honor, but still hold a similar position
therein to that of Jupiter and Venus, or Mars and Apollo, in the ancient
mythologies.

When, however, in epochs pre-eminently devoted to science, and possessed
of a true or false scientific enlightenment, we look to the whole age
and its general tone, this philosophical error of an exclusive
materialism, and of a scientific deification of nature, does not appear
to be the most universally prevalent. It occurs rather as an episode and
an exception, and, in a certain limited degree, as an opposition to
another error, which, as it is received far more generally, so it
exercises a still more despotic authority over the minds of men. I mean
rationalism; this is properly the new heathenism of scientific times.
Here, in the infinity of dialectics, and the endless dialectical
disputes of an abstract and empty thinking, as well as in the false
semblance of a logical necessity which prevails in these logical
disputations, lies the source of the second leading error of philosophy.
All erroneous systems, whether of philosophy or religion, lie somewhere
between these two extremes of false thought. Every species of
theoretical or practical unbelief or erring faith, or even of a
scientific superstition, either approximates, on the one hand, to
naturalism, whether under the garb of a poetical symbolism, or the
scientific form of a dynamical theory, or, on the other, to the
absolutism of the reason, with its dead formularies. Every religious and
every philosophical error is either a subordinate or a distorted species
of one or the other--or, it may be, a mixture--a mean compounded of
both. Manifold, however, or, rather, innumerable, are the several
changes and combinations into which these two elements of infidelity and
an erring faith may, and, indeed, actually do, enter.

These, then, are the two principal elements out of which all the other
forms of error are produced. Reason, therefore, and fancy must be looked
upon as their true roots and sources in the human consciousness. They
spring either from the scientific productive faculty of imagination, as
the unpurified sense of nature before the Spirit of God has moved on the
face of these waters of infinite life, or from the mere subjective
reason, which, in its pursuit of the absolute, thinks only and knows
only its own Me. It is on this soil also that philosophical error first
assumes a systematic shape and development.

Our meaning will perhaps be made clear by an illustration from the
healing art. Confining ourselves to the simple facts, we might say
correctly enough, fever and gout, as two leading forms of human disease,
have their seats either in the organs and circulation of the blood, or
in the system of the bones and muscles. Still it would not be
inconsistent with such a statement to believe that the primary occasion
or cause of both evils has a deeper and more hidden origin in some
higher organ of life within the human frame, and in some derangement or
disturbance of its functions. In their outward effects, however, and
manifestation, these two diseases respectively seize upon these two
spheres of bodily organization, and there spend themselves. And the same
is true of those two intellectual diseases, rationalism and the absolute
system of nature, as regards the reason and fancy. The latter are their
principal seats: they form the domain wherein all the false productions
of erring systems are engendered and spring up, or, in other words, the
spot where the paroxysm of their internal enmity and strife comes to a
complete outbreak. Of course we do not mean that these two diseases
always present themselves simply and purely. In the morbid state of the
intellect, as well as in the similar case of organic affection, there
are numerous complications of disease which require a careful and
accurate treatment. The first cause of all intellectual disease, of
scientific error, or systematic infidelity, or generally of every
species of a false faith, may lie still deeper, or must be traced still
higher to some more remote and hidden cause. And, in truth, the primary
origin of all human error is to be found in the alienation of the mind
or spirit from God and His eternal light, and in its inevitable
consequences--the obscuration of the soul, and the blinding, and the
aberration and disorder of the senses--and especially of the higher
scientific sense for truth. And in order that the senses may be
gradually restored to their true state and order, and reopened--and in
order that the soul be also illuminated anew, the spirit must recover
its true luminous center in God. When this is once done, the whole of
man’s cognitive faculty will be restored to its original state.

But in the outward manifestations of consciousness, as it is now
entangled in and limited by the material, or sensible world, or
practical life, the absolute reason, and a fancy totally merged in and
engrossed by nature, form the two poles of philosophical error. In all
the systems hitherto so frequently alluded to, these two are essentially
the only sources of delusion, although, of course, innumerable
intermediate tints or chemical combinations of both are possible. The
understanding and the will--that is, a faulty sophistical intellect, and
a faulty unconditional or absolute volition--do, no doubt, essentially
co-operate in the formation and completion of both these erroneous
systems of science. There are, besides, certain passionate and personal
errors and prejudices of the understanding no less than of the will.
These, however, in their immediate effects, are practical, and confined
to actual life. At least, taken by themselves, and without the
co-operation of fancy and reason, they will never be able to create a
scientific system.

In order, however, more precisely to indicate the extent to which the
understanding and will co-operate in the production of philosophical
error, it is necessary to repeat my previous remarks, and also to add
some more precise determinations with respect to the form of aberration
peculiar to, and, as it were, inborn in, each of these faculties. As
concerns the will, we placed its proneness to err in its unconditional
or absolute volition, which manifests itself in life as a destructive or
disturbing force, where, however, its effects are variable, being
proportionate to the wider or narrower sphere of action. In all alike,
however, this principle of absolute willing retains its true character.
It shows itself, first of all, in the obstinacy of the child, where it
forms the greatest obstacle that education has to contend against. Its
action is, no doubt, but very weak here; still this apparently
insignificant phenomenon serves to prove--and for this purpose we
referred to it--that the fault has its root, and is, as it were, inborn
in the very nature of man, and in the present constitution of his mind.
As for the second degree, since the evil runs through all the various
stages of human life, and assumes manifold shapes, we are, therefore, at
no loss for examples. Whether we take our instance from the obstinacy of
the founder of a sect passionately adhering to and maintaining the
opinions he has once adopted, or that of the leader of some dangerous
political party, in either case the consequences of this pernicious
principle will appear to be, in the highest decree, extensive and awful.
But, lastly, it shows itself in its full and most frightful energy in
the reckless and unsparing lust of conquest, and in the unsatiable
thirst of absolute dominion which stimulates the conquering despot.

The second of the two similes, however, as it is most immediately
connected with, so it throws most light upon, the problem before us, the
explanation, viz., of intellectual error. For science, too, has its
sects, and even into the calm regions of philosophy (for such it surely
ought to be, as professing to be the satisfaction of our inmost longing
after a knowledge of ourselves and of nature in truth and in God), the
violent spirit of party finds too often an entrance. In the spirit of
system, and in the prejudices of a view or opinion once adopted, the
absolute and resolved will, which originally is rather a fault of
character than an error of the understanding, nevertheless co-operates
essentially to the establishment of a philosophical error, at least from
its formal side. When, however, as, under the influence of the spirit of
system, is easily, and indeed generally done by the founders of
scientific sects, the _absolute_ is itself adopted as the immediate
object, then it is the pursuit of this idea of the unconditional that
carries each of these two general forms of error to the highest pitch of
extravagance. Applied to nature and any positive view and particular
system thereof, it gives to it a character of exclusiveness and
definiteness, by which, separated from all that is higher and properly
divine, and made to rest entirely in itself, it is carried away to the
pantheistic self-sufficiency and deification of a false unity. Combined
with the egoistic or subjective reason, this pursuit of the absolute and
the idea thereof creates the idealistic delusion, or, at least, readily
gives rise to it, and this is the first step, or, at any rate, the usual
introduction, to scientific atheism.

As to the understanding--in one of the earliest of these Lectures, we
mentioned abstract thought as its peculiar form of error. It is
unquestionable that the understanding may lose itself in mere abstract
and dead thinking, so as, amid its mass of purely abstract conceptions,
to forget entirely all truly pregnant and vital cogitation. Such as
understanding, there can be no doubt, must either be defective in its
organization, or imperfectly and falsely developed; and so it goes on
deceiving itself and propagating error among others. Correctly speaking,
however, this abstract thinking does not belong to the understanding,
so much as to the reason, which is even the faculty of abstraction. And
indeed, apart from its great and manifold abuses, the latter, in its
right place and within its assigned limits, forms nothing less than a
natural requirement and an essential function of the human mind. As for
the understanding, it is based on intellection; consequently it supposes
that in this intellectual act the object is vividly seen through and
thoroughly penetrated by the mind. And this object may be either an
external one, taken from nature or actual life, or internal--a mere
thought or conception, and the word or name designating it. In the
latter case, the mental act of penetration is directed to ascertaining
the true and original sense of an idea, or the import of the notion, or
of the term by which it is designated. An understanding which has lost
itself among abstract ideas must, in such purely abstract thinking,
become eventually entirely extinct. Wholly, however, without life and
spirit, the understanding, according to its peculiar character, can
never be; it is therefore its total absence, or a very defective
condition of it, rather than its death, that is marked out and indicated
by such a state.

But if we wish to determine the particular fault or error that is
peculiar to any one faculty of the human consciousness, it is evident
that we must not seek for it in any defective state or imperfect
development; but, on the contrary, in the highest and fullest energy.
But now an extremely ingenious, clear, and vivid intellect may be
combined with what I have lately termed an evil genius--the false power
of genius. In such a combination, we have the true state of a perverted
understanding, or of that aberration which is peculiar to it, and for
which the term of a sophistical intellect seems the tersest and most
appropriate designation. And this sophistical understanding is ever the
working organ and instrument for the building and construction of all
false systems, and to which sooner or later the latter are all obliged
to have recourse.

With regard, then, to the co-operation of the sophistical understanding
in the formation of philosophical error, and its share and influence on
the spirit and the matter of any system of untruth, it furnishes an
opposition to the idealistic confusion which the absolute will produces
by its predominant idea of the unconditional. Here we have rather a
predominating tendency to a realistic view of the world, according to
the principle it adopts of the universal insignificance of all things,
not merely in reference to morals or practical life, and in the domain
of history, but also in nature and the whole creation. And with this
view is associated a skeptical contempt for all who dare to think
otherwise--all ordinary minds who can not rise to the height where the
consciousness of knowing and believing nothing sits enthroned. This
tendency, therefore, and this error of the sophistical understanding, is
most immediately related to, and associated with, the dialectical
confusion of the reason with its endless disputations. But as the
absolute volition and pursuit of the unconditional can not well be
thought of entirely apart from a certain perversion of the intellectual
powers, so the operation of the sophistical understanding is impossible,
without a certain admixture of an evil will and an intentional
determination to oppose the truth.

But notwithstanding this intrinsic connection between these two
intellectual faults, yet in their outward manifestation, and in actual
life, they often stand wide apart from each other. The true notion of a
sophistical intellect will perhaps be best illustrated in a few words by
recalling to your recollection the most celebrated writer of the
eighteenth century, who exercised so great an influence not only on the
minds of his countryman, but on the whole spirit of the age.[50] If,
again, it were necessary to employ instances in order to give you a
clear idea of the philosophical pursuit of the absolute, examples enough
might be found among the German schools and philosophers of recent
times. But to revert to the sophistical intellect: rarely has it been,
and rarely will it be, found manifesting itself in such fullness as it
did in this anti-Christian and worldly writer, who indeed worshiped the
age which worshiped him, but mocked and scoffed at all besides.

Now as to these two opposite systems of error and unbelief--rationalism,
viz., and a false idolatrous system of nature--in their inmost essence
they are both equally false and pernicious. In this respect there is
nothing to choose between them; they are alike utterly abominable. Even
in the judgment of theology, pantheism, as the one extreme of error on
the side of nature, can scarcely appear less false and abominable than
atheism as the other idealistic extreme. Both must be placed on the same
line; for the one no less than the other is a full and perfect refusal
to recognize the one Eternal Truth and the Living God.

Looking, however, to their external manifestation and effects--a
philosophy of nature which cloaks its thoroughly heathenish sentiments
beneath the bright and seductive attraction of beautiful and
highly-finished form--may perhaps appear more dangerous and more
pernicious than rationalism, especially when in the comparison the
latter appears under its more moderate, pliant, and skillfully modified
phases.

But it is not so much in and by themselves, and generally, that we have
here to consider these two kinds of error. In such a case the sentence
we must pass upon them would be, that they are equally fatal and
pernicious. At present we are rather concerned with them in their
reference to our own age, and to that struggle which it has to undergo
with them. In this respect I can not hesitate decidedly to pronounce
rationalism the greater and the more dangerous error of the two. For not
only has it struck its root more deeply in the spirit of the age, and is
far more widely diffused, but it is far more supple. Parasitically it
engrafts itself on the truth and its various systems, to prey upon them
the more successfully. It is ever ready to make concessions to and to
capitulate with its adversary, in order to triumph over it the more
completely in the end. And when it seems driven altogether from the
field, it still holds its ground beneath some new disguise. In short, it
is scarcely possible to determine the point, if indeed it is ever
reached, where it can be safely said that the evil is completely and
forever eradicated. It is only life itself--the higher spiritual life,
that is--and the true philosophy which traces and restores it in the
mind’s triple faculties of knowledge, that can extricate us from this
dilemma of conflicting errors, and provide the clew which shall guide us
out of the dialectical mazes of the reason. On the other hand, a false
philosophy of nature--and such is every system that stands in hostile
opposition to religion, or attempts to usurp its place--which is
conceived in a merely empirical spirit, will never prove dangerous.
After a brief and limited influence, it will soon fall into neglect and
oblivion. When, however, it is the result of a lofty and intellectual
effort--when a truly great and comprehensive spirit moves within
it--then will it soon become conscious of those limits, and feeling its
own false position, it will, ere long, find the passage to the divine,
which is beyond and above it. But it is not easy for a philosophy of
nature to be or at least long to remain strictly and absolutely confined
to its own limits of system, even because of the continual advance of
this science of life. And as soon as it recognizes its true place as
second and subordinate to a divine philosophy, then does it immediately
cease to be a false faith. It is forthwith reconciled to the truth, or
at least is already far on the road toward a complete reconciliation
with it. This milder judgment, however, can not in justice be extended
to that pantheistic science in which nature is as decidedly and
absolutely deified as in any of the old systems of heathenism.

We have now completed our comparison of faith and infidelity, and
sketched the picture both of man’s mind and of his science, to and from
which they respectively belong or issue. We, therefore, leave it free to
the judgment of every thoughtful mind that reflects upon itself and the
nature of things, and loves and desires the truth, to choose and decide
between them. This comparison is ever the proper problem of philosophy;
and even if the sketch and delineation of these two states of the human
consciousness be, from the limits to which we are confined, not
perfectly complete, still we may regard this problem as satisfactorily
solved. The struggle, however, between belief and unbelief is still to
go on in the world and time, but the victory of truth is reserved to
higher powers and forces than man’s.

As to the nature and conditions of that intellectual conflict, and its
several moments, a few remarks must be added, on its relation to, and
bearings on, philosophy. First of all, I think the previous remarks must
have tended to throw light on a phenomenon which otherwise is remarkable
and startling enough. The good cause, even when advocated by men of the
best intentions and the purest zeal for truth, with the greatest
acuteness and a thorough knowledge of the truth and its essential
principles, nevertheless is but little successful. At the very best, it
makes an extremely slow progress, while evil error advances with the
fearful rapidity of contagion. To account for this singular fact it is
not sufficient to appeal to the persuasive rhetoric which the latter has
at its command, or to any superior power of intellect in its advocates.
The cause lies rather in the miasmas of spiritual pestilence which are
spread throughout, and are suspended in the moral atmosphere.

We should err greatly were we to suppose that the cause of truth, and of
the refutation of error, could as easily be disposed of as any civil
process before a judicial tribunal. Here, to carry the day, it is enough
completely to refute the pretensions of one’s adversary, and to set
forth one’s own claim in a clear and irrefragable chain of legal proof.
But, in the matter of philosophy and the higher truth, how little is
gained by the refutation, be it ever so complete, of one written system
of error, when, in the mean while, two or three more spring up and call
for refutation no less than the first. The straight road, therefore, of
a calm, simple, and, at the same time, luminous and complete exposition
of the highest system of knowledge seems, to my mind, a far more
appropriate means for the establishment and diffusion of the truth than
the indirect course of refuting any false or erroneous system that may
reign in a particular age and throughout the whole world. For, in the
latter course, if the controversy be at all searching and complete, it
is necessary to enter into all its tortuous windings, at the risk of
being lost and entangled in them. And even in the most favorable case,
where the refutation is complete, nothing is ultimately gained by it but
a mere negative--the establishing the untruth of the refuted system,
together with the proofs of that negative.

It would be most erroneous to suppose that this controversy is either
entirely or in the main directed against books and leaves, propositions
and words. It looks rather to the soul and spirit, and seeks to drive
away, to remove, and banish from them, and utterly to extirpate, all the
deadly seeds of error and falsehood, replacing them by truth in all its
fullness and energy, so as to win the minds and souls of men to its
beneficent rule.

This, however, is only possible by an individual process and a personal
interchange of ideas. For error and the restoration of truth assume a
thousand different shapes, according to the different temperaments of
individuals, or to the different periods of life in each. If, therefore,
it be the wish or duty of philosophy to make this its principal aim, it
is only in the form of dialogue that it can successfully accomplish the
task, by suiting itself and closely conforming to the personal character
of individuals. In this sense, and on this account, Plato, and the other
disciples of Socrates, in their controversy with the Sophists,
invariably employed the dialogical style, and chose this form for the
exposition of their philosophical views. But even the written dialogue
can not do more than exhibit, as it were, a vertical section of the
whole infinite variety of individual views, convictions, and characters.
And what thereupon is to be done in order to set them free and
emancipate them from error, and to win them for, and to fill them with,
the truth?

The inner sense for the truth and the spiritual eye must be opened, and
the spirit of man must be led back and restored to its lost center. But
the soul must be won and attracted, totally converted and endued with
new life. But is this possible without some higher and divine power? Can
it be accomplished by man’s ordinary art of disputation, even though it
be perhaps sufficient for the ordinary transactions of a civil tribunal;
or by a logical train of proofs, or by the skillful terms of a
well-managed dialogue, in the absence of all profounder power to move
and actuate the soul?

And such a higher power and effectual word of truth does exist. In the
language of Scripture it is called the Sword of the Spirit, which
pierces to the very marrow and divides asunder the soul and the spirit.
A deep meaning is involved in this expression of the dividing asunder of
soul and spirit, and the very greatest of all the soul’s pains is most
appropriately indicated thereby. In death the immortal soul is separated
and departs from the body; but soul and spirit still continue together
in indissoluble union. These words, then, allude to some other and more
violent separation. And it is one, moreover, which is indispensable to
the triumph of truth in this struggle for life and death. For when error
goes to the inmost depths, and reaches to the very center of life, both
spirit and soul grow and adhere together, and the delusion can not
otherwise be dispelled than by the violent separation of the two. And
thus the light suddenly shines upon the spirit to show it the abyss on
whose brink it stands, while the soul is simultaneously set free from
all the chains which bind it to its false life, and is thereby
completely changed and converted. In this way is the triumph of truth
over error and infidelity effected. Only we must remember that the Sword
of the Spirit, “which pierces even to the dividing asunder of soul and
spirit, and of the joints and marrow,” needs not always to be properly a
spoken or a written “word.” In some deeply-moving catastrophe of a man’s
life it makes a distinct and speaking manifestation of itself, working
in him a total change of his feelings and sentiments. But the Spirit’s
flaming sword of judgment may be turned not only upon individuals, but
also upon whole nations and ages, to divert them from error and
unbelief, and to lead them back to truth. Lastly, it may also be
directed toward the whole world and the whole human race; and to this
interesting topic, which in so many ways is brought so immediately home
to the present era of the world, we shall, in the course of the
following Lectures, have occasion to recur.




LECTURE XI.

OF THE RELATION OF TRUTH AND SCIENCE TO LIFE, AND OF MIND IN ITS
APPLICATION TO REALITY.


The union of profound knowledge with divine faith, and the recognition
and perception of their unity, is the mind’s first step within the
domain of truth and of the consciousness of it; or, rather, the first
step in that gradation by which the mind and consciousness advance
toward verity; and it is even the fundamental principle of truth itself
that constitutes this beginning. The judgment which discriminates and
decides between a simple universal belief in God, and the connection of
such a faith with all natural and sublimely true philosophy on the one
hand, and unbelief, false science, and the various systems of error on
the other, forms the second term or step in the gradual progress of
truth and the spirit of truth in the human consciousness, whether of
individuals, or of the whole human race, or of any particular period of
its development. These two subjects have already occupied our attention
in the two preceding Lectures. The third point which the mind must
attain to as the spirit of truth is more fully expanded, both in the
consciousness and in science, is the profitable application thereof to
actual life, or its real manifestation, and the practical carrying out
of its principles. For it is by this alone that the divine and
fundamental principle of truth, and that important faculty of judgment
which separates and distinguishes truth and true science from ignorance
and error, are realized, and attain to their full end and perfection.
The consideration of this subject will form the basis of the present and
all the following Lectures.

Before, however, I enter upon this new topic, or attempt to solve this
third problem of the actual application of science to life and of its
profitable combination therewith, I would wish to add here a few
historical remarks on the subject-matter of our last discussions, which,
while they serve to complete and to illustrate it, will at the same time
furnish a natural and easy transition to our present speculations. The
struggle and the alternate triumph of belief and unbelief, as they
gained in turn the ascendency over the minds of men, and gave the
dominant tone to different ages, or, rather, the contest of truth and
true science with the different systems of error in the several periods
of the development of mankind and of the history of the human intellect,
is at all times a subject of the highest interest for philosophical
observation. In historical applications like the present, it invariably
proves pre-eminently useful and instructive. I shall, however, confine
myself to a few examples, and select such as are most immediately
connected with our subject, or seem likely to lead to the most important
results.

From the whole history of the ancient world I shall adduce but two
illustrations: first of all, the twofold mental or spiritual state of
the primeval times; and, secondly, the highest reach of thought and
knowledge which Greece attained in her most enlightened days, which are
marked at once with the signs of first maturity and of earliest decline.
From both these instances it will be my object to prove that truth
invariably prevails in the beginning, and that it is always and every
where prior to and antecedent to error.

From the annals of modern history I shall in like manner bring before
you only a few particularly fruitful instances. From such periods of the
world’s history I propose to show that the problem of science, in its
reference to life and its profitable application, admits not of any pure
and complete solution; or that often after an opening of promise it
suddenly takes a wrong direction, and so misses its true aim, and,
consequently, the problem of the age remains unsolved. This examination
of the actual relation subsisting between science and life as it has
been, or still is, historically exhibited in this or that particular
epoch, together with the difficulties and the questions which it
suggests, will serve as an introduction to our entire theme. For this is
nothing less than the satisfactory exposition and correct theory of the
application of true science to life, and of their profitable
combination.

First of all, let us cast our glance back to the infancy of the human
race. In these primeval times, we every where meet with legends and
traditions of man’s divine origin, mixed up and interwoven with the
fables and symbols of heathenism. Now we are accustomed to regard
heathenism, or the religion of the Gentiles, as universally, and,
without exception, false and idolatrous, or at least absurd and
fabulous. But is this consistent with the natural course of things?--is
it not probable, or, rather, necessary, that, in its beginning at least,
this chaotic medley of symbols and legends must have had for its
foundation some very simple form of error, if we must suppose that it
was always, and even from the very first, nothing but error?

No doubt the heathenism of the first races, so far as we can trace it,
and the early legends and rites of the oldest times that we are
acquainted with, appear to be already involved in a perplexing confusion
of the strangest fancies. Nothing better are they than a chaos of
symbolical images of nature, mingled and interwoven with some vague and
shadowy outlines of truly spiritual ideas and thoughtful notes of a
higher strain, and also with ambiguous and enigmatical legends of
historical tradition. The whole medley, moreover, differently developed,
according to the peculiar varieties of national character, or the
hereditary feeling of tribe and family, assumes a particular hue from
the local colorings of these different spheres of life; or, moreover, as
is not unfrequently the case, is remolded and cast into new combinations
by the arbitrary caprices of the poetic fancy. Who can hope to find the
simple clew of such a maze? or who will give us the threads of Ariadne
to guide us out of its intricacies?

It is true, generally speaking, that our historical knowledge and
research do not reach very far back. The Flood, to which the traditions
of all people remount, and which all telluric sciences, whether
geography, or natural history, or geology, or whatever other name they
may bear, directly or indirectly confirm, forms an impassable gulf
between the modern and later family of man, and that first and gigantic
race of the antediluvian world. And yet careful criticism and historical
investigation are still able to distinguish in the chaotic congeries of
different mythologies the several strata and epochs, and can separate
the primary rock of the earlier natural legend from the later mythical
formations. But even this primary rock itself, amid the legends of
primeval times--this first, and oldest, and simplest basis of
heathenism, is itself but a fusion and the _debris_ of some earlier and
precedent convulsion. But now all legends, every mythology, and
universal tradition, agree in this one point. They concur in deriving
the origin of man from God, and assert that the first man, who, while he
proceeded immediately from God, was also the first-born son of earth,
in which he was placed, because it was of a nature nearest akin to his
and ours. Now this same first man, as proceeding and taking his
beginning from God, could not well be without some knowledge of Him. The
concurrent tradition of all nations leads us to the idea of man’s
possessing knowledge, and in truth an immediate and intuitive knowledge
of God in and out of nature, and indeed primarily and principally from
this source, and on the other hand also of his having an immediate and
intuitive knowledge of nature in God. And this exactly is the old and
true Gentilism of the holy patriarchs of the primeval world, if by this
term we understand the original religion of nature, among the earliest
families, and the pious patriarchs of the human race, as it is described
in the language and after the analogy of Holy Writ,[51] and also in the
ancient traditions which have grown out of and attached themselves to
it. Now, according to the simple progression of truth, which is also
that of God, and of the knowledge of Him, this revelation of nature was
the first and earliest that was imparted to man upon earth, and must be
carefully distinguished from that later or second revelation of God,
which is both of a positive nature and is contained in a written law, or
written word and book of the law. And in the written revelation this
distinction is most carefully observed throughout. The divine law, which
although not written on brazen tablets, unquestionably existed in these
primeval ages of a natural revelation, which was read and intuitively
understood in nature herself, or immediately in the hearts and minds of
men, was far simpler, and consequently also easier and less burdensome,
than the later law of the second revelation, which was designed for the
moral regeneration of a degenerate people, and for fitting them to be a
witness of the truth to other nations of the world still more degraded
and benighted than themselves. And in the same way this second
revelation was less stringent and less exalted in its scope than the
last law of later times, promulgated in the third age of the world to
all nations and kindreds of the earth. For the latter was not designed
for the first happy period of the infancy of mankind, but for his last
difficult, but decisive struggle, which is to end in the perfect
triumph of good, and in man’s total emancipation from the hostile and
oppressive yoke of original evil. For the wise and omniscient Father of
all has given to every age of man’s history a peculiar and appropriate
law. For the infancy of the race, He published an easy rule of
life--permitting the full expansion and the blooming development of all
his vital energies; but one of sterner preparation, of promise and of
expectation, for his youth. For his maturity, lastly, He has set forth a
law of determined struggle with evil, and of a predominant love of the
invisible, and even of perfection. And consequently a new application of
the same law, and a new strengthening for the same conflict, is to be
looked for in the last times of the final consummation. But not only was
the divine natural law, as promulgated to man in the earliest ages, far
different from that of later times, and the subsequent stages of a
further development of revealed knowledge. This immediate revelation,
and intuitive knowledge of nature, was likewise very dissimilar to the
artificially elaborate and complicated systems of physical science. For
these have principally to trace out and to revert to the original source
of life, and of the full truth of nature, although even on this right
road of return we are not always nearest to the end, even when we seem
to have made the greatest advance in that direction. But as the first
man recognized God in nature, and not merely understood, but immediately
perceived, and, as it were, saw, that He was there, therefore nature
also was, in a certain measure, transparent to his eye in God. And
although his knowledge of nature was in the highest degree simple, still
did it even on that account penetrate more deeply into its inmost
secrets. It was rendered thereby more thoroughly vital and endued with
power. One might almost call it a natural force within him, similar to
and akin to those without him. For generally in those early ages of the
world, man possessed many higher energies and living powers in and over
nature, which subsequently were entirely withdrawn from him, or which in
later times, as wonderful phenomena, formed singular exceptions to man’s
ordinary endowments.

We are, perhaps, only too much disposed to imagine that the ancient race
before the Flood resembled in every particular a later and even the
present generation. Our conceptions of it, as regards both its virtues
and its vices, are in nowise great and wonderful enough. In the first
place, it is highly probable that the atmosphere of the globe was at
that period totally different from what it is in the present day, and
that consequently both the food and manner of living in those days were
also dissimilar from our own. If any reliance is to be placed on the
best and oldest historical testimonies on these points, we can scarcely
doubt that the primeval race--at least the generations immediately
preceding the Deluge--were of gigantic stature, and that their mental
powers and faculties were on a correspondent scale of magnitude. In
perfect conformity with these other proportions, the Scripture also
assigns to those antediluvian races a duration of existence, which, as
compared with our own standard of the average life of man, is equally
gigantic. And so little of antecedent improbability is there in this
statement, that to get rid of it commentators have been forced to have
recourse to the most far-fetched and arbitrary, and, in fact, most
untenable and groundless hypotheses.

Now, it is manifest that such corporeal advantages and length of life
which the first patriarchs of the human race enjoyed, must have been
highly favorable to the development of their intellectual gifts and
immediate intuition, as founded on a living natural faith, so long as
they were rightly used and directed toward God, as their proper object.
And in the same way their tendency to fearful corruption, under an
impious and sinful employment of their great mental endowments, must be
equally evident. At the same time we must confess our inadequacy to form
a conception of the height to which they attained in either state which
would be in any way proportionate to the truth. It is, however, an
invariable principle of development, confirmed by the observation of
nature, and a careful induction of historical facts, that all that is
greatest and noblest, if it once begins to degenerate and corrupt,
reaches in its corruption and degeneracy the worst and most fearful
extremes. And so it appears to have been with this gigantic and
gigantically endowed race of the antediluvian world.

In modern times, a great German philosopher, who flourished toward the
close of the seventeenth century, and was no less famous for his
historical learning than for his mathematical discoveries, made the
memorable remark, that the last sect in the whole development of
Christian revelation, and toward the close of modern history--the last
sect, and also the most prevalent and most fearful, would be that of
atheism. This dictum, at the time at which it was pronounced, which was
somewhere about the transition from the anxiety and oppression of the
seventeenth century to the enlightenment and self-complaisancy of the
eighteenth, must have appeared a perfect paradox. But now that its
fulfillment seems, both to our eyes and understanding, so close at hand,
we recognize with amazement, not to say with a slight feeling of horror,
its deep oracular truth.

Now, as the beginning and the end often bear a wonderful resemblance to
each other, it is not improbable that the first sect was of the same
kind and nature as it has been predicted that the final heresy will be.
A mere dead unbelief and purely negative atheism, it is true, can as
little have prevailed in those times as a symbolically degraded and
immorally materializing heathenism. For it was only after the higher
magical powers were withdrawn from man, that the fancy became in this
sense, and to such an extreme degree, symbolical and figurative. Or,
perhaps, we may more correctly say, that of all high endowments now lost
forever, a purely figurative fancy was all that remained; whereupon, in
opposition to it, the other erroneous extreme of abstract thought
gradually attained to a greater and undue development. And we may with
good reason assume, that with this fearful catastrophe the very
consciousness of man was essentially altered and changed. Of the wild
and lawless state of the generations before the Flood, we can not,
perhaps, form a juster conception than by regarding it as an open
rebellion and organized revolt of man against his Maker and benefactor,
a complete and visible supremacy of the evil principle and the wicked
spirits on earth, and an intimate union between man and the devil. It
must have resembled the description which we meet with in some old books
of the future reign of antichrist. Such a state of things may justly be
denominated atheism. But, however this may be, and whatever conception
we may form, and whatever historical shape we may give to particulars in
this domain (where, after all, we can not get beyond conjecture and
presumptions, or, it may be, hypothetical history, based on
probabilities), one general point is incontestable. Truly noble, in
those primeval times of a pure natural faith, must have been the
intellectual powers and development of the first ancestors of the world
and those great progenitors of the human race, and fearful, in the same
degree, must have been the fall and corruption which followed the abuse
of those high privileges. For man’s mental powers, still subsisting in
the plenitude of their productive energy, and his lordship over nature
being undisturbed, his corruption must have generated the wildest and
most monstrous excesses. Consequently, amid the universal reign of evil
and wickedness, the only course that remained was the total destruction
of the existing generation, and the complete renovation, or, rather, a
new commencement of mankind.

But the corruption of later times, though, in truth, on a less scale,
has likewise been very great. Rapid, too, has been the passage from good
to evil. Moreover, it is self-evident that in the primeval ages of a
vivid natural faith, and of a life according to nature, that separation
between life and nature that exists in these later times could not well
have taken place--nay, at such a period it is totally inconceivable. On
the contrary, science and life must have been in perfect unison. And
this is true, not only of the virtuous knowledge in the first happy
epoch of the world’s golden age, but also of the wicked ideas and the
demoniac efforts of error in the succeeding periods of gigantic
bewilderment and arrogant enmity to God. It is by reason of this unity
between life and knowledge that this instance belongs to that gradation
in the mutual relations of the two in the different ages of the world.

Quite otherwise, however, was it, in this respect, with Grecian
philosophy. In the most enlightened days of classical antiquity we
behold it either coming forward in direct opposition to life, especially
in its public aspect of politics and religion, or else as absolutely
esoteric, retiring altogether and estranged from active duties. Now, in
adducing the history of Grecian philosophy as my second instance, and as
an eminently important moment in the history of the intellectual
development of the ancient world, my object is to show that in the same
way that, according to all grounds of analogy, a simpler natural faith,
as the simple religion of the first patriarchs of the human race,
preceded the later form of heathenism into which the worship of the
Gentiles so wildly and so fearfully degenerated--so, also, in the
philosophy of Greece, its later systems and sects, which were so
thoroughly false and pernicious, were preceded by, at least, a
comparatively better and higher view--by a purer theory of science and
of truth.

For though the oldest philosophers of the Ionian school held water, or
air, or fire, to be the ground and principle of all things, and built on
such hypotheses their whole theory of nature, nevertheless we should, in
all probability, greatly err, were we, on that account, to charge them
with or to suspect them of materialism. They understood these elements,
not in the ordinary, but in a spiritual and living sense, as the
elements of universal life, and, at the same time, did not fail to
acknowledge a higher spirit operating in and above nature, and God’s
all-disposing intelligence. Of Heraclitus, who made fire the essential
ground and first principle of all things, we know, with historical
certainty, that, notwithstanding, his philosophy and view of the
universe was, in the highest degree, ideal and spiritual. And the same
is true also of Anaxagoras, the teacher of Socrates. Much, too, that
would do great credit to the general spirit of thought and science of
that period, might be adduced from the venerable founder of the valuable
art of medicine, and also from his school, were the present the
appropriate place. The simple fact, too, that Socrates proceeded from
out of this Ionian school, would alone dispose me to form a favorable
opinion of it in its earliest state; and it is greatly to be regretted
that our information concerning the oldest of these great thinkers is so
scanty, and its details so uncertain and so little to be depended on,
that it is impossible to form any settled and definite judgment on the
matter.

When, however, we proceed to examine the religious spirit and value of
Grecian philosophy in general, or any of its special branches, schools,
and epochs, we must adopt as the fundamental rule of our judgment the
universal dogmas of man’s pure and uncorrupted feelings or judgment.
Taking for our standard the natural belief in a living and personal God,
and in an everlasting and all-ruling spirit, in the immortality of the
soul, and in the freedom of the will, together with the immutable
principles and ideas of justice, honor, morality, and virtue, we must,
in this case, carefully exclude all the special doctrines of a positive
faith. We must not look for or require, in so early an age, that which
the further development of later periods brought to light. Far be it
from us to wonder at, or to urge it as a reproach against Pythagoras or
Plato, if among their doctrines we meet with ideas, which, strictly
understood, are not perfectly consistent with Christianity. Rather is it
a matter for surprise and congratulation that they knew and were aware
of, had anticipated and taught, so much that a later date first placed
in a fuller light, and made the common property of all men. This, at
least, was the opinion and conclusion on this subject entertained in the
first century by the greatest and best-informed of the fathers of
Christian doctrine and science.

This highly religious tendency and perception which we recognize in
Pythagoras, for instance, or in Plato--this anticipation by science of
the ideas of Christianity, of principles which, with this exception,
belong to the Christian era of the world’s history, could not have been
without God. We must, in short, recognize therein a higher providence.
We may accordingly justly regard Grecian philosophy, in its better
spirit and elements, as forming on its part a preparation for the
Gospel, and a scientific introduction to Christianity, of a special and
peculiar kind.

Now, among those whose observations, and sciences, and endeavors were
throughout directed Godward, the Pythagoreans stand highest and
foremost. We have already alluded to the fact, that in physical science
they were acquainted with the best and the most important of all that
our history of discoveries, within the last three centuries, is so proud
of. Here and there, perhaps, their knowledge even outran our own, and in
all probability they were not without some insight into those mysteries
of creation, about which our philosophy of nature has within the last
half century excited so much wonder and admiration. It is also probable,
we observed, that by their theory of numbers we are not to understand
the ordinary formulæ of mathematics, nor the usual arbitrary play with
them in which science so often indulges, but rather the development of
the intrinsic and divine law of nature and of life according to its
everlasting structure and immutable foundations, or according to the
vicissitudes of its critical times and seasons. But here it may be
asked--whence had they all this? how, without the telescope, and with,
at best, a very defective system of mathematics, and an imperfect art of
calculation, did they attain to a knowledge of the true astronomical
system of the universe? To start the hypothesis, that they learned and
borrowed it all from the Egyptians, would only be to remove the question
a step farther back, and not really to answer it. But even if we were
to admit the fact, such an assumption would only, as regards the
essential question with respect to the Pythagoreans and the origin of
their science, increase their merits and their glory. For in the same
way as we observed on an earlier occasion, with reference to Moses and
the Hebrews, it must have been by the exercise of a rare wisdom, that
while they selected all that was best and most valuable in Egyptian
science, they rejected so much that was pernicious, and laid aside so
much that was likely to lead them astray, and even the impious magical
superstitions that were to be found there.

In much later times, and even down to our own days, the name of the
Pythagorean school and science has been forced to serve as a cloak for
every noxious farrago of mysticism, as also that of the Neo-Platonists
has been made the symbol of every visionary extravagance. But even if
(what, however, I greatly doubt) an historical connection can be shown
to subsist between the so-called Pythagoreans of later times and the
earlier and genuine school, nothing further would follow from such a
fact, than a confirmation of my general position. It would but furnish
an additional proof that all that is greatest, noblest, and most
beautiful, when it once begins to degenerate and corrupt, invariably
reaches a proportionate depth of corruption and degeneracy, and assumes
the worst and wildest aspect of deformity.

As concerns the influence of this school of life, and its political aims
and tendencies, which were unquestionably part of the general design of
the Pythagorean doctrine: all this must be judged of in conformity with
Greek notions and habits, and with reference to the unsettled and
disordered state of the several Grecian communities. This being granted,
it will appear that a simple but lofty object was the basis of their
fraternity. By forming an enlightened aristocracy of highly cultivated
minds, of men of scientific attainments, and of pure and noble morals,
they hoped to establish a new and better polity, such as might check the
reigning anarchy and revolutionary spirit of democracy, which distracted
all the republics, whether smaller or greater, into which Greece was at
that time divided. But the evil had become too great, and its power was
irresistible. But the whole enterprise failed, and its failure entailed
the dissolution of the Pythagorean society.

Many similar views and political designs, which Plato subsequently
ingrafted on his own philosophy, in like manner remained nothing more
than ideas, and led to no practical result. A far more considerable
influence on life and its relations was exercised by the Sophists.
Considered in a political point of view, they were truly and properly
pernicious demagogues, and, in the fullest sense of the term, the
flatterers of the populace. Not only did they undermine the outward
national worship, with its poetical and hereditary associations, but
also overthrew the inward religion of good principles and of moral
sentiments. In short, they practically taught a true moral atheism, and
succeeded in making it the prevailing and ruling principle in the
conduct of life.

At this stage of Grecian philosophy, we witness, for the first time, a
remarkable phenomenon. The true and good science which directs itself to
the Godlike and divine, is unable to attain to any lasting or pervading
influence on the lives of men: on the other hand, we see a false and
evil sophistic gradually gaining a complete ascendency amid the general
demoralization of society, and the growing anarchy of the political
community, which, thoroughly corrupt and degenerate, only rose out of
one revolution to fall immediately into another. Or, rather, this false
sophistic, and this moral and political anarchy, were perfectly one
together, so far at least as two destructive principles can ever be or
be brought in unison.

The complete alienation which now existed between the better science and
life, and especially public life, is most distinctly manifested in the
case of the greatest among the Grecian philosophers of later times--in
Aristotle, and the position he occupied in his own age and nation. This
acute thinker, with the utmost care and diligence, collected together
all the most eminent results of the science, and the most remarkable
thoughts of earlier times. Examining and analyzing them with great
critical acumen, and with a comprehensive survey, he formed them into a
new whole, and arranged them into a system of his own, completer and
fuller than had ever before been attempted or accomplished.

We can not, perhaps, estimate too highly or admire too much this great
master of human subtilty, whether for his intellectual powers and extent
of learning, or even as a writer. Still we must not forget that in his
system were contained the germ and evident tendency to the two chief
forms of philosophical error--naturalism on the one side, and
rationalism on the other. And so we find that in the later times of the
following centuries, each of these false systems, according as the
occasion favored the one or the other, were drawn out from the
Aristotelian doctrine, to receive a further and a distincter
development. In his doctrine on the Godhead, he can least of all stand a
severe and rigorous criticism. And in many points, as, for instance, in
his notion of the absolute self-sufficiency of the reason, he
approximates but too closely to the idealistic view which we have
already designated as the transition to scientific atheism.

It was only in a very remote and distant age that Aristotle attained to
a very great importance and authority. In his own day he did but form a
very inconsiderable school, which exercised far less influence on public
life than two other sects, in whose history the development of Grecian
philosophy finds its close.

The system of the Stoics, with its stern and, consequently,
impracticable theory of morals, its doctrine of absolute necessity and
blind fatalism, announces itself at once as identical with an austere
rationalism. At the same time, under the teaching of the Epicureans, a
soft and effeminate naturalism became almost universally prevalent. And
while, in another and newer form, it gradually assumed the place of the
old mythical heathenism, which daily fell more and more into neglect and
disrepute, it still retained the old heathen sentiment, and a careless
and undisturbed indifference in inactive bliss and self-enjoyment, as it
was even ascribed and imputed to the gods, was introduced into life, and
extolled as the true wisdom. Thus, then, while on the one hand the
foundation was laid for that insensibility with which the wide-spreading
and growing corruption and the approach of the general ruin were
contemplated, so, on the other hand, the apathy of the Stoics was not
exactly the right kind of sentiment to furnish a check or counteractive
to this sybaritic indifference.

As concerns the relations of public life, the social community, and the
state, the Stoical doctrine appears, no doubt, in a worthier and a
better light. On this account it numbered among its adherents almost all
the great statesmen that lived from the last times of the Republic down
to the later centuries of the Empire. Considered, however, in
themselves, and scientifically regarded, both systems must be looked
upon simply as the last chemical decomposing process, or the initiatory
putrifying state of all higher science and philosophical reflection
among the Greeks. On the whole, then, we conclude that Grecian science
and philosophy have exercised no influence at all on life, or at least,
either a very inadequate, or such as has proved radically baneful and
pernicious.

But now, in the very center of man’s history--in the transition-point
between the ancient and the modern world--science and life were again at
unison, as at the beginning. And this was effected by the appearance of
a new science in another form. For most assuredly we shall not err in
giving this name to a new living and spiritual power, which, totally
changing and giving an entirely new direction to the arbitrary views,
sentiments, and principles of public and private life, and also to the
modes of thinking prevalent in the age and in the world, was strong
enough to triumph, not only over heathenism itself, but also over the
science and philosophy of its most enlightened nations. Now this new
mode of thinking, which came forward in the full certainty of the most
undoubting faith and the highest internal illumination, had, so far as
it is right and allowable to call it a science, a very different form
and scope from all that has previously and usually been so called. For
it issued out of the very depths of life, and received from love--a
divine love, that is--its first diffusion and establishment.
Consequently, it was a thoroughly living science, or, as being perfectly
clear and certain in itself, a new scientific life, which, moreover,
proceeded from this its first starting-point, was able to penetrate into
all the other forms of public life and of the anterior systems of
science, and by adopting or remodeling them, give to itself therein a
further and more universal development.

But here, also, the divine impulse from above encountered the usual
partial or entire resistance from below. Accordingly, this new living
wisdom, which, in its essence, is one with life, and which, therefore,
the more it is developed only unfolds this unity the more universally
and the more immutably, was not, at the first, universally adopted, or
did not become every where predominant. Moreover, even where it was
received, and its authority acknowledged, its reception was often little
more than external. It was not admitted as a living principle into all
the depths of the soul, or impressed on all the habits and tendencies
of the mind [_geist_]. And even where, in some degree at least, it was
adopted in the inner man with full and sincere love, it was often
nothing more than an undeveloped germ of the future and of a higher
life. Isolated by itself, and standing apart, it remained shut up within
the inmost bosom, without at the same time penetrating, reanimating, and
giving a new life and shape to all the other life-elements of the
consciousness and the productions of human science.

Thus, then, it was only too possible for error to find its entrance even
here also. And it is remarkable that both its principal forms, such as
in varying shapes the history of philosophy is constantly presenting to
us in the different epochs of its progress, here again most distinctly
present themselves with all the features of their intellectual
physiognomy plainly marked, and with the still more obvious contrast of
their intrinsic diversity. A philosophy of nature more or less visionary
and fanciful was the common basis of the various Gnostic sects. With
their long series of imaginary emanations from the Deity, resembling in
no slight degree the old heathen genealogies of the gods, they would,
had they triumphed, have converted Christianity into a similar
mythology, though of a more philosophical character. In the Arians, on
the contrary, and other kindred sects before and after them, we
recognize rather the spirit of rationalism, which, dwelling on some
point of life, or theory, with a show of rigor and accuracy, while,
apparently, it disputes only about words, is, in fact, undermining the
foundation of the most essential ideas.

All these parties, however, as they originated, so they also
disappeared, within the first five or eight centuries of our era. It
was, therefore, impossible for their pernicious influence to gain a deep
hold of life. At least it was neither universal nor permanent. Yet by
them the ardor of a first love was cooled. And sad, indeed, has been the
loss as regards the fullness of living energy, and even in respect of
profounder wisdom.

The history of the middle ages again presents a rare and singular
phenomenon. One great mind and writer of antiquity, whose influence in
his own day was far from extensive, became at this date, in a most
remarkable manner, the problem and center of scientific inquiry. For
several centuries the human mind was laboriously engaged in disputing
about the philosophy of Aristotle. And although men did not understand
it--not, at least, its deeper meaning, for they lacked the first and
most essential qualifications, and also the requisite means for such a
purpose--this apparently aimless disputation, and this unsolved problem,
was, nevertheless, not without great and manifold influence on their own
and the following ages. It has had a permanent effect on the whole frame
of man’s life and being.

Of the two wholly different aspects which, as we have already so often
remarked, the philosophy of Aristotle presents, it was probably not its
fruits of rationalism (for, at this period, such were generally regarded
as forbidden) that throughout the great part of the then civilized world
excited so incredible a fondness for this all-absorbing and
all-understanding system. Its attraction lay rather in some great and
mysterious knowledge of nature. And the desire for these intellectual
treasures was not a little heightened by the fact, that, in general,
they were inaccessible.

In the little intercourse subsisting, at this period, between distant
nations and lands, and the almost total separation of the East from the
West, it was only through the Arabic versions, or Latin translations
molded again upon these, that any knowledge of this philosophy could be
drawn. This must have led, it is obvious, to a wide deviation from the
true sense and critical spirit of the author. Its original aim must have
been generally missed. For, however highly we may be disposed to
estimate the intellectual merits of the Arabians, as writers of their
native history, or in poetry, or in any other science, they are
notoriously deficient in the true critical spirit. Their total and
universal want, in this respect, is especially evident when they are
compared with the Greeks, among whom this critical acuteness, whether
false or true, sprung up and reached its greatest height.

Strange, no doubt, and singular is it at first sight, to view this old
master of philosophical thought and science, who, on the whole, is so
perfectly heathen, suddenly received among the medieval theologians, and
taking, as it were, his seat, and giving his voice among them. Still, if
men of great mental powers and authority sought to make themselves
masters of the whole matter--both of the much-disputed works of this
writer, this Aristotle, so strangely disguised in his new motley dress
of Arabic Latin, and also of the voluminous labors bestowed upon
him--we must look upon this procedure as analogous to that of the
thoughtful physician, who, in the midst of a wide-spread pestilence and
inevitable contagion, prefers to inoculate it himself, in order the more
safely to treat and to cure it. In short, as the case really stands, we
must look on these illustrious men in two distinct lights. On the one
hand we must see in them the Church’s venerable teachers, and the
sagacious and discriminating theologians of the day; on the other, the
scholastic interpreters of Aristotle, who had now become a necessary
evil for the Christian middle ages.

This, however, and whatever else was the matter and object of such
subtile disputes, was too soon forgotten. In these scholastic contests,
after the fashion of the day, the combatants, horse and man, were armed
_cap-a-piè_, incased and disguised in logical coats of mail, composed of
countless rings of thought and chains of ideas. With this heavy panoply,
the great object was to heave their antagonist out of the saddle. Often
they recoiled from the shock without advantage on either side--so
equally matched were they in their good lances and the weight of their
armor--and often they swerved from the charge. Mostly, however, both of
the philosophical knights found themselves, at the end of the strife, at
their old station in the lists, or driven back, perhaps, to their
original entry. This scholastic philosophy, in the form it now took, of
a highly elaborate art of logical tourney in the philosophical schools,
was, undoubtedly, an abiding evil in the age that immediately followed,
and furnished an important element to the party disputes of later, and
to the rationalism of these latest times.

The overthrow of the Grecian empire and the discovery of the new world,
suddenly and at once introduced into Western Europe vast and varied
treasures of historical, physical, and philosophical knowledge. In this
brilliant epoch of the fifteenth century, a new world of thought was, as
it were, laid open. A new era of science would have been founded, and a
veritable reformation of the whole Christian life must have ensued, had
not the moral corruption and the political disorders of the period been
gross beyond description. But for all this, how much is there to admire
in the Platonic writers of the fifteenth century, among whom Germany,
after Italy, produced the most famous and the greatest number? When we
take up, even now, any one of their works, and contemplate therein
their comprehensive liberal pursuit of science, their mild, antique
spirit, their noble form, and their quick recognition of the beautiful,
we can not turn from them without regret to that new state of barbarism
into which, during the sixteenth and part also of the seventeenth
century, science was plunged by the rampant spirit of party and
controversy.

At last, however, peace and quiet returned again to Christian lands and
states, and slowly, and by degrees, to the minds also of men. And now
was it, in the eighteenth century, and especially toward the middle of
it, that out of this apparent and superficial peace, a new science, or a
new light, or at least a new diffusion of it, seemed ready to arise.
Simply regarded in a scientific point of view, this philosophical
endeavor of the eighteenth century, and the most memorable of the
systems to which it gave rise, occupied our attention in the very
opening of these Lectures. Here the immediate object of our
consideration is not this new science itself, whether true or false, but
rather the influence on the age, and on life in general, of this modern
mode of thinking, as generally diffused and prevalent.

Much, undoubtedly, has been discovered or newly learned in the natural
sciences and in the domain of history; many too have been the bold
ventures, at least, and novel essays in philosophy. This new wisdom,
moreover, was taught and disseminated far more universally than ever
before had been the case; while even the agreeable feeling produced by
the moderation of the intellectual spirit now prevalent, greatly
promoted its wide and rapid diffusion. But at a later period this
enlightenment, so rapidly and so widely diffused, which, moreover, was
taken only in a negative sense, was soon recognized to be unsatisfactory
and superficial, while also the theory of popular liberty and
independence which was grafted thereon, and claimed, or at least wished
to be rational, bore the bitterest and worst of fruits.

In short, to speak most leniently of it, the whole was nothing less than
the undigested scheme of an immature and imperfect knowledge, brought
into the world before its time. Accordingly, its rash and precipitate
course in the last age, whose history is unparalleled in the annals of
the whole world, together with the fearful catastrophe which it has
brought about, opened the eyes of men to the fearful abyss to which such
a precipitate abuse of science had hurried them. And, in consequence,
thinking men of the highest endowments and the richest intellectual
gifts among different nations, have in many ways nobly devoted
themselves to the work of restoration in sentiment, in thought, and in
science.

But on the one hand, the first elements of the former destructive
principle appear to be still existing, even though it be in less obvious
and more pliable and disguised forms. On the other hand again, the
corrected mode of thinking, and the better tone of sentiment and
science, is for the most part confined merely to a more chastened
outward form. Scarcely any where as yet is it carried far enough back,
up to the profoundest sources of spiritual life, up to the primal origin
and veritable foundation of the divine and of the eternally good.

And yet this is exactly the problem of our age, and herein alone shall
we find the solution of the great enigma of the times. For from this
hasty review of the whole course of the intellectual development of
humanity, from its beginning to its close, the result, for the sake of
and with a view to which alone I ventured so cursorily and in such faint
outline to sketch all the leading epochs of the history of philosophy,
must at least be evident. As in the beginning, and in the center
thereof, science and life lovingly co-operated together and were fully
in unison; and as in the intermediate epochs and intervals among the
Greeks in civilized antiquity, and in the middle ages among ourselves,
they became more and more estranged, so at the end will they be at one
again. And already, even in our own days, every thing is tending to
bring about such a consummation. But who shall say whether it shall be
in a good or an evil sense? Ere long, life shall either, under the
influence of the true and good and divine knowledge, be again restored,
permanently regulated, and receive a new shape and fresh vigor, or, by a
false and delusive science, be completely destroyed, and involved in
eternal ruin.

Having, in this hasty review, considered, under its historical aspect,
the problem of the relation of science--the true and divine, as well as
the false and delusive--to both private and public life, it now remains
for us to examine and to answer this same question from the side of
theory. Regarded from this point of view, it would appear that whenever
science fails to exercise an influence on life, or when they withdraw
and are estranged one from the other, the fact may be always accounted
for and explained by accidental causes and purely local influences, such
as have their origin in the several periods of the world’s history, or
flow from certain imperfections on one side or the other. For,
considered in itself, science in general is nothing but this unity of
thought and life, and consequently its living operation and influence
are involved in the very idea of a higher science, provided only it be
true and properly regulated. Either, therefore, science is life elevated
into a thought, and consequently transformed into a thinking, or else it
is a thought carried into reality, that has passed and been transmuted
into life, and therein fully attested and certified by life
itself--consequently a thinking become life.

Now, according to this view, that science consists in the mutual
approximation to, and the final attainment of, a perfect unity between
thought and life, there are three degrees of it, according to that
triple gradation and threefold principle which exists in the human
consciousness. The first of these, then, is reflection. And this,
understood in a somewhat profounder acceptation than ordinarily, is an
internal feeling, hearing, or seeing of one’s own thinking. Consequently
it is a perception similar to that of the senses, by means of which the
unseen thought is in some degree projected and introduced into external
reality. But this act of reflection is nothing more than a passive state
of the soul in its internal observation of itself. So long as it remains
confined to this narrow sphere, it perpetually revolves in the same
orbit, and, properly speaking, produces no ulterior results of a
knowledge fruitful and applicable to actual and outward life.

The second degree or moment of science is abstraction, by virtue of
which, from the complete sum of all the criteria and characteristics of
an object, or, rather, of a thought, some one is prominently set forth
as the most essential, and for the sake of communication designated by a
name. For all communication and language is based on this faculty of
abstraction, which is itself an arbitrary act of the free will. But
although by this naming, generalization, and communication, the internal
thought is advanced a step farther into the external world and the
living reality among and with others, still the reality of the thought
is by no means satisfactorily established thereby. For this very liberty
in the choice of name, of combination, and of general classification,
opens a wide field for caprice. This is evident enough from the
countless multitude of terminologies, so needlessly invented and so
rapidly thrown into oblivion, which form so many remote and mutually
unintelligible philosophical dialects, in the ever-repeated attempt to
build methodically the Babel tower of philosophical system. For these
designations of abstract thoughts, even when they are most felicitous,
fail to win the concurrence of others, and do but open a door to endless
dialectical disputation.

Thus, then, neither reflection, which is eternally revolving within the
narrow orbit of our inward self, nor empty abstraction, though it strays
at pleasure over the spacious realm of the possible, can lead us to the
desired end of perfect certainty or veritable science. It is alone the
practical carrying out into real life of a speculative thought, that can
bring it to the conclusion of perfection of certainty, and to a complete
and true science. Now I should prefer to designate this its highest
grade by the notion and name of _consequence_. But by this term, I must
be understood as meaning not merely a correct logical enchainment of
ideas, but pre-eminently a faithfully-worked-out _consequence_ or
consistency of sentiment and life, _i.e._, a perseverance in good. At
the same time, it must ever be remembered, that the evil principle,
although it often makes a boast of possessing this quality, does so only
in appearance, and never in this true sense. On the contrary, torn to
pieces by conflicting passions in its inmost being, it is really in the
highest degree inconsequent, as acting in direct opposition to its
beginning and origin, which, like all other created beings, it took and
received from God.

Truly consequent or consistent a man can not be except in the truth,
_i.e._, in Him out of whom all truth, and from whom all existence is
derived and flows--in other words, in God. Science, therefore, is an
_applied_ thinking, _i.e._, one that has passed into life, and thereby
become real and certain; and it is only on the road of practice, by its
actual carrying out or _real_ manifestation, that it can attain to its
highest degree, and that the truth of an idea or speculative thought can
be satisfactorily attested.

The ideas, according to the original sense of the term, are even the
self-existing thoughts of a higher life, as distinct both from the
simple facts of the consciousness in the domain of reflection, and from
the arbitrary forms of thought set up by empty abstraction. And though
even here as elsewhere, a false, sickly, or a null and illusory life,
may be substituted for that which is true, still this applies only to
the form of the living idea, as contrasted with the sensuous semblance
or the dead notion. For, that an idea is truly divine, can only be
proved by this quality of consequence--by its divine influence and
effect on life.

On the other hand, many philosophical thinkers have somewhat erroneously
indicated the intrinsic certainty of philosophical thought by the name
and under the form of an intellectual intuition, and thereby given
occasion to manifold misconceptions. But if in all the fullness of the
conception already advanced of the eternal truth, and of Him who is its
sum and source, we were really able to be sentinent of and to feel the
divine life--to hear and audibly to perceive the eternal Word and
actually to see the holy Light, such a spiritual intuition of God’s
glory and majesty would be far more appropriate for the future than for
the present world. And even though we may and can admit it to be
conceivable, as given from above, still a communication of it would be
impossible, and, consequently, could not be available for the ordinary
purpose of giving a philosophical foundation to any human system. Under
this form, then, of a so-called intellectual intuition, if it be really
such, and not rather a mere form of abstract thought under another and
an assumed name, speculative science would consequently assume the
character of a questionable vision, and a possible mental delusion. For
a full internal satisfaction and certainty--so far at least as these are
attainable by man--even in the case that they are the sign and the proof
that this intuition, or perception of the divine light actually took
place, can only be furnished by that quality of consequence already
described as belonging to every thought and cognition which is founded
in God. And to this character of consequence or consistency, the
condition of agreement with every other idea or revelation already
acknowledged to be divine, belongs naturally as the irrefragable law of
judgment and of life.

That full and correct conception of eternal truth which has been
developed by us in the ninth Lecture as the living _idea_ of the Supreme
Being is unquestionably the fundamental speculative notion and the
internal spiritual basis on which every other higher science, that has
any pretensions to the qualities of permanence and consequence which
belong to right-thinking and to immutable truth, is subsequently
raised, or, in other words, it is the source from which it abidingly
flows. In the three subsequent Lectures, however, the subject has been
mostly scientific, speculative, and metaphysical, though throughout
accompanied with historical illustrations drawn from the development of
the human mind. And here, accordingly, a reference to the science or
discipline of logic is every where supposed.

Now, in the form in which this science or discipline has come down to us
from the Greeks, there is much that is rather an accident than a part of
its essence, and whose presence must be accounted for by some special
and local necessity. With no people before or since has rhetoric enjoyed
so commanding an influence as with the Greeks, and with none also has
the sophistic art produced such great and such pernicious effects.
Accordingly, they found it necessary to devote to the analysis of all
its arts, delusions, and tortuous windings, and also to the development
of the dialectical means for their detection and refutation, a
disproportionate degree of attention, which is neither necessary for us
nor practically useful.

The Hindoos, likewise, have from the most ancient times possessed a
scientific system of logic. Indeed it has even been said, that
Aristotle, having received from Alexander the Great some of their
logical treatises, borrowed from them his own system, or, at least,
molded it after them. But from the reasons just adduced, I am disposed
to think that, in all probability, the Hindoo logic was much simpler
than the Grecian, where the simple end of truth, and the great
desideratum of a correct standard thereof, was lost sight of amid an
overminute analysis, and the mazes of an endless subdivision of notions.

In the routine of our school education logic might, perhaps, be made a
highly profitable study if only it were combined with and made to bear
upon the history of the gradual development of human thought, and
especially the theory of language. And then, since thought and speech
are so intimately allied to and dependent on each other, it would be
advisable to go a step farther, and extend our logical studies to the
theory of imagination, symbolical language and its fundamental rules.

In a scientific education, too, a logic of the memory (if we may be
allowed the expression) would in all probability be highly useful. For
an established law and disposition of our thoughts would greatly
facilitate the exercise of memory, and as furnishing rules for the
practice, or generally as an exercise of that faculty, would form an
excellent basis for scientific education. For the conduct of life,
indeed, there is nothing so important or so desirable as a right logic
of the conscience, which should detect all the internal delusions of
egoism and the still more subtile sophistry of selfishness in every
point where the question lies between the righteous truth and a latent
falsehood. And this is intimately connected with, or at least leads
directly to, the notion of the sound reason which requires before all
things a conscientious susceptibility of the truth.

But a logic applicable to this higher science must be understood in a
far more comprehensive sense than is ordinarily done. And this is even
what we have here attempted to furnish. Logic in general is conversant
about three objects: the notion, the judgment, and the conclusion. But
it ought also to possess a general fundamental rule and regulative
standard of truth, so far as this is attainable. But inasmuch as in this
domain the eternal is simply one, so also for this higher science one
notion properly is sufficient; as also one judgment which comprises all
others, and one conclusion which completes the whole, is sufficient. The
act of understanding has been explained to be the completion of the
notion; and the full and complete apprehension of the eternal truth, or
of Him who is the sum of all verities, was the subject-matter of our
ninth treatise. The act of discerning was explained to be the completion
of the judgment; and this perfect judgment, which decides and
distinguishes between truth and error, was the theme of our tenth
disquisition. Science, however, is the perfection of all thinking, and
in its actual operation, as applied to life, and in itself carried to a
conclusion, is one with it. Now this was the end to which the present
discussion and development was intended to lead; while the further
prosecution of it and its reference to the several spheres and domains
of existence must be reserved to the following discourses.




LECTURE XII.

OF THE SYMBOLICAL NATURE AND CONSTITUTION OF LIFE WITH REFERENCE TO ART
AND THE MORAL RELATIONS OF MAN.


How difficult it generally is for man to express his internal
conceptions, to bring out the indwelling idea and to realize its perfect
external manifestation, is shown, for example, among other instances, by
the fine arts, or the art of the beautiful. For this reason the theory
of the latter, the so-called æsthetics (which, however, might far more
correctly be termed symbolism), forms the natural pendant and
accompaniment to logic, if the latter, instead of being limited, as is
usual, to the mere art of distinguishing the different kinds of notions,
is understood in a far higher sense, and referred to eternal, and,
consequently, divine truth, and to its intrinsic and equally divine
standard. For when the question no longer involves a purely material or
simply subjective verity, but that which is more exalted and heavenly,
then beauty (that, namely, about which art is conversant, and which, far
surpassing all that is merely human, pretends and really ought to be
divine and supernatural) forms the other and symbolical aspect of one
and the same eternal truth. And indeed it is neither separable from it
nor opposed to it, so long as art maintains its high standing and
employs the sensual charm which it requires for the lively expression of
vitality, and its outward manifestation, only as a symbol and for the
sake of that higher significance which she herself lends to it, and does
not seek nor admire it for its own sake, nor sees therein the
fulfillment of its own true end and aim.

But by far the greater number of the productions of art are only
repetitions or copies of some previous realization. And I use this term,
not in its usual depreciatory sense, but rather in one that is
applicable to what are truly artistic productions but still only
successful formations at second-hand. Extremely rare, indeed, are the
original expressions or impressions of an indwelling, unborrowed idea
And even among these very many are nothing more than the first faint
outline and commencement, which only at a subsequent epoch of art, and
after long and repeated essays, attains to complete perfection and a
really successful and veritable outward exhibition of the indwelling
idea. For we must ever consider as an idea that inward object which art
in its external manifestations strives to realize, and which in its
creations ought to stand out, as it were, bodily before us.

Even in music (as the expression of the emotions of the soul in their
flow and change, and in the struggle with inharmonious discords, till at
last they finally dissolve in harmony) it is not so much the immediate
feeling--for this would be no more artistic than the mere cry of
passion--as rather the idea of it that the artist has in his mind, and
that forms the subject of his representations. The musician strives to
represent the whole idea--the beautiful and the marvelous in the whole
progress of its development. Following the inmost life-pulse in its
alternate rising and falling, he labors to give its unexpected
transitions up to their sudden harmony or its repetitions of still
increasing pitch up to a full and soothing close, or (if this is
designedly to be left unattained) up to the abrupt and painful breaking
off or gradual dying away and cessation of the plaintive note or the
tone of ardent longing.

And the same is the case with sculpture. But here we would premise the
remark, that the principle with which we set out, of the triple nature
and division of man’s being, is confirmed by the existence of a
corresponding order and diversity in the fine arts. Among the arts,
accordingly, whose object is the manifestation of the beautiful, music
is pre-eminently the art for the soul, while sculpture is for the most
part corporeal.

Now, in sculpture it is not any actual figure or the body itself that
the artist has in view. It is the general idea thereof that constitutes
the subject-matter of his representations. He seeks to portray its most
perfect structure, its full organic development, its exquisite
correctness of symmetry and sublime beauty of form. And to all this even
the expression of character and passion is in a certain degree
subordinate. And exactly because the external medium which it employs,
because the material mass on which its internal conceptions are to be
stamped, or, rather, out of which they are to be worked, is the
inanimate stone and cold marble, therefore does true sculpture aim at a
higher excellence than the uniformity and death-like repose which
characterize the Egyptian statues of the gods. It seeks rather to
triumph by copying with the most marvelous truth and fidelity the living
frame in its most rapid movements, and life in its most violent
struggles, and by seizing its fleeting graces to fix them forever in its
own imperishable creations.

In truth, the imitation of actual reality, however difficult and in
itself worthy of admiration it may be, does not constitute the aim or
object, or generally the principle of sculpture, any more than of any
other art. A remarkable proof of this is afforded by the fact that
color, with all its charms, is excluded from the plastic art and its
embodied manifestations as too meretricious and too closely allied to
reality. For by such an expedient, not less than by the use of ingenious
mechanism to give motion to the limbs, the artistic ideal, or the images
of the gods, would have degenerated into the puppets of children.

Reality, therefore, with its actual shapes and the delusive imitation
and servile copying of them, is in nowise the proper or immediate object
of the plastic art. Even beauty of form is not always, not at least
solely and exclusively its aim; it is only so accidentally and
relatively, as a condition of the expression of character, of external
states, and of the total significance. Always and universally it is a
thought, the _idea_ of some subject or form as the inner sense and
significance thereof, that constitutes the essence of a work of art, and
with which art in general is concerned. In other words, art is
symbolical. And this may be predicated with equal truth of every higher
art, as well as of sculpture, whatever may be the medium of its
manifestations, whether a statue, or tone as in music, or words as in
poetry. It is exactly this that constitutes the difference between high
art and every other which, however closely allied to it in appearance,
has some ulterior and practical object, and which therefore can not be
symbolical.

Of this kind, for instance, is the difference between rhetoric (which
most assuredly is an art, or at least was exclusively treated as such by
the Greeks) and poetry. And it is of the utmost importance to keep this
distinction constantly in view. For exactly in the same degree that it
is neglected is the proper character and true excellency of the higher
art of the beautiful lost sight of. And a right estimate of the other
arts which have an ulterior and practical object would also be
endangered. An orator who with the greatest command of practical and
imaginative language is nevertheless devoid of convincing logical power
to sway the minds of men by his arguments, and to bend them irresistibly
to his purpose, would exercise but little influence; while no heavier
censure can be passed on one who sets up for a poet, than to affirm of
him, that he possesses and understands nothing but the rhetoric of
passion, without--though such further qualification is evidently
superfluous--true poetry.

Of the fine arts, therefore, which, employing a material medium for
their representations, possess an ideal and symbolical significance,
music is the art of the soul, and sculpture is that of corporeal form,
and of the manifestation of the true idea of organic beauty. But among
the three sister arts, painting is the true spiritual one. As the light,
with its ceaseless variety of tints and hues, is the most spiritual
element of nature, and as the eye is the most spiritual of man’s senses,
so painting, as concerned about these, is the most spiritual of the
arts, and the one with which the symbolical spirit readily associates
itself. Painting directs itself wholly to the eye, whereas sculpture
appeals indeed to the eye, but only as the necessary medium for
satisfying the corporeal sense and feeling.

But painting, in its manifestations, does not confine itself to abstract
beauty (if we may so say) or the perfect structure and symmetry of form.
It embraces all the eye can reach in the visible phenomena of the world,
with all its wonderful play of light and shade and magical splendor of
coloring, where not only the whole, but the several parts--in a word,
all that in many and various ways is charming to the senses, attractive
to the eye with ever new wonders, and all that to the mind or spirit is
full of deep spiritual and symbolical significance. And for this reason
the wonderful art of painting is even the most appropriate, shall I say
to exhibit, or rather to suggest, the high mysteries of divine love in
religion and revelation. No wonder, then, if, in modern Christendom,
music and painting, the art or symbolism of soul and spirit, have been
chiefly cultivated, and attained their highest development and
perfection, whereas the art of the perfect development of organic form
and corporeal and sensual beauty, reached its height of excellence in
the sculpture of classical antiquity, which in the same way and degree
will never again be paralleled, or at least will never be surpassed.

It appears sufficient if we assume that there are only three symbolical
arts for the higher manifestation of the beautiful. For architecture,
although in various ways bound and modified by the conditions of some
ulterior design, is, nevertheless, in its principal features closely
related to sculpture, and stands on the same line with it. For beauty of
structure, correctness of proportion, and grace of symmetry, which form
the fundamental laws of the plastic art, constitute also the ideal of
architecture. Accordingly, among the Greeks and Romans, where the latter
attained to its highest and richest cultivation, its principles,
relations, and forms approximate to those of organic figure, to which
they are not indeed outwardly in their structure, but in a certain
degree and according to their internal constitution, similar and
correspondent, or at least related.

Egyptian architecture, with its predominantly mathematical character,
and the tree-like Gothic aspiring to heaven, with its slender shafts and
floral decorations, form the two extremes of this organic character
which belongs to architecture, and which constitutes it one and the same
art with sculpture. For the structures of the former environ and
surround the creations of the latter. And it is only consistent that
that which supplies the legitimate sphere and the natural medium for the
other properly exhibitive art of sculpture and its statues of the gods,
should even possess or acquire a similarity of character with it. As to
the Egyptian and Gothic architectures, the remark readily suggests
itself that the symbolical character displays itself predominantly in
them: purity of form, however, is the prevalent feature of the _antique_
(or Grecian), but even here in its proportions the symbolical principle
may be traced, although it is more recondite, not to say concealed.

Even poetry is no fourth art alongside of the other three. It does not
stand on the same line with and form, as it were, the complement of
their number. It is rather the universal symbolical art which comprises
and combines in different mediums all those other exhibitive arts of the
beautiful. In its rhythm and other metrical aids it possesses all the
charms of a music in words; in its figurative diction it maintains an
endless succession of shifting pictures in the vivid coloring of
diversified illustration; while in its entire structure (which must be
neither purely historical, nor logical, or even rhetorical) it strives
to attain, by a beautiful organic development and disposition of its
parts, to an arrangement of the whole both architecturally great and
correct.

Poetry owes in every instance its first creative beginning to some great
and singular ray of light from symbolical tradition, which, at the same
time, illuminates the noble and memorable past, and points forward to
the dark and mystical future. For it would be difficult to produce one
among the great epic poems of antiquity that does not contain this
poetico-prophetic element, and does not touch upon the profound
mysteries of both worlds. The next and middle step is occupied by the
poetry of sentiment and feeling--that music of the soul or poesy of song
in which the calm deep longings and the wild tearing passions of the
moment, once plunged and glorified in that immortal element, become
eternal. But the height of perfection in the organic development of
poetry is marked by the drama. This third and highest form of poetical
art has for its subject-matter the whole struggle of human life, which
in its vivid representations it aims to realize, and, as it were, to
bring bodily before our eyes.

There exists an obvious analogy between the several constituents, as
well as the different species or kinds of poetry and the three
_material_ arts of the beautiful. As the latter are symbolical
throughout in the subject no less than in the manner and design of their
manifestations, so also, but in a far higher degree, is poetry, as the
art which embraces all the three in its own sphere. And this was the end
to which I wished to arrive, inasmuch as the symbolical significance of
the whole of life is the very point which at present claims our
attention. For it bears intimately on the conclusion which I attempted
to establish in my last Lecture. It was there my endeavor to prove that
the supreme science, which is essentially identical with a divine faith,
may be actually applied to life, be really brought in unison with it,
and become transformed into a living and real existence. But this can
only be accomplished by a symbolical process, or in other words, the
symbolical signification of life is either itself the basis, or else an
indispensable condition of, and inevitable transition-point toward, such
a union and its accomplishment.

But in the arts which portray the beautiful, this symbolical
significance and property is most distinctly prominent; here it is most
easily understood and most universally recognized. On this account I
have chosen this subject, as forming the natural transition and
connecting link between the previous and the following Lectures. No
doubt the æsthetical portion of man’s constitution and life is in itself
sufficiently remarkable and attractive, and rich and important enough in
its effects and consequences, to vindicate for itself such an episode,
and to claim for it a place in philosophical speculation. For it shows
that that fundamental law of psychological science and triple principle
of division of the human consciousness into spirit, soul, and sense,
admits also of application in this domain also, and may serve to confirm
the whole theory and way of thinking. The further prosecution, however,
of this elementary view or sketch of art would carry me beyond my
present limits. For the aim of that philosophy of which I am attempting
to give an exposition is directed to life itself--as well the inner life
of the individual as the public life (and in the present place, also,
its symbolical relation or signification)--which is so inseparably and
intimately connected with the investigation into the divine foundation
of life and the divine direction which ought to be imparted to it.

It can easily be shown that education as well as art is essentially
symbolical. Such, indeed, must be the character of the education,
whether public or private, of the whole rising generation, unless it is
to degenerate into an ordinary mechanical system. And it is even in this
quality principally that we are disposed to place the distinction
between an unspiritual education, which, even though in the sternness of
its morality it may defy censure, yet eventually proves barren and
mortal, and one more solid and more conformable to human nature, which,
less pretending in the outset, is even the more lasting in its effects.

The ready susceptibility of the youthful mind for every thing symbolical
that lies within its reach, and its vivid perception of its meaning,
might be clearly enough shown by instancing some of the ordinary
amusements of boyhood and youth. How commonly, in these years, are the
various occupations, pursuits, and circumstances of real and, to them,
still future life, childishly, perhaps, but still ingeniously imitated,
or, rather, anticipated! And how lasting an influence does this
frequently make on their little society! What various but lasting traces
does it often leave on their minds, more perhaps than many hours of
study, especially if in the latter the usual system of overloading the
young mind defeats its own end. Play, indeed, must not become the mere
pastime of idleness, for it is only by its alternation with labor and
the sternness of discipline that it continues to be a recreation and a
pleasure.

And, indeed, the earnestness, the labor, and the sterner part in this
whole business and matter of education, as mixed and composed of two
opposite elements, of the serious and the sportive, is highly capable of
receiving so spiritual a reference and vital a significance. And if all
education be nothing else than a preparation for the future, and the
state of this preparation, then it must be self-evident that too many or
enough of such vivid references and spiritual allusions to a future
life, either generally or to any particular phase of it that may chiefly
be had in view, can not be introduced into education and its serious and
sportive elements and pursuits. For it is only by this method that the
susceptibilities of youth and the youthful fancy can be vividly excited
and thoroughly impressed with the fundamental design and significance of
the whole of life--a result which no mere dry definition of the future
state, or generally of any “destination of man” on the dusty road of
logic, will ever attain to.

It is nowise singular if this symbolical property and disposition of
human nature announces itself as distinctly in the earliest development
and in the most perfect of the productions of artistic genius, whether
we take into consideration the whole existing state of mankind, or his
original and essential constitution relatively to the world and to God.
We have already remarked, on more than one occasion, that man, as soon
as he was deprived of those higher faculties which he had abused to his
ruin, fell thereby more entirely than would seem originally to have been
the case, under the dominion of figurative fancy, and that,
consequently, his whole nature and consciousness became greatly changed
from what it was at the beginning. If man did at the very first possess
the faculty and the power to communicate his thoughts to others inwardly
by a mere operation of his will, and without having recourse to the
external medium of words, he no longer enjoys this privilege; and if any
wonderful phenomena in any way resembling thereto be now found, they
only form so many remarkable exceptions, instead of making the rule of
human life and consciousness as they now are. As at present
constituted, man feels that his state is pre-eminently symbolical: he
sees in symbolism a necessary requirement for his earthly pursuits--a
substitute for those immediate powers of cogitation which he has lost.
And all this is true, independently of any use he may freely choose to
make of symbols for the higher purposes of spiritual life.

Man, at the beginning, was placed on this earth as its first-born son,
in the midst of the telluric universe, or, in other words, in the center
of a planetary world akin to and similar to his own. Now, whatever may
be the case, or whatever it may be allowable to think of any other of
the starry spheres--though in the invisible world of spirits all perhaps
is more immediately full of and instinct with essence, and is not veiled
in material emblems, this is not the case with this earth. Terrestial
nature, in all its organic productions and warring elements of life, is
throughout symbolical. Man, therefore, viewed from this position of his
earthly habitation, is surrounded by a symbolical world of sensuous
emblems. And if we can, or, rather, if we will, believe the grand
intimation with which revelation opens, the first and highest
destination of man is even symbolical--to be the Divine image.

If, now, all the natural wants and properties of man are symbolical--if
such be his present state in the midst of creation--his whole position
in the mundane system, and his high and heavenly destination, can we,
or, rather, ought we, to wonder if even religion presents itself for the
most part clothed in a symbolical garb? For this is the case, not merely
with that which was the wild upgrowth of a poetical and purely
imaginative heathenism, but also the old, original, and pure religion of
nature--as the first love devoting itself for sacrifice--the second
revelation of God. And so we find it to have been in the old world, or,
as it is otherwise called, the old covenant. Here the first twilight of
faith was yet studded with all the starry splendor of the whole
symbolical creation, as it were with the brilliant diadem of nature’s
most glorious images. And even the new era of the ascending and
brightening dawn still bears on its front the glittering morning-star of
art.

But now, if still retaining the same figure, or, rather, borrowing from
it a contrast, we proceed to designate art in and by itself, we may
justly compare it to the moon, which illumines with its vague but
marvelous _half-light_ the domain of night and the dark realms of
creative fancy. Even here it is but a borrowed splendor from the true
sun, a reflection from another and a higher luminary, that lights up the
darkness. And while all the wonderful starry types of the spiritual
world, which retire in the full day, come out in this magical twilight,
so also deceptive phantoms, airy forms of gigantic magnitude, may mingle
with the hovering and misty troop of shadows to which the earth-born
vapors alone give birth and shape. And yet, notwithstanding this earthly
intermixture, the art of the beautiful, whenever it retains its true
nature, is in its essence directed to the divine. Consequently it not
only lends an external charm to religion, but in its origin, in all
times and peoples, it was intimately related to it, and bound to it by
the strictest ties of affinity and association. And this is not the less
true, even though to the eye of a severe criticism most of its
productions, in the ages of its decline, may appear utterly remote from
its first source and aim, and perfectly vain, worthless, and sensual.

The divine origin of art is easily proved by its history every where,
and indeed is so manifest that it can not well be doubted. High art,
indeed, can not and never will surrender its claim to a divine power and
sanctity: it must insist upon the recognition of this its high sanction.
If we could conceive an age or country where religion should entirely
cease and be forgotten--where not only all positive faith and
revelation, but even the universal belief in a Divinity above them,
should die away and perish among men--the light of all higher and
heaven-directed thoughts and aims should become extinct--that echo of
eternity and of eternal love which the inmost feelings of the human soul
spontaneously gives back, should be hushed forever--then and there at
the self-same moment would all high art be withdrawn and disappear.

In our own age the state of things is the direct contrary to that which
we have been supposing. While from the universal prevalence of
freethinking in politics--a natural consequence of the reign of
religious skepticism--the whole of life, and especially public life, has
ceased to be regarded and understood in its symbolical character and
dignity; while the little of religious sentiment that still survives is
more or less distracted and secularized by sectarian controversy, and
scarcely one inviolable sanctuary is left for a simple and undoubting
faith to shelter in--art and the beautiful are for a certain portion of
the educated classes the only fresh oasis of divinity amid the
surrounding desert of worldliness. It is the last treasure left to them,
and, indeed, prized by them as such, and regarded as the true palladium
of a higher intrinsic life; but this, in its isolated state and by
itself, it never can be.

In this respect the present age may be likened to a noble house, fallen
from its primitive wealth and magnificence into decay and ruin. Its
revenues dissipated by misfortunes, mismanagement and extravagance; its
mansion and domains mortgaged or encumbered with debt, nothing remains
to it but the family jewels. These time-honored heirlooms of better days
are all that it still retains of its former opulence. And even in these
many a false stone has been introduced among the old genuine diamonds;
much spurious metal has been substituted for the sterling gold of
antiquity. Apparently, however, the whole are still preserved as the
last relic of a former splendor, and of a wealth which once seemed
inexhaustible. In the same way the present generation supports its inner
and higher life on the mere external treasures of art, while the great
capital of ancient faith, to which among other excellent fruits that
ornament of beauty owed its existence, has by the great majority been
long squandered on the “_spirit of the age_.”

But the symbolical dress that religion every where assumes constitutes
but one half of its external form. The other consists in the vital and
intrinsic union of all the members and professors of the common faith.
Religion can not by any means be isolated and solitary. It is impossible
to think of it as existing only for the individual. In a word, there is
no such thing as religion in a proper sense without a community. Two or
three must at least be united in a common faith, that its power and
efficacy may be visible among them. And this association is one vital
throughout--an inmost bond binding souls together by a spiritual
attraction, and, as it were, enchainment of the several members.

As the electrical shock traverses instantaneously the entire chain of
the connected links, and the spark which enters at one extremity flashes
the next moment at the other--as a single loadstone will by contact
convert any number of needles into magnets, and elevate them into a new
and higher relation to the whole globe--so is it also in religion. A
living communication from the first origin runs through the whole
community. As in the voltaic pile, composed of alternate layers of two
different metals, one chemical element of the telluric energy or of the
vital principle of the air or atmosphere is emitted or set free on one
side and the other on the opposite; so is it here also in the spiritual
chain of faith and in its living reciprocal action of the different
members of this soul-chain--between those who are active ministers and
conductors, or instruments by which it works, and the others, who in a
somewhat passive relation only imbibe the invisible life. By the one the
divine blessing of sanctification and holiness is set in action and
brought to light--developed and confirmed; while by the others grace is
received as the effectual power and gift of salvation.

One remark, however, seems particularly called for in this place. It
appears, from what has been already said, that even revelation and the
true religion itself invariably puts on and is invested with that
symbolical garb which is so consonant and agreeable to the state and
nature of humanity. This being the case, it becomes extremely difficult
to form a general standard by which we may unfalteringly determine what
symbols are not essential, as only serving for the external garb of
religion and an intelligible vehicle of its communications. For this, it
is evident, must be governed by the diversity of individual wants and
peculiarities, and must consequently assume a variable and personal
character. If, however, a symbol proceeds immediately from God, then it
must necessarily be essential. It is not only a type, but an actual
substance. To suppose otherwise would be even almost parallel to
presuming to regard the eternal Logos, who is the source of light and
life, of all knowledge and of all being, as a word merely, without
innate energy and substance.

Most natural, therefore, is it (that is to say, most consistent with the
nature of the thing, which however in itself is supernatural,
incomprehensible, and surpasses all conception), that the highest symbol
of the faith, that which forms the principle of communion and the living
center of unity of all Christendom, should have such a character as to
be at once a symbol and also the veritable reality of the thing itself.
For inasmuch as on the altar of this religion of divine love, since the
one oblation has long ago been perfected, no other fire shall again be
kindled but the flame of prayer and of a will directed to and in unison
with God; therefore, the act by means of which that communion of souls
which constitutes the essence of all religion, is maintained and carried
on, consists simply in this, that the essential substance of the divine
power and of God’s love to man is given and received as the wonderful
seal of union with Him.[52]

As to the altar itself, how rich or how simple its ornaments ought to
be, is a question which I have already remarked, does not easily admit
of any general solution. If, however, we should attempt to think of
Christianity without an altar, or desire and attempt to establish such a
scheme--what indeed among the vast variety of human conceits and
religious theories has only occurred to a very limited number, and never
has and never will exercise any lasting and decided influence--a
Christianity thus divested of symbols and mysteries would be degraded
into a mere philosophical view and opinion--or at the very best, a
school of the kind--any thing, in short, rather than religion. Even the
study of the Bible, if in spite of so sad a state of things it should
still survive, would sink into a mere matter of erudition, on a level
with any other favorite pursuit of antiquarian lore and research. And
if, on the other hand, rising perhaps somewhat higher than a mere
philosophical opinion or the favorite pursuits of erudition, a religious
community, having no altar at all, should pretend to rest entirely on
prayer and spiritual teaching or preaching, such a scheme must
presuppose an immediate inspiration, communicable to all and continuous
throughout time. But such an hypothesis invariably proves the easy and
natural transition to the most frightful fanaticism, of whose pernicious
and evil effects those only who are acquainted with the domestic history
of Mohammedism, among whose modern and ancient sects this idea is
rampant, can form a clear and adequate conception.

In religion, therefore, and that entire union of the inner man and soul
with God which it demands, or at least hopes and desires to bring about
as essential and necessary, and which the higher philosophy of
antiquity, no less than revealed religion, strove and longed to attain,
there lies a something inconceivably sublime and beautiful. Nay, we
might almost call it an impossible result, similar in some degree to
that which is involved in the higher and more intricate of algebraic
equations for which there is no solution, or which, at least, appear to
have none till it is actually discovered. Now this finite, changeable,
and in all respects incomplete and in no one point satisfactorily, or at
least not perfectly defined (_a_) of our own individual self, with which
we are wont to commence the whole of our thought and life, is to be
brought into communion with, or, in other words, to be equaled to the
wholly incomprehensible (_x_) of the incommunicable Godhead. How is this
possible? By what means is it to be accomplished?

Properly, indeed, our Ego is no such (_a_), and can not be defined as
such in the wonderful algebraic equation of our inmost life and highest
pursuit. For nowhere does man feel himself to be _a first_; all things
prove him to be secondary and derivative, wherever it may be that he is
to take or seek his beginning. And not only does the alphabet of our
life carry us beyond itself and toward its end in this incomprehensible
(_x_), but it is also defective at its commencement, and wants a
beginning and the first (_a_), which ought to form its very opening. And
even the (_b_) (could this satisfy us) is nowhere distinctly and clearly
to be found such as it is in and by itself, or such even as it was
originally. It is invariably mixed and involved with something else
equally unknown. We have, therefore, in this equation of our life, to do
with two wholly unknown magnitudes--with the incomprehensible (_x_), and
with the (_y_). For by the latter sign we will at present designate that
which every where meets and opposes us. For the fact of such an inborn
and connatural obstacle every one will admit, even though he may refuse
to explain it by the evil principle and may be unwilling to receive the
explanation which revelation gives of it.

How, now, is this our (_b_) to be carried back to its original (_a_)?
How is it to be set free from this evil (_y_), and brought into union
with the highest (_x_)? The answer and solution to this apparently
insoluble equation can only be obtained by one method. In attempting it,
we must keep steadily in view the principle so recently advanced, that
the essence of religion consists in the effectual communication of a
higher and living power, which, emanating from the first and original
point, traverses the whole spiritual chain to its farthest link. But, in
order to illustrate completely this principle, and the idea which arises
from it, of a satisfactory solution of this problem, I will indulge
myself in a brief but episodical explanation of the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, as furnishing the most suitable example for my purpose.
For, inasmuch as the symbolical nature and constitution of the human,
and, indeed, of all mortal existence, was the main subject which opened,
and has occupied our present consideration, it may be regarded as the
natural complement and keystone to the whole discussion, if, in addition
to what has preceded, we go on briefly to examine how and in what sense
the oldest writing and earliest method employed by men for the
communication of their ideas was symbolical.

Of the languages of Western Asia, at least, and of the alphabets derived
therefrom, the Hebrew, viz., the Phœnician and the Greek, it may
without hesitation be asserted, that they were derived from
hieroglyphics, and are, without exception, of hieroglyphic origin. This
can not be asserted as decidedly of the Indian alphabet, which differs
so totally from all those previously mentioned. Still I shall not allow
myself, simply on this account, to come over hastily to any conclusion
as to the comparative antiquity of the Hindoo and the Egyptian modes of
writing.

Now, according to all that we know of the hieroglyphical mode of
indicating objects, it rests on a very simple principle. The discovery
which was in so remarkable a manner reserved to our own age, is not
indeed complete, and leaves much still to be explained. The fundamental
principle, nevertheless, is well established. From this it appears that
the hieroglyphic system of Egypt, although entirely symbolical,
contains, notwithstanding, the germ of alphabetical writing. As the
principle of hieroglyphical writing is equally applicable to modern
languages as to the Egyptian, a German word will serve us as well for an
example, and for the purposes of our illustration, as any other.
Preliminary, however, it is necessary to observe, that in this mode of
notation the leading characters and essential elements of the radical
sound are alone indicated; such vowels and consonants as are quiescent,
or servile, are omitted, and being without any special signs are left to
be mentally supplied.

To take, then, a German word for our example. The word _Leben_ (life)
would be signified by its three principal characters. Now, the first
letter would be indicated by _Licht_ (a flaming light), because this
word also begins with L, _Baum_ (a tree) would stand for B, while N
would be represented by any kind of _Nass_ (fluid), by a rapid
waterfall, for instance, or by a waving line, as a type of its moving
and undulating surface. A light, then, a tree, and an undulating
surface, will, by means of the initial letters of our German terms for
them (_L_icht, _B_aum, _N_ass), stand for the word _Leben_, _i.e._,
life.

Now, from this example, which I have purposely chosen, it will appear
that this hieroglyphical mode of notation and writing, while it was
fundamentally alphabetical, had, nevertheless, at the same time, a
symbolical significance. For a light, or light-giving flame, the tree
with its growth, as well as the flowing stream with its waves or
ripples, aptly express and typify the intrinsic character of life, with
its several characteristics and elements. And it is even this addition
of symbolical coloring and signification which in the otherwise
equivocal, and, consequently, inconvenient, representation of objects by
an hieroglyphical alphabet, constitutes the peculiar difficulty, but, at
the same time the mental attraction of this kind of writing.

This mode of hieroglyphical representation is not, however, the most
difficult to be understood. Another, so far as it has as yet been found
out, and as progress has been made toward deciphering it, appears to be
far more abstruse and enigmatical. For to understand or to interpret the
latter in any degree, it is almost indispensable to know beforehand what
is the object indicated or intended. In this mode of hieroglyphical
notation the image of an object is made to stand for any other whose
name begins with the same letter, as the word does that designates the
former. Thus, to employ the same instance as before, the picture of a
flaming light would by itself stand for the word and idea of life. This
is, if we may so say, a bold play with algebraic equations, between
enigmatical emblems, which are at most but imperfectly indicated, and
which nothing but the intelligence of one well versed in the system can
ever hope to comprehend. Any other, even with the greatest pains, will
scarcely be able to decipher it with any degree of certainty. And this
leads me back again to our former and still unsolved equation, involving
the riddle of human life, and which this simile of the hieroglyphics was
intended to help us to solve.

The hieroglyphical mode of writing is, according to the explanation we
have given of it, a symbolical representation by means of the initial
letters of words. In it and through it even that which is the most
ordinary and common assumes a mystical character, and passes into this
wonderful, imaginative, and emblematical sphere. Now the solution of
this general problem lies even in this: that this (_x_)--this
incomprehensible (_x_)--as the eternal Logos of the incommensurable
Godhead, became also (_a_) (that is to say, took on Him a human life and
nature), and is even now fully and really such. For thus the beginning
and the initial letter of the whole alphabet of human existence, which
was so long wanting, although from the very first it was implied in and
was the foundation of the (_b_), was given anew to it by God. And now
this (_b_), and every other of the following letters, can attach
themselves in due order and connection, be united with it and even be
equated to it, and being thus equalized, inasmuch as _x_=_a_, it also
becomes capable of apprehending the otherwise unattainable (_x_). And at
the same time it can be entirely set free, at once and forever, from the
restlessly opposing and destructive (-_y_); since this (_y_), as opposed
to the (_x_), is merely a negative quantity, and as such vanishes.

But however we may attempt by means of this or any other scientific or
figurative illustrations to apprehend or to express the ineffable, the
fact, and above all, a living faith in that great verity, that the
divine (_x_) has become a human (_a_)--that the eternal Logos actually
and really took upon Him the nature of man, and still retains it, is the
point from which a new and higher life commences. It is the ring which
holds together the whole human family--the first link in the chain of
spiritual life, to which all must be referred and from which all is to
proceed.

Thus, then, beginning with the emblematical representations of the fine
arts, and developing the idea through several other spheres of its
manifestation, I have carried the symbolical significance of human life
up to the highest hieroglyphic of all existence. And as in the three
previous Lectures I have considered the eternal Word, simply and
principally in a scientific point of view, as the fundamental law of
truth, it now remains for me to exhibit it as the word which shall solve
all difficulties in the problem of human existence, and shall prove an
unerring guide in the conflict of life and in all its most important
relations and perplexities. And to this subject the three last and
concluding Lectures will be devoted. And in these we shall consider all
this in its reference to the external and public life of man in society
and the state. For not only does it hold true of the higher pursuits and
inmost being of individuals, but it has also a universal application;
for this highest of all hieroglyphics, which is the beginning of a new
life, forms also the foundation of the state in its sacred character.

And because the application of Christian truth and of the fundamental
idea of Christianity is in general so greatly mistaken, I have thought
it necessary to remount somewhat higher in my investigations, to draw
from a deeper source, and to connect them with a higher principle, in
order to arrive more steadily and more certainly at the result which I
had in view. And this result may be thus summed up: The Christian state
is nothing less than symbolical, and even thereby historically
sanctified--whereas the mere polity of nature or that of reason, which,
however artistical and consummate in its constitution, remains all the
while false and unsanctified, is either purely dynamical or else
absolute.

In human life and society there are three species of power, which
possess a symbolical significance and a sacred character as resting on a
divine foundation. And these are parental authority, the spiritual or
priestly power, and the kingly or whatever may be the supreme authority
in the state. The affectionate care and anxiety of an earthly parent
possesses but a faint analogy to the goodness and providence of the
omniscient and eternal Father of all, and is scarcely more than a type
of it. Moreover, the parental authority and a father’s rights over his
children, founded on his relation as the loving and affectionate author
of their being, admits not of being set forth and comprised in any exact
and positive formularies. And even if the social community occasionally
steps in to determine by legislation the limits, and in certain points
gives its sanction to the domestic rights and authority of a father, as
founded on love and feeling, this is only done, nevertheless, with a
view to guard against and to remedy the possible abuse of so natural a
right and relation. When, however, as was the principle of the old Roman
law, power over the life and death of his offspring is conceded to the
father, we feel at once that this is an undue extension of the paternal
authority, and that the provinces of the three different powers are not
kept duly distinct and separate. A parent who should avail himself of
such a privilege would but prove himself devoid of the ordinary
feelings of nature. On the other hand, by a natural sentiment, common to
the savage and barbarian, as well as to the most refined and civilized
nations, respect for and reverence of parents is held to be something
more than an ordinary and conventional duty and obligation. It is
universally regarded in the light of a duty in every sense sacred and
holy. And the divine moral law of the Old Testament completely agrees
with the universal feeling of man’s nature in this ascription to it of
holiness. But, on the other hand, the rights of the Christian limit the
parent’s authority on the side of the spiritual domain, wherever it
would trench upon the freedom of belief and liberty of conscience.
Special circumstances, again, such as the dotage of old age, mental
weakness, faults of character, or offenses against society, may, in
certain cases, tend greatly to limit and control, or otherwise modify,
the parental dignity and authority. But still, in the very worst case,
the most respectful behavior and the tenderest delicacy, on all points
connected with this relationship, remains forever an immutable law of
duty to the child, which, as it is deeply founded in the moral sense of
man, makes itself heard throughout the whole habitable world. The mutual
tie of parental love and filial duty has, it is plain, its foundations
deep in nature itself, and out of it proceeds the sanctity of the very
notion of domestic life, and of all its relations, as well as of the
peculiar authority of a father and a parent.

As for the spiritual and priestly power: wherever religion recognizes
the priest in his true character--_i.e._, not simply as the preacher and
promulgator, but also as the living channel for dispensing and
communicating the divine grace, he is, in so far as his office is
concerned, and in the discharge of his sacerdotal functions, a
vicegerent of God--not so much, perhaps, of the everlasting Father, the
Creator and Lawgiver of nature, as of the Son who came down into the
world to ransom and redeem the human race. The priestly or spiritual
power, therefore, has a divine foundation on which it ultimately rests.
But inasmuch as that bond of communion which unites our souls with God
must be sought and attained by faith and in the spirit of faith, so this
authority, however holy in itself, is, nevertheless, by its very nature,
confined to the province of spirituals.

The judicial function, also, where it is recognized as dogmatic, is at
least subordinate to that other character whose office it is to carry
out the work of redemption, to dispense the divine grace, and to bless.
For an arbitrary judicial power, where internal caprice is the rule of
judgment, and where the execution of its decrees depends on the
individual, does not in strict truth deserve this appellation. With as
much reason might the anointed head of the state claim, by virtue of
this consecrating and anointing, to exercise the functions of the
spiritual office.

Further, we may observe, all these sacred offices possess a certain
analogy and affinity one with the other. This fact, however, does not in
any way militate against the essential and necessary duty of preserving
a precise and accurate separation of their several functions. The
privacy of home, the family circle, and the relations of domestic life,
are by the laws of most nations regarded as a sanctuary which the
external power of the state ought not lightly and without grave
necessity to violate or profane. On the other hand, in ordinary language
paternal titles are ascribed to the other two powers. But as regards
spiritual personages, this is a mere mark of respect, while, as applied
to the head of the state, it serves to indicate a special character of
goodness and clemency in the government. It is not by any means
applicable generally to the functions of government as marking its
specific nature and essence. For it may not be, nay, perhaps, we should
rather say it can not in all cases be simply and purely paternal.

Strict impartiality, for instance, is a primary requisition in the
judge, but is it possible, nay, would it properly be just, to require
this in every case of a father? The judicial character, however, is the
predominant element of political government, and the supreme judicial
function is its essential aspect, with which all the other distinctive
characteristics or exclusive prerogatives of sovereign power are most
intimately connected. And on this account, while the paternal authority
rests primarily on that tie of souls which consists in the reciprocal
affection of parents and children, and while the priestly power is
limited to the sacerdotal and spiritual domain, the supreme judicial and
sovereign power in the state, which is responsible to God alone, as the
highest and paramount of these three sacred and venerated powers,
embraces the complete whole, if I may so say, the bodily reality of
man’s public life. And in this sphere of historical reality it will be
my endeavor to trace the further development of these three ideas as
they manifest themselves in the busy conflict of life and the age. And
to this subject I propose to devote the three following Lectures.

In concluding our present disquisition I will only add one remark. All
these three powers, as founded on nature, on divine revelation, and on
historical rights, are alike holy and sacred. The good, that is to say,
the prudent and affectionate father, the pious priest, and the righteous
king, are each and all, though in different ways and degrees, and with
different powers and rights, visible and acting vicegerents on earth of
the invisible God. The last, in truth, is not merely the representative
but the unlimited dispenser of divine justice. And this divine
foundation of these powers, which claim and present an inviolable
character of sanctity, forms the practical part of that symbolical
signification of life which in its highest phase has formed the theme of
the present Lecture.




LECTURE XIII.

OF THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH AND LIFE IN ITS APPLICATION TO POLITICS, OR OF
THE CHRISTIAN CONSTITUTION OF THE STATE AND THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF
JURISPRUDENCE.


The Asiatic custom of deifying their earthly rulers by addressing them
as King of Kings, Lord or Spanner [_Umspanner_] of Creation, the
Effulgence of the Deity, and the like, have ever been and very naturally
most repugnant to the moral sense of Christian Europe. The Christian
notion and axiom, that all power is of God, is founded on a very
definite idea and well-considered principle. And this principle is
nothing less than this, that the supreme head of the state has to
dispense the divine justice. And while this constitutes the peculiar
dignity of his office, he is, in the exercise of this his highest
function and authority, responsible to God alone. If, however, we should
any where meet, either in the present times or the history of the past,
with a state in which, by the principle of its constitutions, the
nominal possessor of supreme authority and the executive is responsible
to another body, then is the latter in fact the sovereign power, and not
the former, which really is subordinate to the other. The Spartan
constitution will serve to illustrate my meaning. Here, to judge by that
strict definition of the sovereign authority and its peculiar character
and distinctive criteria, it evidently lay in the Ephori rather than in
the possessors of supreme executive power, who were called kings, and
whose office was hereditary. The very fact that two kings reigned
conjointly is of itself subversive of the very notion of sovereign
power. But still more fatally was this undermined by their
responsibility in certain cases to the censorship of the other Spartan
magistracy. To the other ancient republics, whose constitution was based
naturally enough on a very artificial division of powers, and the
maintenance of a certain antagonism and accurate balance between them,
our notion of a supreme and sovereign political authority is scarcely
applicable. It is found far more fully expressed in a special character
of inviolable sanctity and dignity attaching to certain judicial
functions and magistracies, such as that of the Areopagus in Athens and
of the censorship at Rome in the days of the Republic, than to the
transitory tenure of the executive power, over which those judicial
authorities possessed and exercised in certain cases a control.

The proper and _de facto_, or personal division of power, is essentially
a republican principle. In notion, however, or in idea, it is perfectly
legitimate to make a distinction between the several functions and
elements of the whole sovereign authority. Now, in such a case, the
judicial power--the supreme judicial power we would emphatically say--is
pre-eminently the characteristic sign and specific distinction of
sovereignty, from which all its other prerogatives and properties are
originally derived or flow from it as its necessary and natural
consequences. The noble prerogative of pardon and mercy, for instance,
is, as it were, the natural attribute of the supreme judicial power.

With respect to legislation, however, and the legislative authority, an
important co-ordinate power may, according to the existing constitution
of a particular state, be vested in the other correlative members of the
body politic. The preliminary deliberation, the first sketch or the
initiation of a law, may not, perhaps, proceed in every case from the
supreme head of the community. In other states, again, the law must
emanate from the free choice and individual will of the monarch, or at
least the introduction of it, since he can not of himself alone make and
carry out the whole. This is a point, consequently, on which it is
extremely difficult to draw the boundary line, which must in no case be
transgressed or deviated from--in so far, that is, and so long as there
is no question about any thing more than a simple co-operation or
co-ordinate deliberation upon the proposed laws. But still in every case
the final sanction, by which a law becomes properly the law, or by which
it is annulled or repealed, must be reserved to the royal prerogative,
otherwise the monarch ceases at once to be supreme.

Even the prerogative of proclaiming war and of concluding peace is, if
perhaps we may be allowed so to say, a judicial function on a large
scale, and applied to the external relations of states. It is, in short,
nothing less than a judicial act. And in this light it will appear to
every one who does not regard it as a mere act of arbitrary caprice.
This, however, it never ought to be. For it is, as it were, a verdict
on the existing relations of right and wrong between two neighboring
states. But in as much as both parties, in point of right and law, are
in so far equal, that they refuse to recognize in common any higher
judge, an absolute state of violence necessarily ensues, a struggle of
power follows, until at last, in the change of circumstances, the
relations of justice are restored by mutual consent. The party that
first proclaims war becomes, in this process of trial by battle, the
judge of its own cause. And if by the fearful issue of the combat it is
taught to see its own injustice, then must it either make due
concessions, or, at very best, by calling in the mediation of a third
and neutral state, it must constitute it the judge by whose decision it
is ready and willing to abide.

The usual insignia of the kingly dignity, the scepter and the throne,
are only the signs of judicial power, as it were, promoted one degree
higher, and can be historically traced up to the judge’s bench and
staff. The crown alone remains as the peculiar and exclusive symbol of
the highest earthly dignity. And rightly is it called a splendid burden.
For while it exalts him who is called to wear it above all earthly
dependence and responsibility, and exempts him from all the ordinary
relations of human life, the heavy weight of this splendid ornament
reminds the wearer of the grave reckoning and the strict account he will
have to render to God, as the Supreme Judge of all--who is the source
and sum of all justice and righteousness. For this serious and solemn
responsibility is received from God, together and at the very same time
with the crown.

Quite different in signification was the symbolical ensign of the old
emperors in the middle ages--a sword pointing to the four winds or
cardinal points of heaven. It alluded to the peculiar idea and the
peculiar constitution of that dignity. For in this respect it was not
simply a distinction of power, of rank, or of title, between the
imperial and the kingly dignities. It involved a total and essential
difference between the ideas and objects of these sacred and anointed
potentates--between the elective emperor and the hereditary king, duke,
or prince, although it was from these alone that the former could be
duly and regularly elected. For the emperor was looked upon as armed
with the sword of all Christendom to be the defender of the whole system
of European states. Accordingly, as the representative of the union of
several states, he bore this ensign of his imperial office.

To this ancient idea of a Christian empire we shall again have occasion
to revert in the further examination of the idea of a political state
and its Christian community. We shall meet with it once more in that
section of our inquiry which will be occupied with the ruling principle
of right and polity in a system of states as a body, and also in the
mutual relations of its several members. In this section we shall also
show that this principle must be either absolute, that is, one where one
or more of the several members of the union exercises a superior and
preponderating influence, or one artificially constituted and dynamical,
_i.e._, a system of the so-called balance of power. And here will
naturally arise the question whether, for such a confederacy of moral
and civilized societies and nations, a less imperfect and higher, but
common principle of Christian justice might not be found and
established? For any system of mutual confederation, whether absolute or
founded on the artificial relations of the strength of its respective
members, is in any case defective and imperfect, whatever may be the
ground of union, whether founded on the internal constitution of the
states, or derived from the physical consideration of their geographical
position and neighborhood.

According, then, to that divine principle and Christian foundation of
the state which I have attempted to derive from the symbolical
signification of life and the symbolical destiny of man in his relation
to God, the highest authority of the state--the king, or generally the
monarch, as well as the spiritual functionary, or the priest--are the
vicegerents of a highest and divine power, whom they represent on earth.
The only difference between them is, that the latter has chiefly to
represent and to set forth God as teaching men, but at the same time as
warning and commanding them in this revelation of His will, and as
promising and as livingly dispensing to them His grace, while the former
is the representative of the Omnipotent Lawgiver and Judge, who governs
the world with justice, and will by no means clear the guilty.
According, therefore, to the true Christian notion of these two powers,
both of them--the civil no less than the spiritual--possess a
representative character, which, however, deviates very widely from the
ordinary notion of the representation and a representative constitution,
or, rather, forms a decided contrast to them.

And what contrast can, in fact, be more decided than that which such a
representative power and dignity as belongs to the ministering of the
divine grace to the soul and spirit, or the dispensing of divine justice
to the whole earthly life, forms with that thing of horrible memory,[53]
which has been called a representation of the people, or the systems
which have been similarly designated? But even if it could be
satisfactorily proved that a people, like the invisible essence of the
Deity, could be represented, it is open to very grave doubt whether this
is really possible in the method usually adopted. According to the
principle of this kind of popular representation, where the whole adult
population are entitled individually to vote, the election becomes, as
it were, a lottery, and even the political winners thus determined, or
the ballotted members, become so many influential units in one branch of
the legislative body and for a limited period. In respect, however, to
the principles and sentiments, the predominant character and spirit of a
people, those who are thus chosen are the representatives not so much of
the whole nation as of the reigning passion of the moment, or the spirit
of the times in its restless agitation. For when thus resolved into its
constituent atoms and numbered off in succession, a nation is reduced to
an elementary mass. But like all that is thus elementary, when thus
decomposed, and fermenting in its process of dissolution, it assumes a
destructive tendency and turn. At least it ceases to form an organic
whole, an individual. It is only when a state or a nation historically
lives on, further develops and vitally maintains itself in its organic
members, _i.e._, in its several estates or essential corporations, that
it can be said to form a living whole, and to be, as it were, one great
individual.

It is only in this sense that there can be true representatives of a
people, who, if the expression is allowable, are its true historical
men. It is in them that the spirit and character, the general leaning
tendency, the peculiar style of feeling, sentiment, and thought of a
nation, in any definite period or periods, finds its most decided and
loudest expression. Rarely, however, is this attained in a system of
elective deputies or representatives, which is liable to many passing
and accidental influences, and, indeed, in and by itself has no
connection with it. Scipio and Cato would be representatives of the
Roman character and spirit, even if they had never been invested with
public authority and had lived their whole lives in exile. And in the
same manner purely intellectual natures may often stand for such
historical characters and representatives. Horace and Tacitus most
assuredly occupy the same relation to their respective ages as the two
former did to theirs, and this, in truth, quite independently of any
subordinate rank or political dignity and influence which either the one
or the other possessed in peace or war. Cicero, indeed, would have been
all this in an equal degree, and, perhaps, still more so, if, keeping
entirely aloof from the civil contentions of his day, for which he was
little suited, he had devoted himself to the acquisition of a purely
intellectual and literary influence.

However, it is not every famous author or every brilliant political
speaker that can in this sense be justly regarded as historical
characters. Besides that energy of talent which creates an epoch, and
which is, indeed, the primary and essential condition, certain other
properties of character are required, certain sentiments and principles
vividly carried out and realized in life and action. But this is a
combination which is rarely found. A peculiar sphere of practical
influence does not form an immediate, nor, indeed, a necessary
qualification of such a character. Still it is evident that a writer who
truly merits such an appellation must be something more than a mere man
of letters or an artist. The effects he produces on the minds of men
must be both truly national and historical. Such alone are truly and
properly the historical representatives of a people--the men of their
nation.

As for those other elective representatives already mentioned, it is
only when they belong to a particular estate and corporation, and
represent it, that they can promote the permanent interests of this
organically constituted whole. For it is out of such organic members
that the national existence gains its true, _i.e._, its historical
development. But this is impossible whenever they are chosen by the
individual votes of the entire population. Such a splitting of the whole
political body, as it were, into its constituent atoms, is either in
itself an elementary decomposition or must eventually lead to it. Even a
republican constitution, if it be well and wisely ordered, will be based
principally on corporations or organic division of estates, rather than
on any principle of numerical majority and equality, which, taken as a
general element, invariably proves, as history testifies, sooner or
later, a positive source of anarchy.

Not only would it be an exaggeration, but even a gross error, were we to
regard the republican polity as excluded from the Christian principle,
that all sovereignty is of God, or as irreconcilable with it and even as
directly contradicting its spirit. On the contrary, the duty of
obedience and the actual dependence on the existing and _de facto_ head
of the state, is not less binding on all who, through the accident of
birth or their own free choice and voluntary obligation, belong to such
a community, than on the subjects of an hereditary monarchy. The utmost
that can be safely asserted is, that the Christian state principally
inclines to the latter form of polity, without, however, formally
rejecting, or unconditionally excluding the former. Historical
experience has shown this, and the whole of modern history will furnish
abundant testimony to its truth. When the responsibility of the supreme
political authority is in an endless circle shifted from point to point
of a mere human sphere, then the sacred character of the divine
foundation of the state exhibits itself with least distinctness. It is
more immediately manifest in an hereditary monarchy, where, by a single
point, as the first link which holds together the whole community, this
responsibility is attached immediately to God and the divine justice,
before whose tribunal it has alone to answer. And this more immediate
manifestation forms the ground of that preponderating tendency and
preference of the monarchical constitution by the Christian principle.

But in another respect, also, is it easier to give a religious meaning
to political life in an hereditary monarchy, and to discharge its duties
and to maintain it in a religious spirit, than in a republic. Since all
that is human is subject to change, fluctuation, and imperfection, it
would be something wonderful if the case were different with political
matters, and if the state were to form a singular exception from the
general rule. Such an expectation would, indeed, be strange, and
contrary to the nature of things, as well as to reason and common sense.
For, to take an instance from that people whom God so specially and
immediately led and directed; after a wise Solomon has long and
peacefully occupied the throne, with prosperity at home and splendor and
renown abroad, the reins of government may fall into the weak hands of
a minor, when, even without any personal culpability, all hostile
elements come to an outbreak, and lead to the most fearful political
consequences. And even Solomon, with a wisdom which, in many respects,
was more than human, was not secure from all mistakes and errors. For
inasmuch as, after receiving this illumination from above, this wisdom
lent to him from God, he still remained a free agent, he might, as he
actually did, pervert it to an evil use. Like every thing else that is
good, it was liable to abuse by man. Generally it does not lie in the
nature of things that in long succession and change of times one reign
should be equally mild and paternal as another--equally prosperous and
splendid--and equally wise and successful.

This, indeed, is a matter which does not depend invariably and
exclusively on the personal qualities of the sovereign. It is governed
much more by the peculiar circumstances of the age, and the general
relations of the political world. We should err greatly if we were to
suppose, or feel inclined to assert, that this change, from happy and
prosperous to adverse or less fortunate times, is less frequent in
republican states, or that the latter are entirely exempted from such
fluctuations. History furnishes numerous instances to refute so absurd
an idea. On the contrary, such changes are far more generally the rule
in republican states, and their ruin advances with a more rapid and
certain progress. For the growth of a republic in external power and
influence, and the consequent multiplication of its relations with
foreign powers, is invariably accompanied with great internal agitation,
leading to sudden and violent changes. The greatest and most important
difference, however, lies in this, that in an hereditary monarchy the
change from a distinguished to an unfortunate and less prosperous reign
is distinct, and has an assignable cause, which, by a natural and just
sentiment, is received as a divine visitation, and wherever any sense of
religion still survives and prevails in men’s views of life, will be
patiently endured as such. Accordingly, besides its mere legal sense,
the maxim that all authority is of God now assumes the further
significance of a divine dispensation. And it is clearly manifest that
this Christian maxim and principle was intended to convey this second
meaning, and that it embraces such a religious view and estimate of
political matters and events.

Now, it is true that the providence of God extends to all events and
circumstances of the world. Every permission, therefore, of evil,
whether in a greater or less degree, every misfortune and calamity that
happens to us, must, from this point of view, be regarded either as a
well-merited punishment or as a severe trial, as a wholesome pang and
conflict or as a painful transition to a higher degree of perfection.
This, at least, will be our feeling, in proportion as we entertain and
faithfully follow a religious view and estimate of our own life and
fortunes, as well as of all mundane events, in a firm and unshaken faith
in the Divine Omnipotence and Wisdom. Even for the preservation and
health of his physical life, man stands in need of pain and privation,
but still more so for his moral improvement.

Now, notwithstanding that this principle of a divine providence is
equally applicable in every case, still, even the religious estimate,
not to say a simply human mode of judging of political events and
relations, is in republics subject to the following important and
essential modification. In such a constitution, all hangs, or is made
dependent, on the choice or the caprice of men, or, if such terms be
preferred, their merit and intelligence. Consequently, the entire blame
of every error or miscarriage in government, whether real or imaginary,
and however great or little, is forthwith ascribed to its human
administrators. But an injury at the hands of man invariably provokes
bitterness, revenge, and opposition. On the contrary, a misfortune which
overtakes us from God, and which, as being unable to impute the blame of
it to any human individual, we feel and recognize to be a divine
visitation, awakens in us wholesome and salutary reflection. Thus it is
founded on the very nature of things, and on a right and sound state of
human feeling, that a change from a year of plenty to one of want and
barrenness should be borne with patience and resignation. But if, on the
other hand, a general scarcity and dearth, or any similar affliction and
disproportion between the supply and demand of the necessaries of life,
should occur among a trading or manufacturing population, of which the
source should really or apparently lie in some erroneous measure or
selfish policy of those on whom the administration of the state
devolved, all minds would immediately be in a state of excitement and
uproar. And, in fact, the words of the pious king in Holy Writ: “Let us
fall now into the hands of the Lord, for His mercies are great: and let
me not fall into the hand of man,”[54] are quite in unison with the
general feelings of human nature.

Accordingly, throughout the sacred history of the old world, and in all
times where religious sentiment is not quite dead, such calamities, and
even an unfortunate, not to say a wicked reign, are looked upon as the
deserved visitation of God’s wrath, and as a time of heavy trial. And
the chastisement of Heaven will be borne, by all right-thinking persons,
not out of fear of man, but as is fitting, in reverent submission to the
divine will, with manly patience and resignation. On the other hand,
innumerable instances of a contrary course might be produced from
republican times and histories. How often, in such states, has a false
step in government, trifling, indeed, in itself, but still in fact and
in truth, a blunder in one party, been the occasion of an opposition and
resistance of another, and of a general feeling of discontent and a
violent reaction, which have proved a hundred times more fatal and
pernicious than the first occasion of popular murmurs. How often has a
merely human oversight, trivial enough in itself, and running counter to
public opinion in some little trifle, led to the most fearful
catastrophes, amid which the first exciting cause is lost sight of and
entirely forgotten, and finally all is involved in one general ruin.

In this respect, and in this degree, it may safely be affirmed that the
Christian principle of the state is more favorable to an hereditary
monarchy than to a republican constitution. But at this point the
proposition must be left purposely indeterminate. For a rigorous
exclusion of all republican states, as if, properly, they could never be
right and legitimate, would most assuredly not be accordant with the
Christian principle of a state and the fundamental religious conception
of all political relations and events. On the contrary, it would,
undoubtedly, go directly counter to all proper feelings and ideas on the
subject. For the Christian principle of justice respects all that has an
historical existence, and leaves even the imperfect in the undisturbed
possession of its rights. In this respect it is entirely opposed to the
revolutionary spirit. For the latter, in its inmost essence, is
anti-historical; its first step being the refusal to recognize the value
and the claims of all that comes down from, and has been established by,
the past. And, moreover, the Christian idea of justice, with all its
strict rigor, involves a principle of equity. For, in truth, every
Christian sentiment embraces the whole of life, and its several
relations, with a loving mildness, and pays a due regard to all really
existent though subordinate circumstances. And it is this exactly that
constitutes the very notion of equity. Lastly, the doctrine of
Christianity, and the idea of human life which it gives rise to, is
highly favorable to true liberty. But, then, it is liberty, in a large
and exalted sense of the term, in which, first and before all, a
spiritual and moral freedom is meant as necessary to be firmly
established within men before the external liberty in social and
political life can be hoped for. For most true is the sublime
declaration, “If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed.”[55] To every one for whom this sentiment possesses a meaning
and significance it would be superfluous to add, what, indeed, is so
palpably evident, that the Son makes no one free except in the way that
He Himself was, viz., by obedience--a perfect obedience which brings the
whole man, with all its passions and affections, as a free-will offering
to the Father.

The predominant tendency of modern Christendom to a monarchical
constitution, as most accordant with the Christian principle of the
state, is abundantly evinced in history. The fact is so generally
admitted, that it is almost a work of supererogation to adduce instances
of it. Not only within the memory of living men, but also two centuries
ago, a great Christian monarchy, fanatically possessed and inflamed with
the idea of absolute liberty and equality, lapsed for a while into a
republic. But in both cases this passing fever of fanaticism soon worked
itself out by its very violence, and the foreign and diseased matter was
thrown off by the political body. It was out of this crisis, however,
that the much-lauded constitution of England arose, with its dynamical
theory of the division and nicely-adjusted balance of power, which has
reached at present so great a height of practical excellence. Moreover,
it is almost superfluous to notice the fact how a second-rate maritime
power, which in its very origin was entirely republican, gradually
approximated to, and has at last entirely adopted, a monarchical
polity.[56] Another state, monarchical indeed, but which, from the fact
that its sovereigns were elective, deserves rather to be called a
republic, and in some respects was really so, amid the anarchy of party
and the feuds which arose out of the elections, soon lost its ancient
greatness and splendor, and even its existence as an independent nation.
In short, in the whole of Christian Europe, but a few small and
uninfluential communities have retained a republican form. As for the
republics which have sprung up out of the colonial states in the New
World, the very oldest of them are of too recent an origin to allow us
to pass upon them any judgment which could be justly and truly called
historical. On the other hand, however, the modern Christian era
furnishes one remarkable phenomenon of a republican state on a large
scale, and of a wholly peculiar kind. And we may adduce this instance as
a proof that such a constitution is by no means excluded from the spirit
of a Christian polity or its legitimate and historical principle.

I am alluding to the ancient German, or the Christian Roman Empire of
the middle ages, during a period of many centuries, and in the time of
its vigor and splendor, when it led, not to say, formed, the great
political world.[57] As an elective empire, but still monarchical in the
unity of the whole, it possessed so far a republican tendency and shape.
And this it preserved even long afterward, when, by a long succession
of emperors of the same house, the imperial crown had in fact become
almost the hereditary right of a single family; for the solemn sanction
of an election was still indispensable, and this gave rise to more than
one exception or interruption to the otherwise historically confirmed
law of succession. Moreover, this great system or confederation of
states embraced many smaller and principally republican states; at least
in its members were comprised every possible form of political
constitution. The four great dukedoms, who in the imperial diet were the
original representatives, together with the other hereditary powers
which subsequently attained to the electoral dignity, formed, as it
were, the monarchical element in the whole body, retaining, however, at
the same time, its national and popular character. Alongside of these
the spiritual princes, as entirely dependent on choice and election for
their dignities, formed an aristocracy, not only of birth, but of
science and the intellectual culture of the age--in short, an
aristocracy of merit. Lastly, the trading and manufacturing free towns,
with their imperial privileges and charters, formed, among the other
members of the Empire, a true democratical element, in the highest and
noblest sense of the term. For we must not understand thereby any mere
universal equality, leading to the usual popular anarchy, but
corporations, with well-defined rights, of the burgher classes, as they
attained to historical importance and influence. The very name of the
Hanse Towns is sufficient to remind us of the vast and important part
which the latter played, even in the declining times of the Empire.

Thus free and republican in its spirit was the old Christian monarchy of
the German Kaisers. It had no doubt to undergo many convulsions from
domestic faction, and, finally sunk beneath them. Still this political
constitution of the middle ages, in their best days, must forever remain
a remarkable and singular phenomenon. Its full and deep significance and
grandeur are little recognized, and still less perfectly understood, by
the modern science of politics. Peculiarly Christian in principle, in
its kingly administration as vigorous and successful as any other state
in the most brilliant eras of the history of the world, while in the
internal development of its republican members and constituents it was
more rich and varied, and, in truth, much freer than even the most
lauded among the mixed constitutions of modern times. For historical
experience, that great teacher of political science, distinctly proves
that in those _dynamical_ states, which are based on the principle of
the division and nicely-adjusted balance of power, the ministry and the
opposition usurp between them all the functions of authority, while the
sacred cipher of an hereditary monarch is nothing more than a mere
shadow, beneath which they can sit at ease to carry on their endless
disputes.

The Christian view, then, of the world, and of the state, as we have
already remarked, does not exclude or reject any form of political
existence. On the contrary, it recognizes whatever possesses an
historical cause and foundation, and allows it to stand in its proper
place, and in its true and original significance and rights.
Accordingly, it admits the validity as such even of the dynamical form
of polity, even though it feels it impossible to agree with partial and
enthusiastic admirers in considering it as perfect. Nay, it does not
reject even an absolute despotism, notwithstanding that it sees clearly
enough all its imperfections and great inferiority. It is only by a
complete view of history that their existence can be explained and
understood. And in this they will appear either as a necessary evil in
its mildest form, _i.e._, as the less pernicious and dangerous, under
existing circumstances, or as a remedy for some more fearful disorder,
by which alone the social frame can be restored to a more healthy
condition.

The usual transition and natural issue of popular anarchy, when it has
lasted long enough to exhaust its own fearful violence, is a perpetual
dictatorship or despotism in some shape or other, but devoid of a higher
and diviner sanction. This form of government, or (since, strictly
speaking, it is not a form) this political condition, must be carefully
distinguished from a long-established, legitimate, and hereditary
monarchy, with which its whole character has nothing in common. No doubt
when the revolutionary evil has reached its greatest height, and when a
successful and prudent usurper, like the much-lauded Augustus in ancient
Rome, without being personally answerable for the overthrow of the
previous constitution, appears pre-eminently in the character of
mediator between parties and a general pacificator, the world is ready
to accord to him its applause. Gradually his authority is more and more
widely acknowledged. Although at first he is recognized conditionally
only and relatively, nevertheless, if he remains faithful to his better
tendencies, and continues to the last to confer important benefits on
his people, he may often give a permanent and historical foundation to
his dynasty. But if, on the contrary, under his usurped power,
revolution, phenix-like, only renews itself out of its own ashes, and
the old anarchy from below revives in another form from above, as a
merely military despotism, which, in its resistless and annihilating
lust of conquest, honors nothing, but throws the whole world into
confusion, then is the second evil worse than the first, which it
promised to remedy. By such a course it loses its only moral foundation,
inasmuch as it was to the better promise it held out that it owed its
temporary and conditional recognition. Such an instance has been brought
closely enough before our eyes in the history of very recent times, to
enable us at once intuitively to understand its whole character. More
slowly, and in a more organized method, and, consequently, with more
lasting and historical results, did such transitions shape themselves in
the ancient world, and especially in the Roman constitution. The ancient
development, therefore, of this phenomenon, and its special form, is
highly instructive and pre-eminently calculated to throw a clear light
on our whole theory.

Modern history at no period presents to us such a vast system of
republican states as we meet with in the annals of antiquity, which
exhibit this under the most various forms, as the predominant
constitution of the whole civilized world, not only in its infant, but
in its maturest and most flourishing development. Not only the Grecian
communities, Carthage, Rome, and the Italian municipalities, but also
all the independent nations of central and northern Europe, possessed a
more or less perfect form of republican polity. This portion, therefore,
of ancient history furnishes to political science a phenomenon which in
the highest degree demands its attention. However greatly its freedom of
inquiry and high intellectual culture, its splendid examples of
patriotism and its noble characters and heroic deeds, may prepossess us
in its favor, on the whole we are forced to confess that experience has
decided against such a system. This great teacher shows it to us as
utterly impracticable, and ill adapted to promote the real progress of
human development, inasmuch as with whatever of brightest promise it may
begin, it invariably terminates in barbarism and disorder. In all of
these states we trace early enough the same evil tendency to political
license and anarchy, which, developing itself with ceaseless rapidity,
soon paves the way to the indeterminate condition of absolute power.
Almost all the great thinkers and political writers of antiquity,
without exception, set themselves to oppose the democratic element of
their national constitutions, and foresaw and predicted the ruin of
their country from this source, without being able in any way to prevent
it. It will be enough to mention Plato in Athens, and in a different
manner and degree, Cicero in Rome, who was himself drawn into the vortex
of political strife. The remedy and counterpoise for the evils of this
democratical spirit was sought by the political thinkers and
philosophers of those times, in a doubtlessly noble but still very
imperfect form of an aristocracy--a remedy which is as little consonant
to our feelings as it is unlikely to satisfy our scientific convictions.
A just and clear idea of an hereditary and well-regulated monarchy was
at that date almost entirely unknown, since in its essential features,
in its true and perfect character, it is entirely of a Christian origin.
In the ancient world, at most, a few and faint outlines of it are
occasionally to be discovered.

The internal and external dissensions of the republics of Greece, and
the consequent loss of their independence and subjugation by the
Macedonian monarchy, or the half-Asiatic half-Grecian powers which
sprung out of it, affords a sufficient confirmation of the law that the
republican constitution, in the times of moral degeneracy, invariably
terminates in popular anarchy and ruin. The same transition in the Roman
polity presents us with interesting considerations of a higher but
different kind. For in this instance the change was effected with clear
ideas, definite views, and well-digested principles. After a long and
unparalleled succession of bloody civil wars, and an equally fearful
series of foreign conquest and aggression, which were almost
indispensable as an outlet for the wild and ambitions passions of men,
the catastrophe which forecasting minds had long foreseen at last came
about. And instead of continuing a hopeless resistance, it was now the
first object of the wise and prudent to convert the new military power
into an instrument of peace, and by investing the modern but absolute
authority with all the old and hallowed forms of dignity, to bring it as
near as possible to the character of an hereditary monarchy. It is to
the tendency to improvement which forms the germ of these ideas that we
must look for the apology, while in the course of history at this
period there lies whatever there can be of reason and justification for
such absolute despotism as prevailed at this era in the political world.
In itself, however, it can not be too often repeated, it is altogether
formless and full of imperfection. A true family succession and
hereditary dynasty, however, was scarcely possible, so long as there
existed no limit to caprice in adoption or divorce, and when all the
relations of marriage and the family were undermined by the universal
corruption in morals, which the better emperors sought in vain to check
and restrain.

By the ascription to the imperial dignity of priestly offices and titles
belonging to the popular religion, it was indeed attempted to give it a
more sacred character and sanction. This, however, secured to the
emperor no real accession of power. Such was the state of decay and
weakness in which religion, no less than morals, was sunk. The
heathenism of those days consisted in nothing but some poetical legends,
external rites, and ceremonial pomp, which occasionally found a
philosophical interpretation, but without a proper intrinsic substance
and coherence, and an organized priesthood--all which are to be still
found in the ancient religion of the Hindoos. And it was only a natural
addition to the other numerous inconsistencies--it only rendered the
whole drama the more revolting, if, after an inhuman reign, and after
being at last put out of the way in a very human, and, at the same time,
very _un_human way, the hated tyrant was in conclusion placed among the
national gods. And if under Aurelius and the Antonines better days
appeared, still they were but brief and transitory, since they did not,
and in truth could not, possess any historical confirmation and moral
basis like that of the hereditary monarchy of Christian times and
states.

In jurisprudence, not only as a science, but in its practical
administration, the Romans have in all ages, and even modern times, been
justly famous. One reason, perhaps, of this was the fact, that all who
still retained the least sense of right and justice, withdrawing from
the dangers of political life and honors, retired to the still inviolate
domain of law, and devoted themselves to the development of the old
juristic principles. But when the whole social frame, and the very
principle of civil existence has become in its inmost essence
unrighteous, and based on injustice, a few just laws about property, and
robbery, and fraud, and murder, and the like (offenses which, generally
speaking, are, for the most part, essentially the same in all times and
places), can profit little. Equally unavailing, too, are the shrewdest
and most sagacious of juridical treatises on such topics. To extol the
Roman Empire on this ground would be tantamount to praising one of the
worst and most pernicious systems of philosophical error, or excusing it
because it does not violate, or, rather, because it necessarily
observes, the ordinary rules of logic, which, however, does not by any
means lessen or remove the error, but, on the contrary, aggravates it;
since by rendering it so much the more specious, it does but gain for it
a more ready acceptance among men.

In the later epoch of the Christian renovation of the Roman Empire in
the German, the better elements of the old Roman jurisprudence were rich
in valuable and beneficial results. Still the Christian principle of the
state accords better with the old Teutonic laws than with the civil
code, inasmuch as by the old German usages a greater regard is paid, and
a higher influence allowed, to the rights of equity. No doubt but the
Roman jurisprudence has most acutely defined and developed this
beautiful notion; but it is chiefly as an exception from strict right
that it recognizes it at all. For such was the Roman law from its
commencement; and it was regarded and established as the proper province
of equity to moderate and to soften its original sternness and severity.
But, according to Christian law, equity and strict right ought to be in
every instance intimately associated and blended together, as is,
indeed, implied in the very idea of Christian sentiment and feeling.

Herein lies, consequently, the great and essential distinction between
Roman and Christian law. And this is the principle on which a thorough
and systematic development of Christian jurisprudence must proceed, and
in such a spirit alone can it be consistently carried out. A second
distinctive mark of Christian law and of its very conception consists in
this, that beyond all others, it is founded on historical rights. No
doubt in its simple and natural character the Germanic custom invariably
tends toward an historical legislation, both for the burgher and for the
private individual, and is so far perfectly reconcilable with the
Christian principle of right and justice. But in the full and extensive
signification of the term, as it embraces the state, and all such
powers of the civilized world as are brought by geographical contact
into political relations with each other, it is only the Christian
principle of right that can be truly said to be historical; for none but
the Christian view of the world really embraces in its plans and
consideration the whole of mankind.

Had man not fallen from the very first into dissension and discontent
with himself and his fellows, with nature and with God, society would
have stood in no need of a constraining force, or of the state to
constrain it. For what else is the state but an armed neutrality for the
preservation of peace--a sword of justice against wrong, whether from
individuals or communities, a fortress and a bulwark against unjust
attacks and the violence of war? And whence but from that only perfect
system--the system of Christian truth and the first opening of
revelation--can we derive the explanation of that which is but the
propagation of the old evil and the primal curse? Does it not furnish,
in the first wrong and the first fratricide, the historical derivation
and origin of the state, accounting for it as the divinely-appointed
protection against man’s inborn tendency to injustice? And if in any
other history or tradition a tolerably clear and definite allusion to
such ideas exist, it was, without doubt, originally derived from the
same source.

It is, however, as in my last Lecture I have already endeavored to show,
in the second and new divine commencement of the human race that we are
to look for the true sanction and foundation of the state; for it is in
this renovation of mankind that their true intrinsic and higher peace
was first proclaimed and offered to him. Not, however, perfect peace,
for that is to be the fruit and reward of having “fought a good
fight.”[58] Still it is, in the mean time, a sure and everlasting basis
of future peace, and an ever-growing germ of tranquillity even in the
present. Viewed in this light, then, every human peace which is not
merely specious and pretended, but honestly intended, and in so far
Christian, however imperfect and partial, forms, nevertheless, a step in
the great scale of progression--an approximation and a preparation to
that universal and all-embracing peace of God which is higher than all
reason, and all the disputes which arise out of or about it.

If injustice and wrong should ever disappear totally from the earth--if
the peace of God were actually established thereon, then would the end
of law be attained, and all institutions for its accomplishment would
become superfluous. Law presupposes a condition of struggle, and is
intended to endure as long as it lasts. It is itself nothing less than a
struggle against wrong. The Christian view, accordingly, and theory of
law, is far higher. In a scientific point of view, too, it alone is
satisfactory on this account, that it recognizes a higher principle as
the source of right, or as right itself, and that it alone contains in
itself the historical key for the whole, and embraces at once the
beginning and the end. But now the Christian idea of right is thus
historical, not merely because it furnishes a complete explanation of
the first beginning of wrong, and gives an historical derivation of the
divine sanction of the state; but also in this sense, that in obedience
to the principle of equity, as extended to the wider relations of
political life, and to the law of toleration founded on this feeling, it
respects even the imperfect and inferior degrees of right, whenever, at
least, they are the unavoidable results of a previous course of things,
and possess an historical foundation, and are established as less evil,
and at least as comparatively good. And this explains, what is otherwise
incomprehensible, how the Christian sense of right could reconcile
itself to the absolute form, or, rather, formlessness of the later Roman
world, and being gradually associated and fused therewith, led to its
complete renovation in the exalted phenomenon of a Christian empire.

This peace-loving and tolerant recognition of imperfect political
constitutions and forms of state is only applicable, however, where the
absolute and the pernicious had its foundation in some historical
occasion, and where, by a natural course of development, the evil has
followed as the result of some previous defective condition of the
political body. It has no place where the evil is radical and of
spontaneous growth, as in the empire of Mohammed, and of his immediate
successors; for a fanatical lust of conquest was introduced in the first
germ of this dynasty, and indeed formed its foundation and its animating
and vital principle. The brilliant success and personal talents of the
first caliphs may indeed win our admiration and chain our imagination,
but still in the very worst times of the old Roman world absolute power
never presented itself in so unmitigated a form as it does in this
empire of deadly fanaticism. This is the calm judgment of history. In
the former case the evil sprung chiefly from the personal caprice of
individual tyrants; in the latter, the pervading principle was
despotism, which, on the whole, remained unchanged in the most famous
and greatest characters. For such immutability is an essential principle
of despotism whenever the spiritual and the temporal power are held by
the same hand, and are united in one common center and sovereign.

In another point of view also, that, viz., of the moral estimate, the
historical comparison between the old Roman and the Mohammedan empires
turns out to the disadvantage of the latter. In the latter times of the
Roman Empire, the family relations, and the sacred ties of married life,
were no doubt greatly disturbed and perverted by the prevailing tone of
immorality. But among the Mohammedans they were entirely overthrown by a
false religion. Even in this respect, therefore, it is evident that
there could be no place in the latter for that moral foundation of a
long-established family unity, such as a civilized state like the
Christian monarchy requires. It is nothing strange, consequently, if in
the times of the Arabian dynasty, the Mohammedan state stood in more
decided opposition, and proved less reconcilable to the Christian polity
than ever heathenism did in the days of ancient Rome. But,
notwithstanding this, we find, on the other side, the Christian
principle of peace extending itself even to the historical phenomena and
political relations of the Mohammedan world. For the most part (and in a
greater degree with the advance of time) these events have been judged
in that mild spirit of historical justice which, in its complete and
comprehensive estimate, allows a due consideration to every motive and
circumstance.

Moreover, a high principle of toleration has extended to them the
benefit of the international laws of Christian states--a policy which
only requires to be rightly understood to be pronounced in no ways
deserving of blame or reprobation; for the evil can only be radically
extirpated by the complete triumph of Christian truth over the false
foundation and leading idea of this fanatical delusion.

But, however improbable it may seem, regarded merely in an historical
light, that the Mohammedan races will ever adopt Christian sentiments,
morals, and principles, still in the great course of mundane things, or,
in other words, in the counsels of Providence, nothing, however it may
contradict human expectations, can rightly be held to be impossible.
And, indeed, recent times furnish many speaking indications of a growing
tendency to such an approximation. Many signs might be pointed out,
which, while they bear witness to a widening and deepening feeling of
its desirableness, encourage us to entertain higher and better hopes. To
promote, and indeed to co-operate in bringing about so great and divine
a consummation, so long as it can be done without violating higher
duties and principles, does not appear to go in any degree beyond the
sphere of a truly Christian and pacific policy, or to interfere with the
relations which it is right to observe in regard to non-Christian
states. On the contrary, the worst violation thereof, and one that most
surely menaces danger and mischief, is for a Christian state, in direct
opposition to its natural principle and vocation, to be seized and
actuated by a fanatical lust of conquest similar to that which animated
the Saracens. Such a subversion and confusion of all moral ideas, and of
political life, was publicly manifested, for the first time in the
Christian world, during the French Revolution. Breaking out with furious
violence, in the brief period of its duration it developed itself with
fearful rapidity. How many, or, rather, how few steps it would have
required, had its reign been longer, to convert it into a military
despotism, thoroughly heathenish, such as the Revolution indeed was from
beginning to end; into a despotism which, like that of the caliphate
already mentioned, should unite in the same person all spiritual, as
well as temporal authority, we need not here further investigate. The
dreadful possibility of such a contingency has been brought only too
closely home to our fears.

The essence of despotism, as I said before, lies in the union in one
person of the civil and spiritual powers--or in a most anomalous state,
which is, by a rare and faulty combination, at once spiritual and
temporal. And since the distinction between the two powers is involved
in the very notion of a Christian state, it is of the highest importance
that the state should carefully observe and respect the boundaries
between the two domains. It is extremely difficult to establish any
general standard for all the cases of collision between the two that
either have actually occurred or are conceivably possible. For it is
evident that this contingency must be modified in an infinite number of
ways, by existing treaties, the local circumstances and political
constitution of the different states. The chief point is the general
spirit and feeling. The question turns principally on good will and
honest intentions; but pre-eminently on a right conception of both
powers, as alike possessing in their respective spheres a higher
sanction, a divine foundation, and a sacred character. This must be
recognized in every case and time, and all circumstances belonging to
either sphere must be treated accordingly.

Many and serious cases of such collision between the church and the
state have occurred and are perpetually recurring. Many and grave errors
have been committed on both sides. But for the most part they have been
unfairly judged, or, rather, misjudged, through ignorance both of the
times, and of the actual circumstances of the case. The day is not long
gone by when in this respect it was the habitual rule to subject certain
of the early popes especially to an unqualified vituperation and
censure. And it must be told, to the praise of German impartiality, that
Protestant writers were the first, by their historical researches, to do
justice to and to form a fair estimate of these, in their day, truly
great and eminent characters. Still we do not by any means pretend to
deny that both in these and later times grave blame rests with many of
the popes individually. On neither side, however, and at no time, were
the limits which divide the two powers overstepped so far as they were
by Henry VIII. of England, that absolute monarch in temporals, and who
wished also to be equally supreme in spirituals. The most despotic
sovereign that ever sat on the throne of England, by founding [the
independence of] the Anglican Church,[59] became undesignedly and
unconsciously the true author of that much-lauded constitution of
England, which, essentially resting on this foundation, furnishes the
only instance of a dynamical polity, as the only remedy of an otherwise
incurable tendency to division and anarchy, attaining to a highly
perfect shape and development. As for the schism in the faith, which in
these latter times has in so many Christian countries made the problem
of religion only the more difficult, and its relation to the state more
delicate and liable to aggression, it has in England, through this
royal reformer, assumed so complicated a shape that, unsolved as yet, it
appears to many, judging of it in a merely human light, totally and
forever incapable of solution.

We must reserve to the succeeding Lecture the enumeration of all the
results which flow from these premises, and this first outline of a
truly Christian justice, which as such involves the principle of equity,
and is even truly historical.




LECTURE XIV.

OF THE DIVISION OF RANKS, AND OF THE RECIPROCAL RELATIONS OF STATES
ACCORDING TO THE CHRISTIAN IDEA.--OF SCIENCE AS A POWER; OF ITS
CONSTITUTION, AND OF THE RIGHT REGULATION OF IT.


Whenever philosophy, setting up any conceit of its own as a principle,
intrudes either into the domain of religion or of politics, such an
intrusion is, in every case, an aggression. And if the aggressive idea,
once formed and entertained, is, nevertheless, externally and in
appearance held in check and restrained--if, from ulterior
considerations and for the sake of some remote object, science
accommodates itself to the established system of law or religion--then
is the case only so much the worse. The deep and pervading hostility of
sentiment is but concealed beneath the external servility of language,
and the rankling wound has but skinned over the surface. The influence
of evil is far from being checked and destroyed; or, to say the least,
that of good is nipped in the bud, not being allowed fully to expand
itself. And at the same time the dignity of science, which can only be
maintained by its independence, is fatally and irretrievably endangered.

Under this conviction, I strongly protested, at the very opening of
these Lectures, against all such intermeddling of philosophy with
matters foreign to it; and I trust that, for my part, I have hitherto
duly observed the spirit of that protest. But now, the end which
philosophy strives to attain to is a right estimate and full
understanding of its own nature, and that of man, both in the internal
properties of his mind and in his external existence relatively to God
and nature, and also to the world and society. In pursuit of this
object, having once found and acknowledged the center of the inner life,
such as it is given to us, and setting out therefrom, philosophy can and
may, with perfect propriety, submit to investigation the highest ideas
of life, and judge them after its own method, and from its own peculiar
position. But still it will do this in the hope rather of explaining
what actually exists, than of establishing any self-devised ideal of
its own, or of setting up impracticable laws for a merely conceivable
state of things under the most arbitrary assumptions--for a wholly
visionary world.

Consistently, then, with this notion of philosophy, and under this
limitation, I have not, I think, deviated in the latter Lectures from
the law I originally laid down. Inasmuch, however, as the exposition of
a philosophy of life must necessarily be _vivid_, and consequently
requires to be interspersed with historical views and examples, I must
request you, looking principally to the ideas which form the essential
foundation of these discourses, to judge the latter by the pervading
tenor and connection of the thoughts rather than by the several
allusions and instances which I have introduced for the mere purpose of
illustration. All that is merely personal in the interpretation passed
upon those events will, I trust, be looked upon as the private opinions,
indeed, but still the unprejudiced conclusions, of an individual.

In the course of these Lectures I attempted, first of all, to establish
a firm foundation for the human soul, considered both in its own proper
nature and with regard to its most essential relations in life to nature
and to God. In the next place, by investigating the order of the divine
dispensations in nature, and in the realms of truth and history, it was
my endeavor to obtain for it a wider and more solid basis. Lastly, I
occupied myself with tracing the course which the Spirit of Eternal
Truth pursues in science and in life, and the shapes which in its
progress toward perfection it successively assumes. Accordingly, I have
pointed out to you, first of all, how this Spirit of Eternal Truth is
ever one and the same in the highest science and in divine faith; then,
how victoriously it comes forth out of the conflict between faith and
infidelity; and, in conclusion, I showed you that, far from being
confined to the narrow region of science, it may and rightly ought to
enter with an earnest influence into life itself. How the latter duty is
actually fulfilled we endeavored to show, by considering the symbolical
signification of life, and, as derived therefrom, its higher sanction
and divine foundation, especially in public life and the state. And
herein the idea of a universal Christian and truly historical justice
found a closer application and wider development. And this formed the
subject of our last disquisition.

I there sought to elucidate this idea solely and entirely from history.
For this purpose I endeavored, by means of historical instances, to set
in a clear, discriminating light the opposite and divergent notions of
an absolute and of a dynamical or limited monarchy, so far at least as
regards the essential features and characteristic constitution of each.
As instances of the former, I pointed to the old Roman world and the
empire of the caliphs, while the latter was elucidated by the English
constitution, in which, as yet, it has attained to its highest and most
perfect development. This is, no doubt, a master-piece of political
wisdom, wherein an intractable spirit of opposition being adopted, as it
were, into the very constitution, is thereby rendered legitimate and its
evil tendency is held in check. Still the principle of it can not
rightly be viewed in any other light than the wise procedure of the
physician who, in the case of an inevitable epidemic, resolves to
inoculate the disease in order to be able to control it the better, and
by watching more closely its crisis, to regulate its course and issue.

In its true historical place, therefore, this constitution finds its
satisfactory explanation and justification; or, rather, deserves our
highest praise, the fullest acknowledgment of its merits, and even our
admiration. But inasmuch as every feature of it is thoroughly historical
and national, and since the slightest local diversity in the character
of a people or nation might with different relations and circumstances
give rise to wants and difficulties little expected or dreamed of, we
must be cautious how we seek to introduce it elsewhere. In the arts it
is ever a sorry business to imitate great works of original genius. By
such a course little but _manner_ is multiplied. So it is rarely a
felicitous idea to suppose that a constitution, though copied from ever
so lauded a model, must be suited to all nations alike, and must prove a
universal and unfailing source of political felicity--a tree of liberty,
which we may transplant at pleasure, or, as it were, a constitutional
bill of exchange, which, once endorsed we may put in circulation.

But if the true Gordian knot in that master-piece of polity, the English
constitution, remains still an unsolved problem, since that war of
religious opinion, which seems at every moment to be threatening an
outbreak, is as yet, with consummate skill and prudence, kept under and
restrained within its recognized limits, we may see in this fact a
further confirmation and justification of the encomiums we recently
passed upon the religious peace which has become for us in Germany as
it were a second nature, and which, in the place of such a constitution,
is to us the guaranty of mental freedom and the pledge of a higher unity
than one simply political. It is not a mere dead letter, but it is a
living power enshrined in the minds of men. And if occasionally some
rash expression in a great and influential writer, or any grievous act
on the part of a powerful and leading political character, may seem to
menace violence to this religious peace, the general feeling soon
pronounces itself against such indiscretion, and the single note of
discord is quickly brought in unison with the general harmony, or else
dies away without producing any deep or widely-prejudicial consequences.
Not, indeed, that the existing differences in religious opinion are a
thing desirable--we mean any thing but that by our encomiums on the
religious peace. What we really mean is, that in the present state of
things such a peace is of the very highest value, and one whose great
blessing can only be appreciated fully by those who enjoy it. And
nothing but a comparison with other civilized nations in this respect
can enable us to understand and to form a full estimate of its value.
And if every ordinary treaty of peace between states, whenever it is
settled on true and lasting foundations and sincerity of purpose, has an
influence on the inward development of mind or spirit in the course of
history, and affords, as it were, a calm presage of a higher and a more
universal peace of God, how can we look upon this peculiar and internal
peace between men’s minds in any other light than as a token of a richer
and fuller future, and as a symbol of ultimate perfection and unity?

In our notice of the schism in the faith we made allusion to the
possibility of a collision between the two highest and most sacred
powers, the civil and the spiritual, according to the distinction
involved in the very idea of the Christian life. In order, therefore, to
avoid every possible misconception, it seems to be necessary, or, at
least, not a superfluous task, to add one brief remark on the extreme
case when, in such an unfortunate collision, right and justice are
openly violated and set at defiance. If the civil power be the party
attacked and unduly interfered with in its legitimate province, it has a
perfect right to defend itself, as, indeed, in our days, it is quite
able and knows well how to do. The only thing that apparently remains to
be desired is, that in the exercise of this right it should observe, as
indeed becomes the stronger side, the greatest moderation. But if, on
the contrary, the aggression proceeds from this side, and the spiritual
power is attacked, then it ought to bear in mind that its legitimate
opposition to the civil power ought to assume a material character. Its
resistance must never be public and open violence, nor, either directly
or indirectly, by means of what we may call _machinations_, for such a
proceeding would undermine the sacred foundations of public confidence,
and shake the whole edifice of moral order and society. In the case of
such an aggression, religion would deprive herself of her duly-acquired
position in the state. But this, so long as the latter remains
Christian, religion itself never can and never will do, as neither will
those whose duty it is to guide and to minister it in a truly reverent
and pious spirit.

The only opposition, therefore, that the spiritual power can rightly and
justly make to the aggression of the state must be of a passive nature.
It is not necessary to lay down any elaborate and rigorous distinctions
for such an emergency; for such definitions rarely meet the complicated
variety and special character of every possible or even every actual
case. A few historical examples, which readily present themselves, will
serve briefly and perspicuously to illustrate the view of duty which we
wish to enforce. In the unfortunate case of a great and public collision
between the Church and the State, the model of a just and legitimate
resistance on the part of the spiritual power has been furnished by the
conduct of that venerable old man,[60] whom half of Europe regarded as
invested with the highest priestly and apostolical dignity. With calm
fortitude, even in bonds, he refused to yield to the military despot,
and won the personal esteem and admiration likewise of that other half
of Europe which denied his spiritual authority. Or, to take an example
from a more limited sphere, and of a more personal nature, we may appeal
to the history of the patron saint of Bohemia, which, at least, can not
be classed among the legends, and which, in any case, will afford a
beautiful and simple example of a noble, perfectly-allowable resistance
of a spiritual party against the injustice of the political head of the
nation. By such passive resistance, and by such alone, did Christianity,
in the earliest centuries, though so unattractive and so lowly at its
first commencement, gradually attain a secure external foundation, and
become the religion of the whole civilized world. A public outbreak, and
even a secret feeling of discontent between the spiritual and the
temporal power, between Church and State, is, at all times, and in every
case, a great evil, threatening and bringing danger and ruin on both.
For the state, as being ultimately founded on a religious basis,
undermines its own foundation by assuming a hostile attitude toward
religion. No financial difficulties, or any such partial calamities,
will ever ruin a people so long as any moral energy still exists in the
whole body, and it is consequently sound at the core. Political
skepticism, which is the immediate and necessary consequence of
infidelity in religion, is the true cause and origin of the decay of
nations. These two vital principles of human society, therefore--these
two powers, however essentially and necessarily distinct--must work
together in perfect peace and unity. For the one can only flourish where
the soil has been rendered morally fertile by the other, while the
latter can not exercise its full influence except under the sanction of
the political power. If religion were at unity in itself, and totally
free from party and controversy, and the state, as the public life, were
in perfect harmony with it, and thoroughly pervaded by its life-giving
spirit, humanity would, by such a consummation, have made a great step
in advance toward that divine peace for which every human pacification,
however imperfect, is the expression of a profound and imperishable
longing--of a pursuit which, though ever attaining, is still never
wholly abandoned.

However, the alienation and separation of the civil and spiritual powers
seems to belong peculiarly and essentially to, or, rather, to be a
necessary law of, the present condition of humanity, still involved in
struggle with evil, and not yet having attained to the end of its
endeavors. It is much older than men think. It must have existed in the
first ages of the world, and in the earliest stage of the Gentile
religion. For among the Hindoos, who, as they are the most ancient
people that we are acquainted with, are also the most authentic monument
that remains of the primeval condition of the human race, we find this
separation formally and definitely established. It there forms an
insurmountable barrier between the regal and the sacerdotal dignity. On
this point it would not be advisable to direct our attention exclusively
or even principally to the condition of the priestly class among the
Greeks and Romans, since, in the later epochs of these nations,
Gentilism had greatly degenerated, and in the more civilized days of
these people had lost all its essential forms, and its true spirit had
disappeared. But, with that still more ancient people of the Hindoos,
the same unchanged law still exists in these days as in the very
earliest times. A Brahmin who should attempt to ascend the throne or
usurp its powers, or a rajah who should wish to be as a Brahmin, or to
suppress and annihilate the Brahminical caste, would be universally
regarded as an abomination. The attempt, on either side, would appear an
offense against human nature and divine laws. For a mixture or confusion
of castes signifies to the Hindoos the very abomination of anarchy; and
by this term, in one characteristic word of their language, they
designate all revolutionary times, even though, we must observe, such
periods among the Hindoos were never more than brief and transitory, the
waves of anarchy breaking harmlessly against the everlasting rocks of
this ancient and solidly-compact system.

Besides the many other traces of family affinity between the Indian and
Teutonic races, another is furnished by the Germanic constitution, which
forms the political basis of most European kingdoms. In India the noble
class who most especially are bound to military service forms also the
caste of the lords of the soil; and from their latter character they
also derive their name as a class.[61] Some of the most general and most
ancient features of the feudal system have likewise been discovered
among them, though not, indeed, its more artificial and complicated
system, to which feudalism was in later times developed among European
nations. To this landed nobility belong the nabobs and even the rajahs.
For it was left open to the fluctuating fortunes of different families
to rise or to fall from the summit of political dignity. Between the
several grades of honor accessible to a particular caste no
insurmountable barrier was raised; all were open to all the members of
the same rank or caste.

The democratical writers of a recent era, in obedience to a sentiment
natural enough to their false system, have expressed a deep horror and
strong aversion to this institution of castes among the Hindoos,
stamping it on every occasion with the strongest marks of reprobation.
Viewing it, however, in an historical light, I for my part am disposed
to think that it is to this ancient and hereditary institution, however
much of imperfection it undoubtedly involves, that this great and
populous country owes that firm stability of its laws and customs, and
that indestructible prosperity which the various conquests it has
undergone both in ancient and modern times have been unable to shake or
to undermine. No doubt the Indian gradation of ranks wants the stamp of
perfection and mildness which belongs to Christian politics. And in this
respect the comparison is especially instructive. It serves to draw
attention to, and strongly illustrates the fact, that a Christian
division of ranks is, in some points, different in its principle, and
the very opposite to the correspondent state of things in the old world,
as yet unrefined and purified by this divine element. For, first of all,
according to the Christian idea, the spiritual class can not depend upon
birth; it must possess a higher and peculiar vocation. This order,
consequently, can not recruit itself merely by birth, but must derive
its members from the other classes which are hereditary. But in
consequence of this principle, the partition-wall, otherwise impassable
and absolute, between the other ranks, which, taken on the whole, are
hereditary, is so far removed, that exceptional cases occur when these
barriers are opened to merit or other important considerations. It is a
self-evident fact, requiring no elaborate argument for its proof, that
the Christian sentiment, or, as we have here expressed it, that
principle of equity so universally and essentially interwoven with the
Christian idea of justice, demands that every alleviation of their
toilsome and oppressive lot should be afforded to the industrious
classes. To those on whom the accident of birth, as the world speaks,
or, as we should prefer to say, a higher and a divine Providence, has
laid all the hardships of life, it is but just that every privilege
should be conceded that does not militate against the general welfare,
or the private rights of individuals. And in the same spirit, every
political constitution that is organically arranged and founded on a
Christian, and, consequently, modified separation of ranks, will
attentively observe and engraft into its old constitutional stock every
new historical shoot. A great and instructive example of the kind is at
hand. In the Teutonic constitutions of the middle ages, and especially
in the Germanic Empire, cities and trades, which at an earlier period
had formed a very immaterial and comparatively insignificant element in
the whole--in short, the growing burgher classes were, at their very
first appearance, understood humanly and politically--received a great
organic development, and taken into a living combination with the old.

In all probability our own deeply-agitated times, which assuredly
deserve not to be called unfruitful, even though, together with the good
fruit, they may also produce many a false blossom, give birth to much
that is new indeed, but which is, nevertheless, or at least may
eventually become, historical. The phenomena of the present, therefore,
demand our most careful consideration, lest any negligence in this case
should inevitably involve us in disaster, and bring on us a natural
historical retribution. An exclusive and narrow aristocracy, or, if we
must say so, one senselessly insisting on its privileges, such as in the
earlier part of the last century was probably to be met with in a few
countries, is, to the true friend of the ancient order of things, the
most painful phenomenon. It is its own greatest enemy--since, by an
historical law of antagonism and reaction, one extreme inevitably calls
forth the other sooner or later. Hereditary monarchy, as it is the
oldest form of polity in history, so, if it is maintained in the mild
and moderate spirit of the Christian state, is likely to survive all
others, and to be the last in force among the human race; for a state
which is founded and established on the Christian principle of an
equitable distinction and division of ranks, must, in every calm and
unprejudiced judgment, deserve the preference over the artificial
constitution of a dynamical balance of powers; for the necessary
equipoise is liable to be disturbed by the restless agitation to which
the latter form of polity is exposed. And it is only, therefore, in
comparison with an absolute despotism that the dynamical theory can
appear desirable and win so many adherents, while the former, on the
other hand, as the only remedy for popular anarchy, if administered with
talent and energy, becomes not only tolerable, but acquires even an
historical justification.

Each of these two extremes, the absolute and the dynamical, admit,
however, of a wider application than merely to single states and their
different forms, according to the fluctuation of the times between
prosperity and adversity. For the entire system of Christian states
throughout the civilized world may in their mutual relations and
confederations depend principally on the absolute preponderance of some
leading power which holds the others in subjection or rules them. But
this is an authority which all are ready to throw off, and is never
willingly acknowledged or submitted to. Or, perhaps, the whole political
world may, on the dynamical theory, be based on the balance of power,
each state being held in check by the rest. This was the reigning system
of the eighteenth century, and at its first foundation was admired as
the perfection of a wise policy. In experience, however, it has proved
inadequate and practically untenable. The only case where it seems to
admit of application is that of a division embracing the whole globe,
but based on geographical relations; but even in such a case it could
only serve to check mutual injury, and not to promote any salutary end.

In the middle ages, as soon as the German Empire, having fallen from its
original purity, had become totally false to its Christian principle, it
found, according to the spirit of the times, a salutary check and
counterpoise in the Church. And that iron character of the Ghibellines,
which was exhibited no less strikingly in individuals and morals than in
politics and counsels of state, affords the best justification for this
antagonism, as well as for the opposite great party of the Guelphs, with
their milder bearing and sentiments.

But now that this ancient division and conflict of the spiritual and the
temporal powers is in these enlightened times a bygone thing, and in the
older sense is extinct forever--since it seems mankind can not do
without antagonism of some kind, we have, instead of it, an elementary
one between land and water. A political schism variously manifests
itself between the ocean and the continent. In fact, that great Island
Kingdom which traverses and rules the ocean, and by founding colonies
and settlements wherever it listeth or thinketh profitable, puts forth,
as it were, the feelers of universal dominion, is properly an empire of
the sea. For in contradistinction from a kingdom we may call every
monarchy an empire which comprises in itself several other peoples and
nations of divers races and political constitutions. In such a sense we
have contrasted this maritime empire with the Continent. But although
experience has shown the possibility of such a division of the whole
world and political alienation of the two elements of land and water
throughout the globe, it has also established a conviction that though
these two divisions might do incalculable injury and mischief to each
other, no permanent or decided supremacy of either would follow,
inasmuch as a medium for maintaining the dependence of either is
wanting. And as it is only in some urgent need of the times to find some
counterpoise to absolute power, or an apprehension of it, that a
dynamical state or the tendency to it finds its justification, so it was
only during the transient reign of a despotic lust of conquest, and as a
check to it, that this maritime power could have risen so high as it has
in the opinion of the Continental states.

Since then, however, the great powers of Europe have had a different
interest to pursue, and their political counsels have been directed to
the preservation of peace rather than to selfish aggrandizement. For
they have all had to contend with a common enemy in the restless spirit
of the age, which is yet very far from being conquered and subdued. If,
then, an absolute preponderance of a single state is hateful to all, and
a dynamical balance of power in the general state-system is either
inadequate for such an end, or else does not admit of application, is it
not at least conceivable that a higher principle of Christian justice
might be substituted for these which are equally defective? Might not a
common point of moral unity be found and established for the European
states? Must this sublime idea ever be nothing more than the noble
enthusiasm of a magnanimous character? And is it to be regarded as
impossible merely because it is imbedded in difficulties? But is not all
that is great also difficult? Still, inasmuch as this exalted political
unity must have a purely spiritual basis in the sentiments of men, a
precipitate or violent attempt to bring it about must inevitably
miscarry. It would not only militate against, but also corrupt the
original purity of the very idea. It must be universally recognized
before it can, in the contest with the evil principle of the day, become
a salutary power of good, or furnish for the political relations a
general basis of Christian justice. The one extreme of political Europe,
with its absolute polity, which moreover has fallen very low from its
former preponderance, seems excluded by the very nature of things from
the idea of such a unity. But if it be true that it is gradually
becoming more and more European, a character in which, until very
lately, it has rarely been regarded, then a modified kind of subordinate
connection with such a general principle of association among European
states, does not seem necessarily inadmissible or inconsistent. The
other extreme of Europe, with its dynamical constitution, had, in an
opposition, moderate indeed in form and conditionally, more than half
renounced this idea. In the opinion, however, of many competent judges,
this renunciation is much more decided, and must exercise a great and
unfavorable effect on the harmony of the whole. The moral want of our
age, judged by this or some similar idea, is the necessity which was so
keenly felt upon its deliverance from the general yoke of a military
aggression, of a moral and intrinsic regeneration of Europe. And this
unity is not to be derived from and set up merely in science, but must
be felt as a living energy in life itself. But how is such an inner
restoration to be brought about and effected in Christian states, but by
a complete renewal and invigoration of their religious foundation? And
inasmuch as this want actually exists and is felt, the problem which is
to supply it must be regarded as an historical one; and consequently the
historical development of the times--abstracted from the accidental form
of the first essays at its solution--will sooner or later carry us to
all that is most essential in the idea.

Formerly, in the medieval times, the German Empire claimed to be this
Christian center of unity for the states of Europe--although, in truth,
it was far from embracing the whole system of European states. Latterly,
in the new political theory, the mutual relation of nations has become
gradually republican. And this new form has consequently been
accompanied with imperfections and difficulties and almost inextricable
perplexities. Is it, then, probable that in the commencing or
recently-commenced era of history, a firm, compact, but vast corporation
of states, founded on a principle of Christian justice, can be
substituted for and gradually evolved out of the two previous ones,
which are now found wholly inadequate for the ends they were designed to
meet? As a mere historical probability we may well allow this idea to
stand.

Totally different from those idle speculations of an endless peace,
which, for the sake of mere intellectual amusement and discussion,
philosophy was used to advance in the schools, is this thoroughly-practical
thought of a confederation of states based on the principle of
Christian justice and vitally connected with religion as the most
general center of humanity. And the latter must be regarded as the
essential condition of its internal consistency and permanence.
At least we may safely advance the following as the result of a
philosophical consideration of history. An exalted and universal
religious peace of this kind, and proceeding from such a principle, in
which, by a peaceful approximation, not only the two parties in the
faith should be reconciled and finally united, but also the spiritual
and the secular powers, the Church and the State, should be allied
together in the profoundest harmony, is, properly speaking, the very
thing which mankind most stands in need of. But this desirable result
never can and never will be attained until all shall be united in
pervading harmony with religion and with life, especially with public
life or the state, so that all these three principles or fundamental
elements of human existence may work together with one aim and purpose.
Such a state of profound internal peace would be something more than
a simple political peace, with its transient blessings. It would be a
sacred peace of God and the higher spirits, or at least the precursor
and the best initiation thereto. This, however, is not to be effected
by diplomatic skill no more than by scientific hypotheses. It can only
be brought about by the immediate operation of God, and by that divine
energy which from the beginning has sustained and still sustains the
system of the universe. Philosophy, accordingly, must content itself
with pointing to this end and this sustaining power, and also with
calling attention to all the traces historically furnished which tend
in the same direction. And since the great conflict of the age draws
all powers into its vortex more violently than ever, it may be allowed
to be sufficient for us to have hazarded a glance toward this glorious
consummation; and we now will turn our attention to the development
of intellect and intellectual powers as at present involved in the
as yet undecided conflict. Thus much at least must be clear, that if
science, religion, and the state, and the several powers, parties, and
influences belonging to each of these domains, is, as hitherto, to
pursue each its own way in opposition to the rest, then will all hasten
again with rapid strides into a state of chaotic confusion. It may,
therefore, well be permitted us to endeavor to hold up before men, in
as strong a light as possible, this better hope, and to furnish them
with every possible confirmation of it both from science and history.

If our age be as yet far from healthy--if it be still in a sickly state,
if the first fearful crisis has not totally expelled the diseased
matter--if, on the contrary, the general European body in many of its
members is still infected with the virus which has penetrated into the
inmost and secret marrow of life--if the source of the malady lie in
false ideas, or the total absence of right ones, or, in other words, in
philosophical error, which has spread in indefinite vagueness and
endless hair-splitting over the whole of public and private life, and in
a skepticism no less political than religious--then, since the external
refutation rarely avails any thing, our first object must be
intrinsically to conquer and to banish this error by truth, and the
spirit of truth in that higher science which is genuine and lawful and
directs itself to divine things.

The restless anarchical spirit of the times, or the perverted absolute
spirit--for they are essentially one and the same, is yet a spirit--it
may be a superficial, shallow, sensual, and negative one, but still a
spirit, and therefore can not be overcome by any mere negation, but on
the contrary only struggles against it with renewed bitterness and
consequently more vigorous resistance. As opposed to the divine spirit
of truth, however, it appears an unsubstantial nullity, and soon
vanishes into its own vanity.

A direct controversy with error entails one disadvantage. By such a
course the latter is unduly acknowledged for a positive power of evil.
But in reality it only becomes so conditionally, through the atomistic
splitting and diffusion of false ideas, and by the mass of its
followers, when once every thing is resolved into elementary
decomposition. Moreover, one extreme of exaggeration, whenever in
controversy we enter into it and get involved in it, easily introduces
its opposite, which then again is on its side carried too far--or which
even, though strictly and literally it be right enough, is yet asserted
with too little of limitation, and applied with unsalutary rigor. It is,
therefore, a lamentable mistake if men of great and deserving talents,
who from a scientific point of view have devoted themselves to the great
task of morally regenerating the age, have adopted a too decidedly
polemical tendency. For it is partly through exclusively following such
a course that their influence for good has been so narrow and limited,
and has not met with a more general and more unqualified success.

If men would only, first and before all things, endeavor to set forth
with all possible vividness the intrinsic unity which subsists between
higher science with a divine faith, and develop it for its own sake,
without passion or interest, the further results on life of applied
truth would follow spontaneously. From this simple and pure source they
would continue to flow in ample and widening streams over the whole
domain and all its relations. God is truth, and simply on this account
the spirit of truth in a good and true science must even be divine. Its
proper aim is, accordingly, directed to the divine; and on this account
there can not be such a thing as an indifferent science. For every
science which is not directed to the divine is shallow, superficial,
sensuously negative, and idly rationalizing. On this account it is
false, and must consequently prove, in its external effects, nothing
less than evil, injurious, and destructive.

It is in regard to all this that I have classed science, together with
religion and a Christianly-regulated state, as the third power of good.
Although merely intellectual [_geistige_,] it is of great moment in the
conflict which all have to wage against the destructive principles which
so fearfully menace our age. The power of science, it is true, can only
produce an effect in an intellectual sphere, but this intellectual
sphere is of itself of great influence on every other circle of human
operation. Religion has for its immediate object the soul and its
salvation, or its union with God; and this is its peculiar region; but
still it comes in various ways in contact with the higher science, and
penetrates deeply into actual and also into public life. But it is the
state, as the organic form of the latter, by which the divine as law,
and as a higher idea of justice, modified and completed with that of
clemency and equity, is first introduced into reality of actual and
corporeal existence, and this historical and sensible world. But the
state itself has no other than a religious foundation. It is built upon
religion, but also requires the support of science.

By the visible relation, and that parallel similitude which
spontaneously suggests itself between these three great moral powers in
public life--philosophy, religion, and government--and that original
triple principle of the human consciousness, as consisting of body,
soul, and spirit, as the simple but fundamental idea of Christian
philosophy (however the latter may insist on this basis in confirmation
of its utility in living application), we do not for one moment mean to
maintain, or propose, a total separation or estrangement of these three
spheres. This would be quite unnatural. For in a political, as well as
in a psychological sense, these three primary principles must co-operate
and be intimately blended together to produce a complete and perfect
result in the sphere of any one individually.

If, as we are perfectly justified, we have been considering science, at
least that which is true and divine, as a power of a higher kind, we
must still remember that it is not so in the same way as religion or
government. The latter rests on a divine foundation of eternal justice;
and therein lies the source of its vital efficacy. Religion is the
legitimate form of a living dispensation of the divine strength and
grace. True science is the mind’s lofty pursuit, in a Godward direction,
of perfect knowledge; and this direction forms the characteristic
distinction between it and false science. In the state, in like manner,
its loftiest character lies in the sacred foundation of justice. It is,
therefore, a very wrongful and a most pernicious error to look for the
inmost essence of the state, or the true source of political prosperity,
in any external form or formula. For this external form is in many cases
nothing but the shape in which the national mind displays itself--the
theater which it erects for its political manifestations. But, in
another point of view, also, the form of the state is subordinate to the
essence and its foundation of right. In the legitimate state, an
hereditary monarchy, _i.e._, the act of crowning, is, no doubt, a very
beautiful, highly significant, and, indeed, an essential sacred right.
But, with the exception of certain special cases and positive
institutions in some existing constitutions, the monarch’s right is not
dependent thereon, but even before the anointing he is truly and fully a
sovereign. Far different is the case, however, where the political
authority is only delegated and vicarious, as with an ambassador or a
plenipotentiary deputed to negotiate a peace, or other treaty. For in
such cases there is no authority but what is derived solely and entirely
from the delegating source, and on the legal act by which the right or
power was delegated. Without this, it is absolutely null and void. This
remark extends to every case and every sphere of legitimate transference
of a higher authority, even though the latter be of a divine origin. And
it is simply on this account that in religion, as the proper sphere for
the dispensing of divine strength and grace, the form is so highly
important and so thoroughly essential--even as much so as the matter
itself--or the imparted light of the spirit, and properly is inseparable
from it.

The position of science is quite different. For this rests on what is
thoroughly human and inborn in man--the passion of longing; which,
however, if it be maintained in its purity and perseveringly carried
out, may, without doubt, pass over into a divine pursuit. Even the form
of communication in science is human throughout, since it employs
language as the intellectual medium for setting forth the truth. If,
then, in this higher tendency, the full center of living and divine
truth be attained, according to man’s utmost powers and ability, then,
even here, a higher and divine power may, undoubtedly, intervene and
co-operate therewith. But still, for such a case, no strictly-defined
form, or external sanction and consecration, exists, and from the very
essence of the thing, it is not to be looked for. That which is divine
in science must, from its nature, move freely, and be devoid of all such
forms. As a higher power, it must operate immediately, and must seek to
establish its own law for itself, intermediate between religion and the
state, or even in each of them alike, though still in a peculiar way of
its own. Wherever it is genuine and unadulterated, then it will in no
case come into collision with the actual laws either of one or of the
other, even because truth is one and every where the same. But if
science, in its external form, and in its social and political
existence, should become entirely blended with religion and the
spiritual class, being confined and restricted thereto, as was the case
with the institution of castes among the Hindoos, which we have already
noticed, and with the Egyptian priesthood, then we must fain admit that
freedom, which the scientific spirit requires for its growth and
development in the sphere assigned to it, would be too closely limited
and checked by narrow and partial considerations. But if, on the other
hand, it be possible for a false science to arrogate that spiritual and
divine right of free action, which, unquestionably, is in a certain
sense the prerogative of heavenly truth in its invisible kingdom, which
the latter can neither misemploy, nor ever impede in its course, then
such a supposition would account for the prevalence of error. It would
also, at the same time, serve to illustrate the mode by which such a
prejudice as the arrogated right of an unrestricted freedom of thought,
or, rather, of the free and unchecked communication thereof, could ever
have struck so deep a root in the human mind. But this is a claim which
we can in no way recognize, or allow, as really founded in right and
justice. Since, wherever, as is the case in this sphere of purely
intellectual operation, all is immediate and without a definite form of
external sanction, there any thing like right must at most be indefinite
and individual.

It forms, perhaps, one of the most important problems or questions of
our day, whether the entire sphere of science, the whole republic of
letters--not only the mere elementary instruction of the schools, but
the whole domain of education in general, embracing under the latter
description literature and the fine arts--might not, in obedience to the
requisitions of the age, be brought into a more organized and
well-regulated form. For if this were possible, it might be made to
approximate more closely to the other great spheres of public life in
religion and the state, and confined within its proper limits, according
to some greater and more comprehensive ideas than those current among
us, or than those which have come down to us from antiquity, which are
either defective in themselves, or else are no longer adapted to
existing circumstances. Those which the present age has advanced, are,
for the most part, crude and ill-digested, and scarcely ever
consistently carried out. But, after having reflected for many a long
year on this question, so deeply interesting to myself, I have arrived
at the conviction that, for the present at least, a radical change in
this department would be premature and scarcely desirable, as promising
to afford no very advantageous results. Every thing in this sphere is
too isolated; whatever is good, and especially what is best, is too
individual and too formless to allow of its being as yet, without great
difficulty, reduced in all parts and in every point to a firm rule and
definite shape. In all probability, by attempting unseasonably to
introduce organic order and law, we should cramp rather than assist and
develop the good. In the present chaotic state of science, it is only
the vicious and profane that possesses a systematic coherence. All
detrimental and dangerous, as well as futile and indifferent ideas,
mixed with a few good and useful ones, are atomistically diffused and
spread in every possible shape and quarter. And if against this
boundless dissemination of evil thoughts--this elementary decomposition
and chemical analysis of the human mind, and the whole body of human
thoughts, a negative barrier be set up as a preventive measure of
defense, and as a temporary substitute for a better and higher state of
things, murmurs and reproaches immediately rise from all sides. But,
taken on the whole, and in so far as principle is involved, these
remonstrances are neither just nor well founded. For in almost every
state where, owing to peculiar circumstances, such precautionary
measures have not been taken, the most dangerous disorders and jarring
discords have affected the whole of public life, as the inevitable
consequences of its absence.

But let us turn our eyes from the insignificant controversies, with its
host of ephemeral publications, the interest of which seems little
likely to outlive even that of a daily journal, and let us look to the
greater and more historical phenomena amid them, which, in all
probability, will mark an epoch in the development of mind. From these
it is distinctly apparent that science is a real and actual power. In
proof of this fact, we need only appeal to the great talents and
abilities which, not only in recent years, but also throughout the last
century, have exercised in the domain of science what, without
exaggeration, we may well term a world-embracing influence. Only we must
admit that in this period they have taken more or less a destructive
tendency, and one that threatened in this scientific burrowing to
undermine the foundations of everlasting truth. But if we will take a
still wider survey, so as to embrace all the several periods of the
world’s history, and the course of the human mind therein, then,
undoubtedly, we may discern the higher might of divine truth,
manifesting itself as an influence for good, as a pure and genuine
spiritual theocracy of science, to whose domain above all others the
idea of an immediate and higher supremacy of mind and divine power is
peculiarly applicable.




LECTURE XV.

OF THE TRUE IDEA OF A THEOCRACY; OF THE MIGHT OF SCIENCE, AND OF THE
FINAL RESTORATION AND PERFECTION OF THE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS.


The idea which the adverse party, or opposition, in the political
domain, and in the scientific theory of politics, usually form of a
theocracy, is for the most part incorrect. By the adverse party I mean
all those who either openly assail, or privately call in question, the
religious foundation, the higher sanction, and the divine authority of
the state; in short, those in general who are hostile to the religious
sentiment. The latter apply the idea of theocracy and employ the term to
signify the rule of the spiritual power, such as the Egyptian priesthood
may, perhaps, or, at least, such as they suppose them to have
possessed--or a polity where the supreme temporal authority works in
unison with the sacerdotal class.

And even by the defenders of the good cause--by men of higher and better
principles, the idea is frequently taken in too inaccurate and
indefinite, not to say incorrect, a sense. They seem to understand by it
nothing more than the divine authority of the state and of the Church,
and their mutual support and dependence, and their co-operation. But
nothing can be more erroneous than such a notion. For the kingly
dignity, no less than the priestly, as respects the divine authority,
which is inherent in both, is not immediate, but vicarious and
representative.

When, however, we turn to its original source--to the historical basis,
_i.e._, to Christian revelation, and derive therefrom the true idea of a
theocracy, we shall find it to be very different from the assumption
which each of these parties tacitly advances as self-evident. The idea
of a theocracy can only be properly determined from the instance of the
Jews. The history of that nation will not only enable us fully to
develop it as an actual form of polity, having an historical origin and
existence, but also in the clearest and readiest way to illustrate it.
Now the passage from revolution, civil war, and anarchy, to absolute
despotism, in its genetic progress, can be most clearly and most
profitably traced in Roman history. The true nature, moreover, of the
dynamical polity can be learned from the historically originated and
historically preserved exemplification of it in England, far better than
from any theory, or from any scheme of a constitution propounded for the
occasion of some state experiment, for all such experiments require the
lasting test of a few generations, or at least of half a century before
any decided opinion can be passed on their success and historical
permanency. And just in the same way the peculiar character and essence
of a theocracy can be deduced from no source so clearly or so fully as
from the Jewish history. Or, rather, the true idea of it can be acquired
from no other channel, since among this people only has a theocracy ever
existed as a real form of national polity. And here it continued in
force for nearly four hundred years.

However poor may be the part which the people of Israel played in the
great drama of the world’s history, in comparison with that of the great
conquering nations, the Persians, Greeks, and Romans, still the
prophetic people (whose importance must be sought only in this
designation, or, in other words, their continual relation to the
future), possesses, even in their peculiar code of laws and form of
government, a remarkable interest for the historian. For in the true
historical estimate of things mere extent of power can not pass for the
exclusive standard of greatness and importance. And this has been
already the judgment of many writers of history, who, as far as regards
this particular subject, and the general question of religion, must
undoubtedly be pronounced free from either prepossession or prejudice.
The way, too, in which this ancient people have survived the destruction
of their national government, and for nearly two thousand years since
have uniformly remained separate from all other nations, has been more
than once confessed to be a very striking phenomenon, unparalleled in
the history of the world.

Moses, from whom that theocracy first emanated, or, rather, with whom it
commenced, was not himself the High Priest. His brother Aaron enjoyed
that dignity. He neither wished nor had a title to hold it. He had no
hereditary claim to it, neither was he elected to it by the people. And
yet he stood in no man’s place, nor did he forcibly dispossess any one
of his right. And so even, if for a while we dismiss the theological
view entirely from our regard, and, forgetting it for a moment, judge
of the matter by the strictest juristic notions, we can not call him a
usurper, even in that sense of the term which comprises the demagogue’s
character. At an earlier period of his life, he appeared likely to
become a mere liberator in the usual sense of the word. In this
character, however, he does not appear unjust, even though he allowed
himself to be hurried into an act of violence against a petty tyrant
among the oppressors of his countrymen. And at a later period, when he
had received his call, we can not in his conduct toward the Egyptians
discover any trace of injustice, even judging him by the strictest legal
notions. Now, the authority which Moses exercised over his own people,
while he led them through the wilderness, rested on the immediate
exercise of the divine powers which were lent to him from above, and
which were immediately acknowledged as such, and nowhere met with any
considerable resistance. And, accordingly, properly speaking, no
question was ever raised against a right which was based entirely on
those imparted powers, although they were totally devoid of any formal
or distinct act of legal sanction. The office he held was prophetical.
But by this term I do not mean merely according to its later and more
obvious meaning, the function of warning or promising, of teaching or
predicting, but all this, and something more--a higher and divine power,
which vividly and persuadingly displayed itself in life and deeds.
Looking at it in a general light, and as applied to a case which, at
least, we can think of as not impossible, of the Almighty having sent,
or purposing to send, a second Moses to some other people, then the
circumstance we lately mentioned, that this Moses forcibly dispossessed
no one of his rights, and had made no unrighteous revolution, must be
taken into consideration, even if it might not simply by itself serve as
the characteristic or distinctive test of the genuineness of the
vocation in question.

For a power emanating from God, and truly divine, would never violate or
forcibly subvert any established right, whether essentially sacred or
hallowed only by prescription. It will respect the least privilege of
equals and inferiors no less than the greatest prerogative of superiors.
I have introduced these remarks in order to determine more precisely the
right point of view for an historical comparison of Moses with every
other character that sets himself before the world in the same light,
whether the parallel be made with Mohammed, or that still earlier Indian
Mohammed who is usually called Buddha, although this is only an honorary
epithet, and not the name of any historical person in particular. And
the same standard will hold good for our judging of any other reformer
of the world who makes religion the instrument of his ambition, to
whatever age he may belong, or any modern Mohammed, in whatever part of
the world he may arise.

As regards the religion itself, or the matter of the pretended
revelation, there is another characteristic mark by which we may
distinguish a genuine from a spurious mission from God. Although it is
both external and negative, still, as being historical, it deserves to
be here adduced. It is this: a genuine revelation is, in the doctrine
which it promulgates, at the same time both old and new. It is new in
regard to its novel application to life and in its fulfillments, and
also to its animating force and spiritual awakening; but old in so far
as invariably referring to an earlier revelation and to a still older
source of light, it remounts up to the pure fountain of eternal truth.
And such is, throughout, the case even with the Mosaic revelation. It
continually leads the inquirer back to some higher and remoter
source--some deeper spring of everlasting light. And on the same
principle it also has been acknowledged as such by the Christian or
divine philosophy of the Spirit, and Moses has been recognized and
honored from all time as its founder. In the domain of religion, to be
absolutely new is equivalent with being false or groundless, namely,
totally detached from the old and everlasting foundations, without
connection therewith, and, consequently, isolated and arbitrary.

In reference to, and as contrasted with, the above characteristics of
genuine revelation, there is for the most part in systems of imposture
as little really new as actually old. This is especially the case with
the doctrine and Koran of Mohammed, however much it may have been lauded
for its poetry, or on account of the rhetorical art and vigor which it
displays. Its subject-matter and doctrines are not really new, since
they are but recasts of Jewish and Christian ideas, which it has freely
borrowed, mixing them together and adapting them to an obvious end and
design; and yet not old, since it does not go back far enough or deep
enough, and never remounts to the first beginning of nature and of man,
far less to the threefold fountain of divine life.

Now, with respect to Moses: an historical judge of the ordinary kind,
who could not enter into the religious view of his character and office,
might say, “This is quite a strange world to us, a very remote period;
much is there in this history difficult to explain and extremely
obscure. This much, however, seems to follow from the whole history: the
man possessed extraordinary mental powers for his times, and an equally
uncommon strength of character; no wonder, then, if he bore down all
obstacles, and by the force of genius carried every thing before him.”
Such an estimate, however, reduces every thing to the force of genius in
an heroic character, instead of a higher and immediate operation of
divine power and the prophetic office founded thereon. Superficially
judging this false view, eluding, or, rather, perverting, the divine
illumination, admits of an application, though delusive and specious
enough, to Moses, on account of those ample powers of genius which, no
doubt, he possessed, or even on account of the sublimity of his style,
which the very heathens could appreciate and admire. Still, it is in no
way applicable to that line of men, for the most part of the very
simplest character, who succeeded him, and during the period of the
theocracy down to the time of the kings, held what was immediately a
divine or prophetic rule. It was not by any hereditary title or formal
choice that they ruled; neither were they priests any more than Moses.
Called immediately by God to the dignity of judge, they suddenly stood
before the people, to be instantly and without opposition acknowledged,
and thereupon their mission and authority were at once established,
without any external sanction or solemnities, or any form of legal
recognition.

The general condition of the Jewish people under the Judges was that of
a noble and not uncivilized nomadic race. We must not confound this
description, however, with the so-called natural state of a wild and
barbarous people, but rather think of it as resembling that of the
Arabians generally before the time of Mohammed, or of a few tribes still
subsisting in the most retired parts of Arabia, where, under their most
distinguished leaders, as shepherd princes they lead a roving life of
hereditary freedom. Similar, or at least not very different, was the
mode of life and state of society that prevailed among the Hebrews in
the interregnums which occur in this long period of the Judges. Toward
the close of this period, judges first arise who are invested with the
priestly as well as the judicial dignity. These form, accordingly, the
transition to the regal government and the epoch of the kings. For when
the people at last demanded a king to rule over them, like the
neighboring Gentiles, every sanction that could exalt, and every
sacerdotal inauguration that could be thought of, was conferred upon the
appointed tribe and the kingly house. But at the same time the priestly
dignity was guarded strictly and jealously from encroachment, and the
temporal power was rigorously kept free from all union and confusion
with the sacerdotal authority. But that wild and tumultuous demand of
the people, or, I should say, of _public opinion_, which at that time
was in favor of a monarch with the same pomp and splendor as the Gentile
sovereigns displayed, as in more modern times it directs itself to the
no less heathenish attraction of liberty, was imputed to them and
depicted as a grievous fall and religious infidelity. For in the
previous times of the direct theocracy, Jehovah Himself had been their
true but invisible king, while, as is expressly asserted, the judges and
leaders were only His embassadors or plenipotentiaries. Under the first
kings we may discern, in the historical description of the sacred books,
many traces of that higher power, and its immediate exercise and
effects. Subsequently, however, it totally disappears; and after the
division of the two kingdoms, the contrast in the personal powers and
character of the later sovereigns, and the consequent fortunes of the
people, so accordant with the political history of other Asiatic
countries, becomes most decided.

The preceding remarks will, I hope, be sufficient to throw out, in
perfect distinctness, the true idea of a theocracy, such as it has been
historically developed. For inasmuch as in the present age, and amid the
party disputes which mark it, this idea has been employed in so many
various acceptations, and mostly in a false or partial sense, I thought
it expedient, in the present place, not to omit to sift the question to
the utmost. Now, in a very remarkable manner, a single element, from the
earlier and original theocracy of the olden time, still survived among
the Jews in the period of the monarchy. It formed no longer indeed the
supreme power of the state, for this was held by the kings, but
constituted formally and avowedly an antagonism to them, as a
well-defined opposition, which, so long as it confined itself within its
due limits, was altogether righteous and justifiable, and which we may
justly designate as legitimate and divine. In this light we must view
the position of the later prophets, who, without, however, being
invested with any special political dignity or power, dared to raise,
before a vicious government--or, since in those simple days of old every
thing was more or less personal--before a wicked king who had forgotten
his high vocation, the voice of warning or denunciation. This peculiar
form of a political opposition, and, as such, recognized to be
legitimate and allowable, this remnant of the once exclusive theocracy
and a complete supremacy of the prophets, which still survived in the
time of the kings, forms a phenomenon as highly remarkable as it is
singular in its kind. And those who have no admiration but for
opposition, might, perhaps, if they could disentangle themselves from
the forms of their own days, or the notions imbibed at school, find here
an object altogether worthy of their praise. They might probably find
the duties of an uncompromising and yet justifiable and lawful
opposition to the state discharged by an Elijah with equal, if not
greater intelligence, strength of mind, and energy of character, as well
as sense of justice, as by the Ephori in Sparta, or a Demosthenes in
Athens during the Macedonian ascendency, or by the most virtuous of the
censors, and the most upright of the tribunes of the people in old Rome;
or even by the parliament of England. It was only in the last period of
the total decline of the Israelitish nation, and shortly before and
during the first days of the Roman dominion, that the regal dignity and
the office of High Priest were united in one family (for even here they
were not invariably associated in the same person), in such a manner as
to correspond with the notion that is at present usually understood by
the term theocracy.

Far otherwise, however, was it, in this respect, with the Christian
world. The first apostolical preachers of the new doctrine of grace and
founders of an era which was truly, and in a divine sense, new,
undoubtedly did not possess less of that immediate miraculous power than
even a Moses or an Elijah. But the only use they made of it was to
promote the diffusion and to set forth the glory of religion. Once only
did the first of the Apostles, for the sake of preserving the
hierarchical authority, and the purity of the community which professed
to give up itself and all that it had to God, make a retributive use of
the divine authority committed to him. He who for the love of money was
false to the cause of God and of truth, was struck dead by the avenging
glance of him who in will was united with God as the everlasting Judge.
Never did the Apostles employ their power against the state, or avail
themselves of it in opposition to its decrees. And yet the despotic
measures of the Roman Government toward the degraded nation it had
brought, by force of arms, under its oppressive yoke, might seem, at
least, to justify such an interference with its unlawful usurpation. Not
even in self-defense, or to escape from afflictions or bonds, did they
once employ the theocratic powers committed to them.

The idea of a theocracy which is entertained in the present day is so
loose and shifting, and its application generally so erroneous, that it
is necessary to show, at length, how little the common views of it are
founded on truth. There exists no foundation for them in the view or
theory of a Christian state in its first and simple origin. And as
little is it the case with the succeeding epochs of Christianity. Such
extraordinary powers, as were manifested from time to time and intrusted
to particular individuals, have ever been employed for the diffusion of
the faith, its internal development, or to glorify it before
unbelievers, or for a new confirmation of old truths, but never for the
purpose of founding a temporal power or political influence.

The true theocracy, however, such as it has actually manifested itself,
does not depend on any particular theory, but, as an immediate power and
authority from God, is regulated by the divine will alone. It would,
therefore, be precipitate, if judging of it, _à priori_, by any
arbitrary principle, we should unconditionally pronounce its recurrence
to be impossible. Generally, the wonder of a theocracy must be judged of
historically in the light in which its own history exhibits it. A mere
theory can lead us to no stable determination regarding it. The
following seems its relation to the natural history of man, or, even, we
may say, to the usual course of external nature. Viewed generally, and
in its principle, whatever is, comes from God, as its first cause. The
permission of evil, however, whether in the realm of nature or of
humanity, when, after their first divine impulse, they are left for a
time to pursue their own course of internal development, is clearly
something of another and peculiar kind. Peculiar, too, are the higher
authorities which exist in the latter, and which are ultimately founded
on a divine law and right, and somewhat different is the case with their
immediate divine operation and miraculous agency. As, therefore, the
course of the world, on the whole, is natural, and whatever transcends
it as a singular or rare exception, does but interrupt the regularity of
the ordinary laws of nature; so, too, the course of universal history,
in ordinary times, is agreeable to man’s nature, as regulated and
modified simply by historical circumstances. At most a few theocratical
junctures, a few eminent moments of a more divine working and
development of power, may be noticed at distant intervals. And these
grand and pregnant epochs, in which all the existing relations of the
world assume a new and unexpected form, are generally, in the first
moment of its triumphant result, or scarcely-hoped-for emancipation,
rightly and thankfully regarded and acknowledged as interventions of a
higher and a divine agency; though, alas, the enthusiasm of man’s
gratitude to God, even when it does take a passing hold on man’s heart,
is wont to evaporate, even more rapidly than any other of his ardent
feelings.

Our own age has afforded a very remarkable instance of this kind. To
this it is sufficient to allude, without entering into any further
disquisition concerning it. But it is not only in such wonderful changes
for good or happy deliverances from the power of evil that these
remarkable divine moments or theocratic junctures announce themselves in
the history of the world. We may even recognize them in every
commencement of a truly new era in history, which, in the favorable
crisis, is suddenly and triumphantly effected by a some higher impulse
and divinely-imparted power. Many instances of the kind might easily be
adduced if this were the proper place for it, or time allowed. The first
triumph of the Cross and Christianity that was public and extended to
the whole world, under Constantine the Great, belongs to this class. As
a second instance, I would mention that beginning of the Christian
Empire in the West under Charlemagne, which was afterward to receive so
happy a development. Superficial inquirers, who judge by the mental
external coloring, are in danger of confounding these creative
beginnings--these turning-points of a higher intervention--with the
ordinary event of a revolution, or the rapid and decisive step of
energetic usurpation. But to the eye of patient observation and deep
penetration they are distinguished from the latter by their profound
historical causes and their attendant circumstances, and by a peculiar
stamp of purity and grandeur. In short, in their essence they are
entirely different.

These observations must have made it evident in what sense I spoke of a
theocracy of science. The power of truth in that good science which is
directed toward God, is in its influence of a lofty and even divine
nature. But it is this simply, in its immediate energy of operation,
without depending on any external sanction, or even form thereof. In the
same way error also, in its evil effects, is most unquestionably, and in
the fullest sense of the term, a power; and that not merely in a
sensuous and materialistic, or relatively to the mind in a purely
negative sense, but a demoniacal power of evil with a most embarrassing
and perverting influence, such as it has been often and in our own times
most undeniably exercised. The great degree in which science actually
manifests itself as a power is not apparent so long as we limit our
consideration to the history of the human intellect in our own circle of
observation and the ordinary sphere of European civilization.

Among the Greeks, for example, rhetoric became the mere slave of an
extremely corrupt government, and followed it in all its disorders.
Poetry, indeed, was the handmaid of the heathen worship and its
religious legends; but still, as being an art and the sport of fantasy,
it moved with a considerable degree of freedom. Accordingly, in the best
and purest and greatest of the poets of antiquity, a profound and
significant symbolism of life lies under, and occasionally appears on,
the surface of their works, which, as considered from a right point of
view and in a liberal spirit, is neither totally repugnant nor directly
opposed to a higher, or even the highest, _i.e._, Christian truth. But
still such notes of a divinely-inspired feeling, which in the
inspiration attains to a clearer perception of the divine nature, is
very far from amounting to the power of an idea, and its actually and
determining influence on life. The philosophy and science of the Greeks,
from its beginning to its close, stood in decided opposition both to the
popular religion and to the state. Accordingly, they either exercised no
influence at all on life, or, at least, no uncontested one. At any rate,
their effects were very trivial. All that can be justly said of the
subject of Grecian science or the ideas of the Greeks applies, with a
slight modification and in a less general sense, to those of the Romans.

The remarks we made above on ancient art and poetry hold good, though in
a somewhat different application, of the romantic portion of the middle
ages, its legends, namely, and poetic fictions. However important the
nobler aim which fancy here pursued to influence morals and life, still
the idea of the power of science can scarcely come in here. As for
science itself, the medieval mind was divided in its pursuit of it. On
one hand there prevailed a strong desire after what was forbidden--or at
least was supposed to be forbidden--the old heathen philosophy; on the
other, as soon as it appeared impossible to get rid of it altogether, an
anxious endeavor to come to an equitable compromise with it, or at least
to make a rationally Christian application of it, and especially of
Aristotle, who, in the judgment of those days, ruled as supreme monarch
over all the sciences. Under these circumstances, and confined by these
chains of authority, it was impossible for Christian science to put
forth its full power and might, or to exercise any material influence on
the age or on life. On the contrary, agreeably with the very principle
of the Christian life, the latter shows itself only in writers like St.
Bernard, who did not belong to the schoolmen. For in the genuine
scholastic philosophy, as having its origin in a perfectly heathen
dialectic, neither the method nor the forms of thought could be purely
Christian.

How great the power of science has shown itself within the last century,
and especially in our own age, is a frequent topic of remark. And at the
same time the fact has not been overlooked, that this power has
gradually assumed a more pernicious direction, or at least has become
involved in a great and violent struggle, which as yet is undecided,
between a destructive tendency of mind and the power of goodness and
truth exerting itself in an effort of restoration. And it is, perhaps,
only to the latter, in its conflict with the evil principle of unbelief
and the denial of all that is divine, that the idea of a theocracy of
science and such a higher power of truth is really applicable. For this
alone seems likely to secure to it the victory in this contest, which,
so far as numbers are concerned, is most unequal.

If, now, we turn our looks to a more distant point, and take into
consideration the older Asiatic nations, though chiefly and in generally
with respect to the religious aspect of their science and scientific
monuments, here, more than elsewhere, we shall meet with much that
corresponds with this idea, and has on its front a strong theocratical
impress and signature. It will, therefore, pre-eminently serve to
elucidate this idea. The whole edifice of scientific thought among the
Hindoos, though in its form of sacred laws, systems, and authentic
commentaries thereon--of history, legends and poetry, it is not less
rich and diversified than the literature and philosophy of the Greeks,
forms, nevertheless, a whole where every part is of one piece and one
mold. In all its manifold forms, it rests and is supported on the same
foundation, which is regarded and venerated as divine. And therein lies
the secret of its incalculable power, to which it owes its unshaken
stability through so many tens of centuries, as well as its great
influence on the whole of Indian life, which has derived from it its
unchanging form and duration, so that we might almost say, Here has
science, or at least this elevated system of thought, become the
animating principle of life and a second nature.

To the many and great errors which are mixed up with the Indian system
of faith and thought, I am not disposed to ascribe this indestructible
principle of vitality and permanent influence on life. At least, if
something must be ascribed to this source, a vast deal more must be
assigned to the influence of the truth that is also contained in it, and
which, though variously adulterated and falsified, still, in its leading
features, has been distinctly preserved from the sacred traditions of
primeval times and the first progenitors of the nation. And yet even
here, in this edifice, otherwise so uniform, many a book and many a
system has been introduced from the opposition, even though the latter
exerted its antagonistic principle far more weakly and far less
pertinaciously here than among the Greeks, or on any other domain of the
European mind. For it was chiefly in the southeastern peninsula that the
founder of that purely intellectual and ideal, but yet demoniacal and
therefore truly anti-Christian sect of philosophy and religion, who
lived about as many centuries before the Christian epoch as Mohammed
after it, and whose followers, numbering nearly a third of the whole
population of the world, spread over the southeast of Asia, and Tartary,
and China, found adherents in India. Still the old and proper India did
not remain totally free from the pernicious tenets of Buddhism, which,
of all religious or philosophical sects and errors, is the most fatal
and destructive that ever has been or ever will be.

Let us now glance at the sacred writings of the Jews, though not,
indeed, in so far as they are to be regarded as the divine law of faith
for that nation, and for all others who should come in the future and
latter times of Christianity (a law, we must observe, which is expressed
in a language so thoroughly individual, and in so national a spirit,
that it often becomes thereby highly obscure and difficult to
understand), nor, indeed, generally in a theological light. For
otherwise the example we have chosen for the illustration of the
theocracy of science would be identical with the matter it was intended
to illustrate. We must here consider it simply as the written record of
the origin and descent of the nation, both in its legal and historical
existence, combining therewith its distant promises and expectations of
the future--in short, as the history, poetry, literature, political
institutions and hopes of this singular people. Viewing it, then, in
this light, merely in its human, national, and historical aspect, its
firm and lasting impression on the Jewish mind, and its indestructible
effects, which survive all the changes of time, form a most remarkable
phenomenon. For by means of it this ancient people, so miraculously
scattered among all the nations of the world, is to this
day--three-and-thirty centuries from the original composition of its
first sacred books--still one, amid all its dispersion, and, we might
almost add, even in spite of its half unbelief in itself.

In modern history, which commences with the second epoch of revelation,
the four holy Gospels, with various didactic epistles, and the great
prophetic book at the close of all, forms the deep focus of
illumination, to which, however, I do not now immediately refer, lest,
as I observed in a former case, the illustration and the illustrated
matter should prove identical. Out of this first germ of light, as it
was carried forward in a living transmission through the first five or
six centuries, was gradually raised an edifice of Christian science and
thought. A new literature was formed in every branch of doctrine or
history, of eloquence or controversy, which, composed in the two
highly-cultivated languages of classical antiquity, has exercised the
greatest possible influence not only on the succeeding generation, but
on all subsequent times. Occasionally, no doubt, and especially in the
earlier centuries, a deviation from, or, rather, opposition to, the
prevailing system, whether as private opinion or positive error,
intruded itself into the midst. Still, notwithstanding these little
discords, scarce perceptible in the entire mass, the whole forms, as a
system of thought, an intellectual power whose effects have been so
great that its authors, or, rather, its spokesmen, have with perfect
justice been styled the Fathers or the earthly creators and founders of
the Church, _i.e._, of this new era and of the truth which is
transmitted in it, without change, indeed, but with a stream which
widens as it flows.

I have chosen all these examples from well-known matters, in order to
direct your attention to the fact that the idea we have advanced of a
theocracy of science, or a divine power of truth therein, does not
depend for its final triumph and the total extinction of error on any
individual force of genius, however great, but on a common and joint
operation of a system of forces--on a vast and comprehensive edifice of
thought, various indeed in its composition and mental character and form
of expression, but still perfectly harmonizing as a whole. One thing,
however, is indispensable--a divine tendency must predominate in it. The
foundation on which it rests and is supported must be divine. The one
ray of light, even though in itself it be ever so pure and bright, and
truly deserve to be termed divine--one stroke of the sword, though ever
so sharply and keenly struck--the one confining limit, though set up and
maintained by ever so comprehensive an intelligence (which term I use to
convey something more than mere _prudence_)--all these will avail
nothing against this new flood of error and infidelity, and of Godless
ideas--thoughts, that is, which are entirely without God, and making no
reference to Him, proceed from impious and demoniacal delusion. Against
the inroad of atheism, which is threatening life on all sides, the
divine might or theocracy of true science can alone furnish a defense.
It can only raise a new ark to save the age from perishing in the flood
of spiritual wickedness. But with this view the most essential point is
the building of a consistent and compact whole, while those who wish to
co-operate in the good work must, like the builder of the ancient ark,
have their regards turned chiefly to the future, looking far beyond the
present, and its minute and frequently most trifling controversies.

This true theocracy of science, resting on a divine tendency in man,
which, though it is inborn, is seldom found pure, and still more rarely
retains its purity to the end, must look to the state to secure its
external stability and unimpeded action. To this end it is necessary,
however, that the state should understand and recognize its own divine
foundation, and look to that heavenly grace and strength which religion
alone vouchsafes to it as the true source of its vitality and
permanence. Individuals can at most do nothing more than co-operate in
bringing about this desirable consummation. They must not attempt to go
beyond the true relation of this co-operative character. The moving
power must come from above; it must proceed from the fountain of all
goodness and all truth.

Philosophically viewed, indeed, science and its divine tendency rests on
the good and genuine aspirations of the human consciousness. And it is
only by the restoration of man’s mind to the perfection in which it
originally came from the Creator’s hands that science can attain to its
perfect state. Now that the consciousness in its present state is
imperfect--or, rather, that as compared with its condition when, in the
first fresh energy of life and in full and unimpeded action, it came
immediately from the Creator, it is no longer uncorrupt, unconfused, or
unimpaired, as it was almost our opening remark, so it has been kept in
view throughout the present series of Lectures. The most natural
conclusion of our labors, therefore, is to consider the possibility of
restoring it to its original divine perfection, as being the only method
which can secure to science a stable foundation and enable its Godward
tendency to attain its proper end.

In a cold, dead, and abstract understanding--in a passionately blind and
absolute will--in a reason which loses itself in dialectical disputes or
amuses itself with dynamical theories, and, consequently, never reaches
its true object--in a fancy which is ever longing after and pursuing its
own imaginations, living on and lost in a dreamy and imaginary world of
its own--in these severally faulty forms of the human consciousness, as
corrupted by the influence of sin, and the consequences of the Fall
(even though the objects of this vitiated thought and will may, in
themselves, appear perfectly innocent, indifferent, unselfish, and even
intellectual), lies the original fountain of all perverted and deadly
thinking. The soul, in the center of this fourfold source of false
cogitation and false volition, is torn and distracted many ways,
impeded, and, as it were, crippled and deadened. But still it remains
eternal and immortal. Accordingly, the soul must be the point from which
the restoration and reawakening of life must proceed. But this
restoration of the human consciousness to perfection is to be called
divine, on this account, because it can only be reached by the soul
attaching itself exclusively to what we formerly called the second new
and divine starting-point of human existence. For the more that the
soul, created for immortality and loving, and in love embracing that
which is in itself immortal, adopts this great and new word for man,
this second beginning in God, and is impregnated with it, in the same
degree do reason and fancy cease to be at issue with each other and to
be independent, isolated, and clashing faculties; and, finally, they
become altogether merged in the one thinking and loving soul. Then, too,
does the soul cease to be dead, cold, and abstract, and becomes,
instead, a living and wakeful spirit, _i.e._, one which in its new life
works freely and energetically. And the will, too, is no longer blind,
no longer passionately absolute; but, restored to sight, becomes one
with the internal sense, as the third member of the human consciousness.
And by this union the will is, as it were, fully armed and equipped. For
the external sense, which hitherto has been thoroughly passive, as soon
as the will is restored to sight, assumes by its means an active and
living operation; and the inner moral sense, which before was merely
subjective, acquires a power of external discernment.

This is the end of perfection. And it is only on this road of a divine
restoration of the human consciousness, according to its established law
of progress, that the divine tendency of science can attain to
perfection. With the attainment of this end an entirely new era will
commence. But the intricacy of the problem which our own age has to
solve arises simply from this circumstance, that a truly new era and a
false one are engaged in mortal conflict. The former can only spring up
and flourish when the latter decays and is got rid of. To this end the
present false spirit of the age, which is but a perversion of the true
cosmopolitan spirit, must die the death. And this must be brought to
pass by the sword of the Word or of eternal truth, which pierces even to
the joints and marrow, and divides asunder soul and spirit. For the
immortal, God-created, and God-devoted soul requires to be separated and
detached from the so-called spirit of the age, which is mixed up and
compounded of so many dim, false, imperfect, and evil spirits. And the
spirit of the age must itself be entirely converted and be brought to a
knowledge and open confession of its error, and when once whatever in it
is totally dead has been adjudged to eternal death, it will itself be
renovated and purified in the fiery floods of the truly new times.

In this divine restoration, however, of the human consciousness, or
theocracy, man’s part must be wholly passive. It is enough if he does
not hinder or retard it; for in a certain sense he can at least
co-operate in bringing it to pass. Even that final consummation toward
which that true new era, which as yet is entirely hidden and, as it
were, choked by the false, longs and yearns--that peace of God, of which
the highest and best religious peace is but a foreboding symbol, and, as
it were, the first weak grade, or step, can not be brought about by
human art and power. It is not by any diplomatic courtesy, which in this
case would be highly culpable--not by any amalgamation, which in the
present sphere is contradictory to every notion of right, that that
peace can be brought about, in which, according to no vain or unmeaning
promise, there is to be one fold and one Shepherd. Its accomplishment
must be reserved entirely to Him who, from all eternity has been, and
still is, the good Shepherd of all His creatures.

Here, then, at this point, having, by means of the idea of a restoration
of the human consciousness to its original divine perfection, arrived at
a close, I will pause a few moments to take once more a rapid survey of,
and to throw a clearer light on, my past labors. And herein I shall
purposely refer to the division of philosophy, and the designations of
its several parts usually given in the schools. The first five Lectures
treated of the human soul in the wide extent of its original relation,
not only to life but also to nature and to God, and formed consequently
of psychology, though in a wider sense than the science which is usually
occupied with this subject. The three next, as discussing the divine
order of things, contained a species of natural theology, though treated
of in a perfectly living method and relation, and entering historically
into individual, no less than universal, life. Of the last seven
Lectures the first three were devoted to the investigation of truth. We
here examined its fundamental principle of the unity of the highest
science and divine faith, the discrimination of truth in the struggle
between faith and skepticism, and the final conclusion in the unity of
this higher science and faith with the true life and its influence
therein. This higher logic, in so far as it considers the true essence
of things, might even be designated an ontology. And, indeed, since it
derives every thing from a divine principle, it might not inaptly be
called an applied or mixed theology, in the same sense as this
designation is employed in the mathematical sciences, viz., as the first
part of such an applied theology. In this sense the second part thereof
would be formed by the metaphysics of life, as the science of that which
is above nature, whose province it is to indicate all higher and
supernatural principles in the whole sphere of existence and the actual
world, so far as it is given to man to know them. Employing the old
phraseology and division of the schools, we might term this a cosmology,
in a moral and intellectual sense, and with a regard to what human
philosophy can attain to. The symbolical energy of the divine
communication in religion, the divine foundation of the state, the
Godward tendency of science, and the restoration of the consciousness by
God, form, as it were, the four poles or summits of all these
principles, which transcend and overpass the merely natural.

Concerning the accomplishment of perfection in man’s divinely-restored
consciousness, and also in the whole of existence, or in nature itself,
a few words yet remain to be added. And thus this last section,
considered as a cosmology, is based on a divine principle, so far as
this is attainable by man.

Now, the first consequence of the perfection of the human consciousness,
as accomplished by God, will be the restoration of the divine image and
likeness in man. The soul, now purified and made complete again, becomes
once more spiritually fruitful, and in this internal productiveness,
which even the pure spirits do not possess, is rendered similar, though
at an infinite distance and in a very secondary sense, to the Creator in
His productive energy. The livingly operative spirit in the creature is
like to that in the being who is increate and from all eternity, while
the livingly active sense, as the third member or element in the
perfected consciousness, is similar and correspondent to the divine
operating word. And lastly, in this livingly quickened and completely
restored consciousness, man reassumes his original true and distinct
relation to nature. By the soul, first of all, he is reunited to God; in
his spirit, now restored to true life, he enters into a living and
clear communion with all other kindred spirits; and by his will, now
clearly seeing and working in God, he assumes once more his original
relation to nature as her first-born son and her legitimate lord.

But nature, as the creature that groaneth and travaileth in pain
together, waiteth in earnest expectation for its perfection and
restoration. And this is the only view of it that is either founded in
truth or really Christian. And in this idea of creation groaning and
travailing in pain lies a fullness of prophetic intimations for nature.
While she seems on the whole to be deeply slumbering, this alone excites
a hope of a great and general awakening; whereas it is scarcely a
generation and a half, or two at most, since physical science first
began to awaken out of the grave of its own dead notions, when in nature
itself, no less than in the science of it, all seemed sunk in death.

We need not, therefore, be surprised if this Christian view of nature
and a dynamical physiology evince so little of agreement. For the latter
invariably regards the system of nature as something absolute and as
perfect and complete in itself; but this it evidently is not. And indeed
many an eloquent theological essay on the proofs of design in nature and
on its indications of the goodness of the Creator, sets out on a
similarly defective hypothesis, that nature, in its present condition,
is exactly the same as God originally created it. But this is directly
contradicted by the promise so expressly and distinctly made to the last
times, of “new heavens and a new earth.” For this not merely implies,
but rather asserts, that nature stands in need of a grand renovation,
which it transcends the ordinary course of its proper powers of
development to accomplish, and which, consequently, is only conceivable
as brought about by the immediate operation of divine power, or of a
celestial theocracy for this purpose, in the time of the universal
regeneration.

We are far more ready and disposed to assign to the powers of evil a
greater influence and a wider field of operation in the world of man
than in the system of nature. But it is, perhaps, more conformable to
truth to see in the present condition of the latter a state of truce
with the evil and destructive powers which formerly raged more
fiercely--an interval during which the conflict is confined within
certain limits, rather than as a complete and perfect peace. Its
external influences, as they affect man, must not be taken for the
standard in this case; for they may be merely accidental; just as the
ordinary inundations belong to the economy of the balance of the
elementary forces of nature, and as the storms and tempests, which
occasionally are fearfully destructive, are, nevertheless, it is clear,
a process necessary for the purification and salubrity of the
atmosphere. But, on the other hand, many facts of medical experience and
peculiar phenomena of disease, or even births of faulty or defective
organization--as well as the lothsome generation of insects in the
atmosphere or on the surface of the earth, and many diseased states in
both--when viewed simply and elementarily, and apart from the usual
principle of epidemic contagion, appear to point rather to some
intrinsical evil and originally wild demoniacal character in the sphere
of nature, even though they only occur as exceptions to these general
laws. How deadly even sidereal influences may prove is at least
established by the fact of lunacy. In those fields of celestial light,
too, and those brilliant hosts of heaven, which, as nature’s more
retiring and lovelier charms, become visible only by night, and display
themselves to the calm and tranquil soul, all is not in such perfect
unison and harmony as the first impression would lead us to suppose. A
note of discord arises from the irregular orbits of those eccentrically
revolving stars, which, though rare in their appearance, seem to be
pretty numerous--exercising either a watery or an arid influence on the
terrestrial atmosphere, and whose paths astronomy has indeed calculated,
though her calculations have not always been verified. All our
knowledge, too, and recorded observations of the rest of nature, _i.e._,
in this sense of the earth itself, does not go beyond the
surface--consequently to only one portion of it; and yet perhaps that
internal part, which is hidden from us, is the very one that is most
deeply significant, and more nearly akin to the eternal. Nature, in her
interior and reality, may perhaps possess little resemblance to what we
see of her externally. At every step we stumble on some new proof of our
ignorance, and much also that gives an intimation of a new and unknown
world.

Nature in general may, for us, be compared to a towering pyramid of
hieroglyphics heaped together at random, from which, with our utmost
pains, we can scarcely succeed in bringing together and deciphering two
or three at most, while we have not the key for interpreting the
meaning and order of the whole; for we must not, as under a very
erroneous idea is often done, seek this in nature itself, but entirely
in its divine principle; for in this must all that is unintelligible
find its solution. Now, in that one part of nature which we are best
acquainted with, its surface--after that law of sexual distinction which
reigns not only in the animal but also in the vegetable world, and
which, moreover, in a certain sense prevails in the very atmosphere and
its elementary organs of life--no other law of nature is so universal as
that of death. But if it be true that through that spirit and power of
evil who first revolted from God, death came into the world, and also
into nature, then must the earthly and now natural death have proceeded
from the author of eternal death.

Very questionable, in this case, would it appear to be, whether the
first and original creations of nature were other than immortal. If He
whose essence is omnipotence thinks hieroglyphics, then are they living
creatures; and can we, judging of Him in Himself, and His proper nature,
suppose that He would conceive of or create aught else than what is
eternal and immortal? The old curse still hangs over nature, wherein the
first author and inventor of death has contrived to root himself so
deeply. And that malediction was not removed by the first man; on the
contrary, it was deepened and confirmed by him. And even at the divine
renewal of the human race, the same anathema was again pronounced upon
the natural tree of an earthly life, condemning it to wither still more
and more under the baneful dominion of death. The victory over death is
only to be gained together with the perfection of man. And then shall
follow a theocracy and divine renovation of nature, under which all that
is therein shall again become immortal. A perfect harmony shall thereby
be restored to the whole of creation.

END OF PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.




PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE.




PREFACE OF THE GERMAN EDITOR.


In these pages we give to the world the philosophical Lectures which the
late F. V. Schlegel delivered last winter, at Dresden, to a numerous and
distinguished auditory--the last monument of his life and mind. To many
of his personal hearers they will probably be welcome, as enabling them,
in the perusal of what their own ears so lately heard, to realize more
distinctly the matter of the Lectures, and the whole person of the
eminent individual who was so unexpectedly taken away from among them.
But to a still larger circle of the friends and admirers of Schlegel,
this publication will, no doubt, be acceptable, especially since, under
a pervading reference to language, it throws much light and more fully
carries out the views advanced by Schlegel in the Lectures delivered two
years before, at Vienna, on the Philosophy of Life. In this rich and
important fragment, Schlegel’s whole idea of philosophy stands out far
more clear and distinct, though, for its complete elucidation and
exposition, it was his intention, had he been spared, to add at least
one more series of Lectures to the three already given to the world.

The present publication is eminently calculated to show what in these
three connected series of Lectures it was the author’s first object,
both as a thinker and teacher, to accomplish, viz., to convey the living
words of his inmost mind, rich with the fruits of many years’ study and
research, to all who possessed a sensibility or disposition likely to be
roused and animated thereby to pursue or promote some kindred inquiry or
object. It would, therefore, be a proof of grave misconception to make
such requisitions on these Lectures as are incompatible with this end
and with the character which they most covet, of being, in the higher
sense of the term, a living discourse; for, to satisfy such demands was
neither the design or wish of the author. It was not his purpose either
to take some single abstract notion, and by detailed elucidation to make
it clear and obvious, nor to set up some rigorously limited system of
notions, with its definitions and arbitrary terminology, whose great
merit should be made to consist in such regularity of plan and faithful
execution, as should every where command the notice and the wonder of
the reader. In short, it was not his object, in some partial speculation
of the reason, exclusively to set forth a long series of abstract
propositions as a model and precedent for such essays. Those, however,
who, to use Schlegel’s own words, look upon these Lectures as a series
of questions to which their own hearts, silently, indeed, give a
concurrent answer, or find therein the satisfactory solution to many
difficulties suggested by their own reflections on the life and mind of
man, will not be able to get rid of a just and righteous sorrow, to
think that the voice from which they still looked for many such
questionings, and much similar instruction, is suddenly silenced, and
that none remains who, as inheriting the spirit of the departed, or as
his favorite and intelligent scholar, is able to supply what is still
wanting.

With this heavy feeling of sorrow, it seems perhaps inconsistent to
express a passing regret that the author has not been permitted himself
to superintend this edition of his Lectures, and to make those
corrections which here and there might have appeared to him desirable. A
few passages, noticed thus (†) in the text, were marked by Schlegel
himself, either for emendation or enlargement, and the loss of these
corrections we can not but miss and regret.




LECTURE I.


By philosophy--and this term best expresses the historical and original
conception as it was understood by the Greeks, who so variously and
ingeniously developed it--I understand man’s innate and natural
curiosity, so far as it is universal in its scope, and not from the
first limited to any one specific end or subject.

This natural curiosity, consequently, stimulated by the mysteries of
existence, whether in the external world or of its own consciousness,
would fain make all these enigmas clear, to itself, and by attaining to
an inward illumination, would discover the true signification, or, if we
may so call it, the all-explaining key-word of life. And, indeed, there
is no reasonable doubt but that the possession of this revivifying and
living key-word would give to life, both individual and universal, a
much more exalted energy. For nothing less than an internal light of
intellectual brightness, or of the spirit made clear to itself, is that
search after truth and knowledge, by which we discover the key-word and
true signification of life, as a whole. By it all the powers, qualities,
and faculties of the soul are strengthened anew, inwardly elevated, and
augmented in force and fertility. And if any would prefer to give the
name of science to this highest and earliest speculative knowledge or
pursuit of internal certainty and divine truth, we object not, so long
as it is admitted that it is not a science precisely in the same sense,
and still less in exactly the same or similar form, as the other
sciences, which are directed to one specific aim and limited to one
subject. Free as life and the free-formed spirit itself, ever new,
wonderful, versatile, and infinitely varied, both in internal structure
and external manifestation, are the ways of man’s thinking and
speculative spirit. A ready and apposite illustration will clearly
demonstrate this peculiar freedom and manifold variety in the methods,
species, and developments of philosophy. At any rate, if it do not place
it vividly before our eyes, it at least suggests the idea of it. The
written dialogues of Plato--that great master of philosophical
exposition and of the thinking dialogue of science, with its
ever-living and changing play of thought, and earnest spirit of
investigation--are perhaps not less diversified in their course; not
less wonderfully manifold and exuberant with all the riches of genius;
not less peculiar in their general conception, as well as external
development; not less exquisite in the finish of the several parts and
divisions, than the poetical productions of the greatest and most
admired of dramatists.

Those who are best acquainted with the art and the intellect of the poet
and of the thinker, will be least inclined to dispute the justice and
accuracy of this comparison. We appeal to the instance of Plato with
greater confidence, not only because he stands alone, as inimitable for
beauty of exposition, and for fullness and grace, as well as spirit and
vividness of style, but also because (as is apparent from the numerous
and varied compositions which he has bequeathed to posterity) every path
of inquiry previously opened, as well as every road and by-way of
dialectic subtilty still conceivable or possible, were perfectly
familiar to this lofty intellect. There was, in short, no field of
speculative thought and investigation, however high or deep, that
remained unexplored by him. From any one of his most perfect
master-pieces, consequently, we might perhaps, by a precise and
exhaustive analysis of the art and skill that lies hidden in it, gain a
more correct notion of the true and profitable method of speculative
thought and investigation than from many or most of our compendiums of
all absolute ideas and metaphysical chimeras, or from the systems at
present in vogue of unconditional logical negation.

In order, however, to establish this view of a true philosophy of life,
which in its very form is also living, it is unnecessary to appeal to
any single example, even though it be one so splendid as that of the
Socratic school in general, or of Plato, the greatest thinker it has
produced. For in fact, the whole history of philosophy, from its
commencement to its close, will serve as a proof and confirmation of its
truth. In various ways does it teach and convince us that in this lofty
struggle after truth the most divergent, and even apparently
contradictory methods and tendencies may, however, and actually do lead
to similar conclusions, nay, to one common result. It shows us that,
however various may be the paths, the end of knowledge--the
eagerly-sought jewel of truth itself--is by no means always and in all
cases tied to any immutable and exclusive rule of one fixed form and
solely felicitous method of thought, as to a magic charm on which all
depends, and from which all success must flow. The history of
philosophy, I said, for, understood in its full extent, in its correct
sense and spirit, and in its deepest significancy, what else is this
than the internal reverse of the picture of man?--the intellectual half
of humanity, in its development through all the peculiar and remarkable
processes which in the pursuit and cognition of truth--that noblest
exercise of man’s powers and faculties--he has at any time had recourse
to. And in tracing this gradual progression, we may easily discern an
invisible guidance which shows itself, especially in the more remarkable
epochs or transition-points and decided periods of the struggle. In the
general exciting cause, and the new directions which the inward
intellectual development occasionally took up, and the law it followed,
an entirely distinct order of things manifests itself to the glance that
looks beneath the surface, of a far higher and more exalted nature than
aught which is comprised and established by the insignificant rule of
our ordinary school methods, or which is only estimated and judged
thereby.

It is by no means my wish to set aside the usual scholastic form in the
academical exposition of scientific philosophy, or in any way to
depreciate it when it is effectively carried out on strict principles.
In its right place, and when the occasion demands it, we must
acknowledge it to be indispensable. It is not to be neglected with
impunity. This is especially the case in that period of our life which
is more particularly and exclusively devoted to the study of the
sciences, when philosophy naturally takes its place among the rest in
the academical course, and also in the systematic mode of instruction
assumes a form similar to the other sciences. It is involved in the
already advanced but briefly and imperfectly developed idea of the
spiritually free and ever-varying, ever-shifting form which belongs to
the very nature of philosophical thought and knowledge, that when
circumstances predispose, and its external relations afford the
opportunity and occasion, philosophy should adopt and appropriate the
limited and less absolute form of other sciences, or, as I would rather
express it, may and can condescend to assume them. But this is only a
special application for some collateral purpose, a deviation and
exception from, and not the rule itself, if we thereby understand the
natural rule, or that which is essential and original, and consequently
the simplest and highest.

As regards, however, the philosophy which pretends to be the science of
life, and not merely of the school, this principle follows from the
fact, that when taken as a whole, and when the question is not of any
special application to a particular view and object, its form also must
be free and vivid. Consequently, even when classed and associated with
the other sciences, it justly lays claim to the first place among them,
as being of a different nature and origin.

It is far, therefore, from being requisite that philosophy, following
the mathematical sciences as a handmaid, should endeavor servilely to
copy them, as has been so often erroneously done, and, in spite of
experience of its impracticability, over and over again attempted.
Still, with a true view of a living philosophy, mathematical science,
however dead in itself, and even fatal to a higher spirit, attains under
profounder apprehension to intrinsic significance, and becomes elevated
and ennobled. The true method (that, namely, which alone deserves to be
so called, the method of truth) is based on the simple process of
thought and its living development, in which one thought springs and
unfolds itself naturally from another, and rigidly excludes all that is
foreign and repugnant. The true method does not move in paragraphs and
numbered propositions, making an outward parade of an apparently strong
chain of evidence, in which, however, a rigid scrutiny often detects
some specific link in the chain totally valueless and without illative
force, or at least weak and far from cogent, or placed in a false
position, to which it has properly no reference, and only in appearance
filling the void it covers. Thus it is also with what we call system, or
systematic. We are indeed accustomed to employ this word in a twofold
sense--either to convey praise, or in an evil and deprecatory
signification. In the latter use we say, “This or that work is nothing
but a system,” or, “According to this or that system.” But by such
phrases, when criticising any comprehensive theory of scientific
thought, we do not mean that the work is entirely without foundation,
purely and absolutely imaginary. For in such a case it would hardly be
worth while to spend more words upon it. Our meaning rather is, that
while containing something that is true, and much that is excellent,
undue importance is ascribed to the system, or too much is inferred
from it, every thing being forcibly made to agree with it, and itself
carried beyond the limits of sober truth: in a word, that the systematic
coherence is only external and specious, and the result of much labor
and art. In reality this is very frequently the case. This course is too
often pursued in the theories and discoveries of modern science,
especially in those branches which stand in the closest relation to
physical life and its preservation, and are consequently most influenced
by the fashionable ideas of the age. Some happy thought, bearing the
very stamp of genius, some ingenious idea or entirely new view is
started; on this foundation a system is forthwith raised, either by the
author himself or his followers and disciples. Embraced with the ardor
of enthusiasm, the novel theory is further extended and promulgated, and
becomes the watchword of a sect or party, until, degenerating into a
mere fashion, and being borne up awhile by the eddies of the moment, it
sinks at last into insignificance, and is swallowed up by the vast
stream of time. When once the matter has reached this point or this
stage in the pathology of human thought and opinion, then that first
idea and original invention may be considered as good as defunct, or at
least is, as it were, buried alive, and the true vital principle which
originally animated it is no longer perceptible.

But in a good and legitimate sense we may characterize a scientific work
or a scheme of thought as systematic, or as forming a system in itself,
and as such approve of it, if only it possesses the virtue of internal
consistency, and the spirit of unity pervades and animates it. And if
this consistency of idea be really intrinsic and spiritual, and at the
same time living and natural, it will be easily recognized in its
perspicacious simplicity of form and expression. It will need neither
the external display of systematic precision and prolix demonstrative
argumentation, nor the apparently rigid concatenation of paragraphs, in
which, however, the forced connection and the panoplied array of
propositions form but a poor device to conceal the deficiency of
intrinsic life and unity.

The case is precisely the same with the science of human thought and
philosophy, as with external life and daily experience. Nothing is more
highly estimated in society, business, or politics, than an active and
consistent character. Properly speaking, this example is not so much a
simile as the very thing itself, or the same subject viewed from another
ground or in a different relation. But this high and rare property of a
genuine consistency of character does not depend on the delivery of a
multitude of philosophic adages in and out of season, or the specious
thrusting forward of moral maxims, but rather manifests itself amid
general reserve and silence, by its straightforwardness of action, or
when it speaks, by the clear simplicity of its language. So is it also
with consistency of idea in philosophy. The intrinsic and vital unity of
a comprehensive system of thought--the systematic coherence which
results from a reigning idea of the whole, reveals itself and is to be
known by a simple and familiar form of expression, not unlike that of a
friendly conversation, and is not exclusively confined to any
prescriptive or preconceived formula of the schools or artificial
method.

But in respect to academical instruction, and the position which
philosophy either may or ought to occupy therein, I have one remark to
add. If I may judge by my own experience, or by what I have at times
observed in others, either when as a youth I was an academical student,
or when afterward, as a visitor at several of the German universities, I
took part in the scientific pursuits, and occasionally as a lecturer
propounded my own views and opinions, a decided and striking division
seems to subsist between philosophy and the peculiar scientific studies
proper to the future wants of life. This is, however, less the case with
the study of medicine, which, being founded on, and conversant with, the
science of nature, stands in a close relation to philosophy. Still even
the prosecution of this natural science proves distinctly enough that
the interests of general science follow entirely different paths from
such as are most eligible, and more especially conducive to the
acquirement and collection of particular information. Still more does
this apply to that numerous class who devote themselves to civil
professions, and whose future life is to be employed in political
departments. By them philosophy is pursued as a mere collateral and
secondary object of study, as a half-superfluous intellectual luxury.
But this she nowise admits of; she demands an earnest and devoted
affection, and must be embraced with the full ardor of love. It is in
this very earnestness of purpose, and this genuine attachment and
enthusiasm, that it has its source and being. Hence we may often observe
many a studious youth attracted by the general question as to the
nature of the human soul, and by these sublime investigations into the
mysteries of existence. Under the influence, as it were, of some magical
spell, he is absorbed in them so as completely to forget and lose sight
of the studies appropriate to the calling he has chosen, or at least to
neglect them, viewing them as comparatively secondary, while others of
more practical tendency steadily devote themselves to the study of their
profession, and confine themselves exclusively to its pursuit. Rigidly
rejecting the metaphysical charm and seduction of system, as a dangerous
lure, they care little, if at all, for the contempt with which the other
class, whom dialectic speculation has bewitched into forsaking its
proper object of study, looks down upon them as incapable of rising to
the height of its own exalted argument. Now, if I might venture to
hazard a suggestion for the removal, or at least the accommodation, of
this alienation from, not to say opposition to, philosophy, which exists
in the tone of our German universities, and if it be not out of place
here to enter into this matter, my first desire and advice would be,
that the study and course of philosophy should be kept entirely distinct
from that of the profession or the particular science which is learned
with a view to future avocations in life. In such a case philosophy
might most advantageously be taken up by the student after the
completion of his other studies, in short, at the conclusion of the
whole academical course, setting, so to speak, the crown upon it, and
forming the last step which the pupil must take before he enters upon
the realities of life.

Moreover, there is no leisure for idle meditation during the years of
academical study--that period of preparation which few have a second
time afforded them, and which, being entirely practical, ought to be
specially devoted to the perfect mastering of the special sciences which
in after-life are to occupy us. It is rather in our later and maturer
years, after the acquirement of the particular professional knowledge,
and even in the midst of the active business of life, that leisure,
together with a convenient opportunity, or a natural occasion, is
afforded for that meditation with which philosophy ordinarily begins,
but which in its results remains no idle speculation; or for that
apparently superfluous inquiry, which, however, investigates a subject
more necessary and more essential to man than all else.

So much--if it has not been indeed too much--I believed it requisite to
say concerning the form of philosophy, not so much to justify or to
excuse that which in the present case I could alone adopt, as rather
from this point of view also to establish the independent position, and
to depict the lofty aims of philosophy. For if philosophy is nothing
less than the actual science of life (and the skeptical query whether
such a science be either possible or attainable by man, will in nowise
affect the question; for if the doubt concerning the nature of life, or
life itself, is suggested by life, and consequently is living and real,
it amounts to the same thing, and the objection applies alike to the
doubt or the certainty)--if, I repeat, the object of philosophy be the
sublime conception of our inner life, struggling to unravel the mystery
of its own being, how can it be right, or how could a wish arise to
exclude from it one half of humanity, or society, or of civilized life?
The proper sphere of philosophy, no less than of art, is the whole
civilized public. This is the body in which it must circulate, and to
which its action must be applied. The specious ground for such an
exclusion can only be looked for and discovered in the ordinary school
form, which indeed, as I have endeavored to show, is by no means
essential to it, but rather a mere accident, which is so far from being
necessary, that it is not even of universal application.

If, therefore, the subject-matter of philosophy is the whole inward life
of man, if its end is the solution of the ever-recurring questions of
the speculative consciousness, and the reading of the enigma of
existence, or however else we may choose to characterize and express it,
it is assuredly something of a distinct and more exalted nature than any
of the preparatory sciences which make up the academical course of study
for the specific objects of some limited calling and profession. The
philosophy of life, as it sets out only with one simple position--life,
viz., man’s inner life--is restricted to no particular sphere, but
embraces them all in their fit season and occasion. When, indeed, in the
youthful, not to say childlike spirit, standing on the threshold of
expectation, this inward feeling of life or consciousness has not as yet
shaped itself into an ardent speculative curiosity, or a grave and
melancholy questioning, or when at least, it has not passed through the
first stage of thoughtful wondering, then it is as yet too early for the
awakening of philosophy--that inward search after truth and meditation
on the nature of our existence and consciousness, that self-examination,
those half-doubting yearnings after an unknown love. Youth,
inexperienced and undeveloped, may reasonably be supposed to be excluded
from a participation in this natural field of philosophical speculation,
although even in this, as in every other case, it is extremely difficult
to define the precise limits. It would also be idle to repeat the remark
so often insisted on by the sages of antiquity--that where life is
totally absorbed in the business or pleasures of life, or distracted by
the cares of avarice or ambition, so that, strictly speaking, no voice
from within is heard, no soul-cherished feeling or sentiment, nay, even
scarcely a thought purely spiritual, still survives, or finds a place in
that world-engrossed bosom--there philosophy finds no ear for her
sublime revelations of the inner life, nor dares hope for a responsive
echo to her high-soaring meditations, and that profound emotion from
which it draws her own birth.

Philosophy, I said, takes nothing for granted but life--an internal
life, that is. The more perfectly, the more manifold the aspects, and
the more comprehensively within the given limits under which this life
which it supposes is viewed and studied, the more easily will it fulfill
its object, the sooner will it attain to that which constitutes its
proper end and aim. For this aim is to render clear and intelligible,
both to itself and others, that higher life, whose existence it assumes
as the necessary basis of its speculations. But how would this primary
postulate, this natural basis of philosophy of life, be restricted and
limited, if the sex which is so pre-eminently marked by strong and deep
feeling should be entirely excluded from the sphere of its inquiries.
Indeed, according to a more liberal, comprehensive, and enlarged point
of view, such as is most consistent with the true nature of things,
youth, with its enthusiasm and quick sensibility for the beautiful--its
first and most exalted love--is not to be exclusively given up to the
fine arts. As the latter are elements of life, and very important
elements too, they can not be excluded from the sphere of philosophy,
but, on the contrary, form no inconsiderable portion of its general
problem. The objection, however, might be raised, that these, the best
and fairest of the gifts which nature dispenses with a liberal and
benignant hand, are but transitory, and that they wither and disappear
before the first rude touch of external circumstances that limits their
free play; so that, to judge from appearances, they scarcely can abide,
or be steadily kept up to the gravity of philosophical contemplation.
Often, it may be urged, some unpropitious destiny, some sudden storm of
fate, overwhelms and destroys them, stripping the youthful tree of life
of all its leafy honors before it has properly put forth its blossoms.
This, no doubt, is perfectly true. In most cases, however, the
destroying principle does not come from without. Fortune and external
circumstances have little to do with it. It lies rather in the inner
impetuosity of passion, in self-will, or some other dark shade of
character, perverting and bringing jarring discord into the most exalted
feelings of the soul. Would it not be well and especially advisable to
place from the very first these tender and delicate flowers of youthful
feeling within the influence, and under the action of an inward
illumination and reflection, as the only probable means of imparting to
them greater hardihood and durability, and thereby to convert the fair
but ephemeral flowers of youthhood into the mature and enduring fruit of
sincere benevolence, of a generous activity and inward harmony? There
is, in truth, no easier or more simple mode by which man can hope to
arrive at this end. It is only by means of such inner light, and purity
of sentiment and luminous meditation, that we, can hope to work our way
to the key-word of existence which shall reconcile every difficulty,
clear up every doubt, and attune to harmony every discord. For hereby
also will the power be gained which alone can sustain and protect this
inner life from every destructive influence. This enlightenment,
however, is nothing else than the philosophy of life, and therein
consists its essence.

Now, in order to place before us the very center of the entire question,
and at least to notice beforehand that which must more perfectly develop
itself as, step by step, we trace the natural process of thought, both
in life itself and the science of life, one remark is necessary. The
soul is nothing less than the faculty of love in man. For this reason,
also, the loving soul (if I may here make such an application of the
words of a great teacher) is the clear mirror in which we gaze upon the
secrets of divine love either reflected or symbolically figured as so
many enigmas, which, nevertheless, serve us as light-giving and guiding
stars amid the darkness of this earthly existence. And in this pure
mirror of our soul we plainly behold the eververdant and immortal
plants or hidden flowers of nature, like the dark bed of the deep
through the clear waters of a still sea. In this mental mirror nature
greets us with features less strange and unknown, and with familiar
aspect seems to claim at once a kindred sympathy.

In these slight and passing remarks, I have touched briefly upon many a
topic of which the full development must be reserved for our subsequent
Lectures. Still, though thus limited, they contain the grounds which to
my mind fully justify my adhesion to the opinion which, more than thirty
years ago, in the first commencement of my literary labors, I advanced
with regard to the question of the propriety of excluding one half of
mankind from this region of speculation. And although, in maintaining
this sentiment, I have to stand alone in, or even am opposed to, the age
in which I live, still on this point I prefer to take as my guide and
precedent the ancients, the Socratic school, and, above all, the great
master, Plato. And were it necessary, and the present place admitted of
it, I might easily, both from ancient history and modern times, adduce
authorities enough, both in number and in weight, to refute the opposite
opinion, or, rather, prejudice.

The sphere, therefore, and field in which philosophy has to move, or to
which it has to apply itself, is no narrow one, hemmed in and confined
by any unwarrantable exclusiveness. On the contrary, it must, so far is
possible for aught that is human, be complete and perfect. And for this
reason also, she must not, as indeed she can not, take her rise in a
consciousness artificially parceled out and divided, and, in short, but
one half of its true self, and which, being biassed and visionary in its
views, is divorced from real life. It can originate only in the mind’s
greatest perfection and in its full and most undivided entirety,
inasmuch as to make this consciousness clear to itself and to others
constitutes even its proper function and entire aim.

In the latest period of German philosophy many an ingenious path of
investigation has, no doubt, been here and there struck out. By a
critical comparison of different views, systems, and opinions,
dialectics, as a preparatory course of study, has been improved,
psychological research advanced, especially the philosophy of nature
enlarged. Still, on the whole, a purely abstract mode of thinking,
totally estranged and separate from actual life, is almost universally
held to be the only right road to a profound philosophy. This so-called
pure and abstract thinking takes nothing for granted, and allows of no
postulate or axiom; it acknowledges none besides, and generally has no
foundation save itself; it starts from itself alone, and in so far has,
strictly speaking, no proper beginning. Consequently, without proper end
or aim, it goes on continually revolving around itself as a center, and
within its own charmed circle. Assuredly, where the dialectic art and
system moves within this narrow range of thought, and restricts itself
thereto, employing a language which, while it is sharply abstruse,
metaphysically recondite, and pre-eminently abstract, has at least the
merits of clearness and distinctness, and ingenious classification, then
the very first result of such an exercise of dialectic art is
profitable, although merely negative. For it establishes the fact, that
truth and knowledge are not to be attained by this method; that thus it
can not profitably be either sought or found. It shows, too, that this
dialectical preludium itself in nothing more than a preliminary exercise
that at most does but serve as an introduction to another more lively
way of fruitful thought; though even as such it is suited, not indeed
for all, but simply for those who enter upon it with this view of its
nature.

Human language, with its wonderful suppleness, can adjust itself even to
the consciousness which is parceled out and abstractedly divided, so as
perfectly to copy and reflect it in its ever-movable mirror. It is able
to give a perspicuous order and an artist-like shape even to the mere
logical thought which has no subject-matter. It only fails when the
logical conceit of mere empty thought contemptuously rejects in the
giddy whirl of supreme abstraction, as its last earthly defect, the laws
of grammatical art, and refuses to add to its abstract style the merit
of perspicuity, in order that, as a metaphysical chimera, it may in the
inaccessible darkness that shrouds the obscure of the high-enthroned
“Ego,” soar higher and higher, and withdraw itself as much as possible
from the eyes of man. A confused terminology, perfect unintelligibility,
are the never-failing companions and peculiar characteristics of a false
philosophy, which dreams of finding the inestimable jewel of truth and
science in a never-ending and elaborate division of the consciousness.
It places perfection in an abstraction carried continually higher and
higher in its emptiness. But in truth it is only in the living unity of
the full consciousness that we can properly understand the pure logical
forms of thought, such as they are inborn in the human mind, or are
engraved thereon as the first directive traits and principles of its
intellect and rational activity. They must be judged of according to the
place which they occupy in the whole, and relatively to the manner in
which they act in or influence it. It is thus alone that their true
signification can be determined and truly conceived.

As often, however, as from that self-styled pure, but in reality empty
and totally abstract mode of thinking, which is divorced from life and
the realities of things, it is hoped to raise or to evoke, as it were,
by spell, a real system of true knowledge, we have a repetition of the
old history of the Babylonian tower, with its consequent confusion of
language. Every new system of this kind is nothing more than an
additional section of or an appendix to that ancient confusion of
speech, as well as of views and opinions, so ancient in the history of
the human mind. Each of these builders in the edifice of endless error
commences with pulling down the fabric that his immediate predecessor
and all before him may have commenced, while in the space he has thus
cleared for his own labors, he founds and rears the imaginary tower of
_his own_ knowledge and science. He has at least the firm intention to
raise it still higher--nay, far and far above the height that all before
him have attained. But one man understands another just as little as
himself. More and more entangled and obscure, consequently, becomes this
new confusion of ideas, till at last nothing remains but the anomalous
ruins of crumbled and abraded thoughts, which even when entire were only
so many lifeless stones--mere abstractions, soon either wholly
forgotten, or if surviving, becoming daily more and more
unintelligible--since the original lexicon or alphabet, or the
all-explaining key to these rare and singular characters, can be
recovered only with the greatest difficulty.

A true and living philosophy can not choose and pursue this method of
ever-advancing abstraction; much less can it recognize it as the only
right one. It proceeds rather from life itself and the feeling of life,
and, in truth, from a feeling and consciousness of it, which strives to
be as complete as possible. Far is it from dreaming that it is in any
artificial and elaborately-worked-out division of the human mind, that
it must seek its success or hope to attain its aim--the end of all true
knowledge. Without that, it feels that man’s consciousness, in its
existing state, at least, is already too much rent and distracted by
division, and being by means of this dismemberment checked in its
natural action, and weakened and impeded.

And this even is the point on which all turns. That philosophy of
so-called pure, but properly empty thinking, separated and abstracted
from actual reality, without end and without beginning, without ground
as without aim, knows nothing of our postulate of life, in the full
extent and sense of this word, so far as any thing is full and complete
for man. The thinker, once entangled in the meshes of such a philosophy,
can not admit of such an hypothesis, will allow to it no value, or,
rather, knows nothing of it, and would never be able to make any thing
of it. And yet, notwithstanding, in this very philosophy an hypothesis
is started, or, rather, assumed beforehand--one, however, which in truth
is entirely arbitrary, and which, when examined more closely and with
rigid scrutiny, betrays at once its utter baselessness. It depends on or
consists in assuming that the human mind, as it exists at present, is in
a perfect state, and has remained entire and complete, and altogether
unaltered from its original constitution. It holds that nothing is
wanted for the attainment of truth, beyond a careful and skillful
analysis of man’s self-consciousness, and a correct and appropriate
classification of its several members. But, on the contrary, whenever we
yield and give ourselves up to the feelings of our inward consciousness,
and try carefully to understand it simply as it is, the first thing that
strikes us most forcibly is a discord and opposition subsisting not only
between ourselves and the external world, but a strife with one’s self
raging in the inmost center of the mind, so that it seems to fall
asunder and to rend itself into absolute unconsciousness and
irreconcilable contrarieties.

Now, is it probable that strife would form the original state or the
proper destiny of the human or even of any other being? can this, in
short, have been the case from the first?

Strife, it is true, prevails every where in human life. It has its
parties and divisions in the present no less than in the past, in the
free intercourse of private as well as in political life, in the family
as well as in the faith, in knowledge as in thought and opinion.
Wherever these act upon life, or in any way affect it, they invariably
involve it in hostile opposition and sectarian animosity.

But the immediate question here is not of this strife of the passions,
or of the moral corruption of the inner character, which is excited by
their indulgence, although, in truth, the external strife of human
nature, which comes forward, as it were, in a visible and bodily shape,
and its earliest source in the hidden contentions of the inmost soul,
which arise from its entire constitution and the present condition and
state of our faculty of thought.

Just a little also do we refer to any view taken of the sad mutilations
of the human consciousness resulting either from some faulty
organization and disease, or from those defects which proceed from
defects of character or weakness of intellect. The conditions which,
relatively speaking at least, we call physically and morally sound, as
being free from all remarkable deficiencies or disorders, are,
nevertheless, not to be regarded on this account as perfect, and endued
with full living energy, and possessed of their original completeness.
On the contrary, in the general mind, such as on the whole we find it at
present, and which, in this respect, we may look upon as being in its
true and proper state, there is much that is evidently perverted from
its right object, much that has fallen a prey to disorder. And indeed we
are naturally led to take the same view of it when we discover most of
the several constituents of the mind for the greater part extremely
weak, and as it were in a crippled state, and its different faculties
seldom if ever maintaining a deep pervading harmony, and keeping in
perfect unison with each other. It is to this internal opposition and
original dissension of the thinking consciousness that I here would draw
your attention, as psychologically manifesting itself between thinking,
feeling, and willing. In this dissension, so deeply rooted in our inmost
being, intellect and will are, even independently of the effect of human
institutions and observances, but seldom in harmony; while reason and
imagination, if not always opposed, are at least greatly estranged, and
seldom maintain a mutual good understanding.

This is man’s first and ever-recurring, ever-renewed perception of his
inward life. Careful observation of self is ever impressing on him a
consciousness of what we might almost call an inborn, or at least
hereditary, discord and division in the human mind. This intellectual
fact, which is one purely psychological and totally independent of the
disturbing influences of passion or disease, may in truth well carry us
to the conclusion which, independently of it, so many other moral
phenomena and historical traces appear to point at. It leads us on
almost irresistibly to embrace that exposition of it which has been held
in common by almost every ancient people; the doctrine, namely that man
at the very onset fell from his original state of harmony into
dissension and disunion, and has since sunk many degrees lower and lower
from the dignity which belonged to him on his first creation. But as
this primitive obscuration and degeneracy went to the inmost root of
man’s being, under its influence, not only his relations to the external
world, but also in himself, in his pure internal thinking, feeling, and
willing, all is deranged, discordant, and fragmentary, so that very
rarely indeed do the three co-operate effectually in a living and
enduring harmony. And it is doubtless because the prevailing theories of
the human mind overlook the fact of this great change that they are so
utterly unsatisfactory and generally so tame and superficial. The
determination, however, how far this event is to be regarded as an
historical fact and rests on authentic tradition, is a question which
lies beyond our present purpose, and belongs rather to a purely critical
investigation. The immediate and specific aim of philosophy is simply to
analyze and clearly understand the psychological fact of the discord and
dissension which subsists between the several faculties of soul and
spirit, and to exhibit it just as it is. Having accomplished this, it
will then proceed to indicate the point or position from which the work
of restoration must be commenced, or by which at least the way which
leads to it may be discovered; the path, namely, of return to the
original harmony of the soul. In other words, its ultimate object will
be to discover the means of restoring a living and perfect
consciousness, and of bringing about a more harmonious co-operation of
its hitherto divided powers and faculties, whether of soul or spirit.

Now, even in ordinary experience, certain propitious combinations of
circumstances do occur, when this inward strife and innate or hereditary
discord between the understanding and the will, the reason and fancy, is
happily overcome. Under their influence the faculties, which previously
were separate and divided, or hostilely arrayed against each other, are,
partly at least, and for one individual life in all its incidents,
actions, and productions, brought into profitable agreement and
harmony. These rare occasions are furnished by extraordinary energy of
character, unrivaled artistic genius, or other high and rare mental
endowment. These, therefore, form not only so many experimental proofs
of the possibility of restoring the now discordant elements and the
isolated organs of the inner man to completeness of unity and entirety
of life, but also furnish stable points from which to start again, and
to carry on the work of restoration. Such instances, however, are but
exceptions from the general course of things. Fortunate and rare
exceptions they are, no doubt, but still, even as such, they only serve
to establish more surely and incontestably the predominance of the rule,
and the universal fact of the internal strife among the faculties of the
human mind.

Not unnecessarily to distract your attention at the very outset, I shall
for the present omit to consider many subordinate and derivative, but
applied and complex faculties of our mind and soul, such as memory, the
external senses, the various instincts, and the conscience. Restricting,
therefore, myself immediately to these four principal powers--understanding
and will, with reason and fancy, which we may regard as the four poles
of the internal world, or as the quarters of the human consciousness, I
shall consider generally the opposition which displays itself between
these elementary powers of man’s mind. This fact is so universally
recognized, and so generally predominant, that it displays itself even
in the experience and incidents of every-day life. To what amounts the
opinion so commonly expressed of many men, nay even the greater part
of distinguished characters, “that their judgment and will are not in
unison?” “What extensive learning and comprehensive views does he not
possess,” is said of one man; “what acuteness, excellent judgment! What
might he not accomplish if he had but the will; but he is so changeful,
you can never depend upon him, so inactive, so void of energy of
character, that he does not himself know rightly what he wishes.” Now
in such passing estimates of men, it is deserving of remark, that it
is not the passions, or of passionate transgressions of the moral law,
that come in question, but rather some internal defect and weakness.
“He has the best will,” is said of another, “is always active,
capable of any sacrifice and devotion, and of a firm and undaunted
resolution; but at the same time he is so narrow-minded, so unbending
and short-sighted, and possessed by such inflexible prejudices, that
nothing can in truth be made of him, and every enterprise is sure
to miscarry that he has any thing to do with.” The discord is not
indeed in every case so strongly marked and distinct, still every one
who at all observes his own consciousness may easily determine, and
satisfactorily answer the question, whether this opposition between
the understanding and the will, or at least the disposition thereto,
is not deeply fixed and rooted in our inmost nature, and on the whole
universal. Whence else springs the high estimation in which steadiness
and consistency of character are generally held, but from the fact that
it is a rare exception for will and understanding--the inward thought
and the outward practice--to be in perfect harmony and agreement?
And in truth consistency, thoroughly carried out in the whole life,
steadfast unison of idea and practice--in short, power--immediately
enforces our respect and admiration, even though we may not be able to
agree with the motive and principles on which it acts, and moreover
remark much in the whole line of conduct deserving of blame, when
measured by the highest ideal standard of moral justice and perfection.
How often do we feel this to be the case in the historical judgment
and estimate of great and celebrated men, where our admiration by no
means implies or carries with it a full and perfect approbation of
every trait in their character or actions. Another mode of view and
comparison will perhaps serve to set in a still clearer light the
characteristic feature of the human mind in its present broken and
discordant condition. Man usually directs his glance downward to the
brutes, in order, by pointing out its difference from the animal world,
to determine the peculiar essence of his own being and nature. In this
comparison, after much and painful investigation, man discovers that
although his physical organization and the principle of life, the
blood-soul, as the source of vital heat, is of the same kind and nature
with that of the brutes, he nevertheless possesses a rational soul,
which they do not enjoy.

More instructive would it be, occasionally at least, to raise our
contemplation to things above. By this method, many characteristic
qualities of the human mind might be briefly but distinctly set forth in
sharper contrast by comparison with other created things, or, as the
poet calls them, “superior spirits, with whom we share our
knowledge.”[62] Leaving this belief in the existence of purely
spiritual beings, which was common to all nations of the old world, to
rest on its own deep foundation, and passing over the doubts which might
perhaps be raised against it, I shall simply take for the basis of my
comparison the general idea of these angelic essences, such as from the
very first it has been long and widely entertained. Now, from this point
of view I should be at least justified, were I to point to that
fickleness and inconsistency, or weakness and even defect of character,
which I have above mentioned and depicted as forming the ordinary
condition and the specific characteristic of man, which according to our
hypothesis does not belong, either in the same degree or at all, to the
pure spirits. With them understanding and willing are altogether one,
and every thought is at the same time also a deed, every fact perfectly
comprehended and carried out, with a design perfectly understood. Their
activity is ever one and the same living and uninterrupted operation,
whatever be its direction, in a bad as well as a good sense. And thus it
is that with these spirits knowing and willing are one; so that a living
and effective intellect is even a very spirit, and equally so is a
perfectly self-conscious will. But a spiritual being like man, in whom
intellect and will are not one, is, as contemplated from this point of
view, a spirit divided and distracted, and one that has fallen into
disunion with itself, which only by means of a new and higher aspiration
can be again raised to its full energy and living unity.

Still more obvious, and even more striking than the general and
universally prevailing discord between the understanding and the will,
is the opposition and division which holds both the fundamental
faculties or opposite poles of the inner world of consciousness, namely,
between reason and fancy. The fancy is the fertile, and, properly
speaking, the inventive and creative faculty of man; but she is blind,
and subject to many, or rather, we must say, innumerable delusions. This
is not the case indeed, at least not in the same degree and manner, with
the reason, as the faculty of calm prudence in man--the internal
standard of the moral equilibrium of his nature. Still, actually to
produce, truly to bring forth or to create, is, with all its reasoning,
utterly beyond its power; and if at times, as is the case with the false
philosophy and mere dialectical thinking, it does make the attempt, it
gives birth to naught but lifeless abortions and mere thought-created
phantoms of abstract nothingness. It will hardly be necessary to track
this opposition between reason and fancy farther, and to follow it into
the great arena of public life, or to prove by a lengthened discussion
that the men endowed with the best reasoning powers are not at the same
time or especially endowed with the fire of genius, or that the most
æsthetical and artistic natures are not always the most logical. True
genius, however, forms a rare exception to this rule, because in him the
faculties of soul and spirit, which are usually found isolated and
opposed, are happily united and effectually co-operate in an harmonious
unison. In other words, we have in such a case a union of the creative
fancy, which in the productions of genius is the most essential point,
and the acute, discerning sagacity, as also the distinctness of sensible
shape and order, which can not be absent from any real production of
art. And yet, for all this, the understanding of the artist is something
quite distinct from practical reason and logical acuteness. There is,
moreover, another state, or, rather, quality of the soul, wherein the
else divided reason and fancy are intimately associated and entirely
reunited. This is a natural, pure affection, and the very faculty of
love, which is itself the soul and the peculiar essence of man’s
spiritual soul. For example, a mother’s love for her child, which is the
deepest and strongest of the natural affections; no one can call this
love irrational, although it must be judged by an entirely different
standard from the reason. At least it does not arise from any
carefully-weighed process of the reason, for it is over it that it gains
its greatest triumphs. In love both halves of the soul are united. For,
taken separately and apart, reason is only one half of the soul, and
fancy the other. In love alone do both concur, and the soul is there
present totally and perfectly. In it both halves, which otherwise are
ever apart, being again united, restore a perfect state of the
consciousness.

And in the same manner there is also a means of reunion for the
understanding and the will. And that, too, is a pure, strong, and
morally regulated love. Whenever, proceeding from the very depths of
man’s being, it has become, as it were, a second nature, and having
received a higher and diviner consecration, it forms the still and
invisible, but ruling soul of life, then is it the best and surest road
for attaining to the reconciliation of the otherwise inveterate and
deeply-rooted discord between the intellect and the will. By such a love
the inmost man may be restored to peace and harmony with itself, and the
otherwise distracted consciousness, regaining a full and perfect unity,
is enabled to exercise its best and highest energies.

The following are briefly the results of this our first psychological
sketch, so far forth as they are necessary for the purpose and object
before us. The ordinary state of the human mind, such as, in its present
condition, it exhibits itself to our internal apperceptions, is one of
fourfold discord and distraction. Or, rather, if we may so speak, it is
a quadruply divided consciousness, as being a prey to the double
contrariety between the understanding and the will, and between reason
and fancy. But the mind, when restored to its full and living
perfection, is threefold, or, if the expression be here allowable, it is
a triune consciousness--the soul restored to unity in love--the mind or
spirit requickened by the energy of a consistent life, and, lastly, the
internal sense for all that is highest and divine--which third member,
as the external medium and the ministering instrument of the other two,
can not interfere with or disturb their profound harmony. Now, the
return from the mind, checked and limited in its operation by its
existing divisions and discord, into a living triple or triune
consciousness, is the very beginning of a truly vital philosophy, and,
indeed, of a renovated and enhanced vitality.




LECTURE II.


When man is considered relatively to his external existence in the
sensible world and nature, to which by his body he belongs and forms a
constituent part, then the three elements of which, as regarded from
this point of view, his whole being or essence appears to consist, are
body, soul, and spirit. Now, not even from these are schism and conflict
excluded. There is little or no harmony between the higher and spiritual
principle of the inner man and the outer world to which properly his
sensuous faculty belongs. The natural wants and the organic laws of our
corporeal life are at issue with the moral law of the inward
feelings--with the exalted requisitions of the soaring thought and the
profound desire of the pure spirit. The struggle between these two
distinct laws or ordinances of life, the higher and the lower, forms,
perhaps, the chief problem which in his moral destination on earth man
has to solve. At least it constitutes the first beginning and step
thereof. No doubt, the external frame of the human body, with its
wonderful organization, presents in the prime of its development the
corporeal image of a more exalted and more spiritual beauty. In its
highest and happiest expansion--in its noblest forms--in many a bright
gleam, for instance, of animated expression on the countenance of
youth--we read the graceful reflection of a more than earthly
loveliness. The stamp of man’s heavenly origin is not quite extinct or
completely defaced even in his frame. But on the other hand, it is
exposed and subject to innumerable injuries, sufferings, diseases, and
corruptions; so that we feel at once the truth of the Apostle’s words,
in calling it the “body of this death.” Added, then, to the other two
elements of man’s being, spirit and soul, the organic body forms the
third constituent, in which, however, is contained the ground and
occasion of conflict and strife. In the inner man, indeed, taken by
itself, and in soul and spirit, as the two constituents of his higher
life, there is involved no absolute element of discord. No doubt even
here the harmony is liable to many disturbances, and perfect unison,
perhaps, is very rarely to be met with; but still the discord has not
its ground in the essential constitution of these two principles of
soul and spirit. The contrariety between reason and fancy, understanding
and will, though existing in the fourfold consciousness of man in its
present state, prevails not there by any law of necessity. It is not a
result of their essential constitution. Simply, the spirit is the more
active faculty of the whole higher principle and of its internal life,
the soul the more passive one. I have designedly employed the expression
the _more_ active, and the _more_ passive, while thus speaking of soul
and of spirit; for perfectly passive, and entirely devoid of liberty,
the feeling and loving soul is not, as neither, on the other hand, is
the spirit perfectly active and independent. The latter stands in need
of the fellowship of the soul and of the life-giving feeling to kindle
and to expand it. To a certain degree, both spirit and soul, or at least
the preponderance of the one or the other, are dependent on the
organization and organic differences of sex. In general, we may at least
assert and admit this much: that, viz., spirit or thought predominates
in man, but spirit or soul in the female sex. But even here (so
incalculably great is the diversity of human character and disposition,
so various are the methods and forms of education and moral culture)
many exceptions, either by way of complication or deviation from the
original simple relation, are found to subsist. In no case, moreover,
can this preponderance of the reigning element be taken or understood as
a total isolation or severance from the other. On the contrary, there
are manifold transitions and fusions in the reciprocal action of soul
and spirit. In the same way that there are peculiar modes of thought, a
special kind of intellect, which, by a happy divination, goes infallibly
to the point and the truth, and is entirely the judgment of feeling--the
issue, in short, of the _feeling_ soul; so, too, there are many
impressions on the feelings (an ardent love, for instance, and a purely
intellectual enthusiasm), which take their origin immediately out of
some thought, or generally from the understanding. And, in fact, the
very separation of the two generally does but lead to their more
intimate union, and furnish a new bond of unity. Thought and feeling
stand reciprocally in need of each other. As thought gains new life and
animation from the rich feeling, with its facile, tender, and profound
emotions, deriving therefrom its vital nourishment and sustenance, even
so the feelings are not unfrequently first awakened, and very often
strengthened and elevated, by the lofty flight of thought in its bold
and searching investigations. It is even this that constitutes, in part
at least, the attraction of social intercourse, the charm of love, and
the happiness of a well-assorted union, which does but become more close
by years--the one party finding in the other the intellectual or (if the
term be preferred) the psychological complement of his own being and
character.

But now a similar complement for the void and deficiency which, even in
the most favored dispositions, enjoying the highest advantages of
learning and culture, still remains in man’s consciousness and internal
existence, may be found in yet another wise, and by a far superior
method. We may, for instance, seek this consummation of our nature in
that Being who contains in Himself the fullness of all might and of all
existence--of all life and of all love--and out of whom both soul and
spirit proceed and take their beginning. Now, if we should wish to form
an idea of the heavenly state of supreme felicity, such, at least, as in
forecasting hope we may suppose it to be, and indeed are justified in so
doing, then we may doubtless think of it as such that in it both soul
and spirit, sunk in the abyss of eternal love, will rest perfectly
satisfied. Or rather, in a living communion of thought and feeling, they
will most intimately sympathize in this ineffable majesty, being
absorbed in the never-failing stream of the infinite plenitude of
divinity. In this state of bliss, the body will be dissolved and no
longer existent. At least transfigured and changed, it will remain
nothing more than the pure, luminous veil [_Lichthülle_] of the immortal
soul and the spirit, now totally and freely emancipated. For it will no
longer be possible, with any propriety, to think of the body as separate
and distinct from the soul and spirit, as in truth and fundamentally it
will not be separate from them. Now, for this blissful state of perfect
union with the supreme essence, no less than for those single and rare
moments of mental ravishment, during which, even in this earthly life,
man occasionally, though transiently, does, by vivid thought, transport
himself to such a state, the third element, which as the connecting link
must accrue to these two fundamental energies of man’s inward being and
existence, in order to complete and perfect it, is God Himself. For it
is here even as in the external world of sense; there must be a third
element. There, however, it is the body, which, as no less essential
than the other two, completes the existence of the total man. Merely
psychologically regarded, and when we adhere and limit ourselves to the
given sphere of the internal consciousness, the triple principle of
man’s being is neither God, soul, and spirit, as in the higher blissful
state, nor even body, soul, and spirit, as in this material world, but
simply spirit, soul, and sense. These are the three elements of the
mind, which as such immediately concern us at present, and form the
essential basis of the following considerations.

Much is there that attaches itself to this principle, or follows from
it. It would consequently only lead to confusion were we at present to
take a full survey of all these cognate matters and consequences, and
lay them before you at the outset. Many of them will arise much more
naturally afterward. Even the treating, and the elucidation, of the
relation in which the senses, as the third element of the human mind,
stands to the other two, and the place which it holds among them, will
hereafter come more appropriately before us. And this is especially true
of a question which, however, has an important bearing on the matter
before us--the question, viz., whether or not some particular faculty,
either of soul or spirit, is to be regarded as an internal sense, a
moral instinct, or an immediate perception and intuition of the highest
and best. And, connected with this inquiry, is the remark, that even in
the usual outward senses there lies a spark of higher spiritual
perception--such, for instance, as the artistic eye for beauty of form
and color, and for grace of motion, or the musical ear for lovely sounds
and measures; so that even the senses are not so purely corporeal, so
totally material and grossly sensuous, as at the first glance they
appear. But there is another topic which here enforces itself on our
consideration, and which, for the correct apprehension of the whole
matter, is even still more important than that of the relation which
sense holds to the other two elements of man’s consciousness. And this
is to determine whether these two, soul and spirit, are really
different, or whether it be not probable that, as the active and the
passive powers and aspects of a higher principle in man, they are, on
the whole, one and the same, and consequently ought not, in thought
even, to be unduly separated and distinguished. But however this
question is to be answered, even though in man they be really and
necessarily united, still a relative distinction of them is justified by
that preponderance of one or the other which manifests itself at
different times and in different relations of life. But a weighty reason
exists for supposing that they are essentially two elements. A fair
presumption that, after all, soul and spirit are not perhaps one and the
same under two several sets, arises from a comparison of man with other
created spirits, if only it be allowed us to make a further application
of a parallel which, on a certain hypothesis, we have already hazarded.
For, however problematical at most the results of such comparisons may
appear, still in such cases as the present they are often very useful.
They tend, at least, to give a sharp and precise determination of the
peculiar and characteristic features of man’s consciousness. Now, the
free and pure spirits far surpass man in energy of will--in activity and
power--and, secondly, in rapidity and clearness of apprehension,
possessing as they do an intellect immediately intuitive. In these
properties, as contrasted with the mutability and weakness of man’s
vacillating will, the slowness of his groping and erring intellect, the
angels have greatly the advantage of man. But, on the other hand, the
human mind or spirit possesses in its peculiar creative fertility a vast
prerogative, which can not--not, at least, in the same degree--be
ascribed even to the pure creatures of light. And, in truth, it is on
the soul, which is not merely receptive or sentient, but also inwardly
productive, lovingly creative, and ever giving new forms and shapes to
the old and common, that the creative faculty of invention, so
distinctive of man, ultimately rests. At least, it forms the inner
foundation and root out of which it springs and rises. Fancy, indeed,
with its external shape and visible manifestion in art, is only one
portion of it. But still the other part also of the soul, viz., the
reason, when directed to its right end, and so long as it remains within
its natural limits, is a faculty of endless intellectual development,
infinite advance, and perfectionment. And, in truth, the position is by
no means new, that perfectibility or the faculty of endless improvement
(which, however, is associated with an equally great and no less
infinite faculty of deterioration), is the essential and wholly peculiar
prerogative of man. It is his characteristic property. With regard to
the other aspect or portion of the same property, the productive fancy
namely, and its creative productions, a similar view to our own--and,
indeed, under the same parallel and hypothesis--is expressed in the
poet’s assertion already quoted--

    “Thy knowledge thou sharest with superior spirits;
     Art, oh man! thou hast alone.”[63]

Only the term “art” must here be understood in a wide and comprehensive
signification, so as to take in language. Or, rather, language itself is
the general, all-embracing art of man. For nowhere does art evince its
peculiar, internal, and intellectual fertility, its creative faculty of
invention, so striking as in this wonderful structure of human language,
with its many compartments. Man, we might well say, in general terms, is
a production of nature that has attained to the perfection of language.
In other words, he is a spirit to whom, before all other creatures, the
word explanatory and declaratory, the guiding, the communicative, and
even the commanding word, is lent, imparted, committed, or conveyed, and
even therein consists his original, marvelous, and high dignity, so far
surpassing the ordinary standard of creation.

On this account, therefore, it is only natural and consistent, _i.e._,
agreeable to man’s nature and dignity, that the comparative
juxtaposition and parallel which is to lead to a more correct
characterization of the human mind, with its peculiar faculties and
properties, should, as I said, be directed upward, rather than, as is
usually done, downward to the brutes, and to the animal consciousness,
if, indeed, we may justly ascribe such to them. Now, in this method of
comparison I would go a step farther, for by so doing I hope to promote
the more perfect understanding of the whole, and also to arrive at a
correct and accurate notion of the several faculties of man’s spirit and
of the powers of his soul. Which, then, of man’s faculties or powers may
be rightly attributed to the Deity, and which not? To answer this
question, however, it is not my intention to enter into any very
difficult and abstruse investigations, such as would neither be very
apposite to this place, and perhaps (to speak generally) would be
absolutely without and beyond the limits of the human understanding. It
will be sufficient for my purpose throughout to take for granted what,
according to the universal feeling of mankind, is generally admitted,
and which is even as generally intelligible, as it is easy of
apprehension and clear. But when I thus without hesitation take for
granted a universal belief in the existence of a divine principle,
notwithstanding the doubt which in the human mind springs up against
all else, so also against the highest object of faith, I do so with a
deliberate view and purpose. For I shall reserve the solution of this
grave problem to a later period of my sketch and exposition of the
thinking consciousness and of a true living science. It is there, in
truth, that it will find its most natural and appropriate place. Here,
however, for the purposes of our intended comparison, which, as the
instance itself will prove, is likely to be highly instructive, it will
be sufficient if I confine myself to a single remark. The little that we
know or can with certainty predicate of God may be comprised almost in
the few words, “God is a spirit.” It is by virtue of this proposition
that we ascribe to Him an omniscient intellect and an all-mighty will.
Both these attributes or powers of God, are, it is self-evident, in the
most perfect harmony, and can scarcely be separated from one another;
whereas in man they are frequently widely divergent, at times even
hostilely oppose each other, and at best do but check and limit their
mutual action. Here, however, arises the question whether in strict
propriety we may venture to ascribe to the Deity any of the other mental
faculties and powers which man is conscious of, though on a greater and
different scale, and in a very extended sense?

Now, in the creative energy of God, there is, in truth, comprised the
plenitude of all fertility, and, if it be allowable so to speak, an
inexhaustible source of all invention.

But still, as every one must at once feel, a productive faculty of
imagination and a creative fancy can not on this account be ascribed to
Him; for, were we to do so, we should step at once into the domain of
mythology with its fabulous gods. And even as little, in strict
propriety and accuracy of language, can we attribute to God the faculty
of reason, which, in man, is the opposite of fancy. Reason is the
connecting, inferring, discursive faculty of thought. But all this, with
its graduated series of ideas or conceptions, is not applicable to the
Deity, for in Him all must be thought of as standing at once and
immediately before the divine mind, or, rather, as directly emanating
from Him. Consequently, in a strict sense, and following a rigorous
precision of a thoroughly correct designation, we may indeed ascribe to
God an immediately cognizant and intuitive understanding, but not
reason; since, by this term, it is only by a violent abuse of language
and a total conversion of ideas that a faculty of intellectual
intuition can be understood. One kind alone, or branch of reason, is
immediately intuitive; and that is the conscience, or the moral
instinct, for the appreciation of whatever is good or evil, right or
wrong. This might not inaptly be called an applied reason; viz., a
reason applied to the will and to its inmost motives, and to its just
commencing, still inchoate determinations, out of which external actions
ultimately issue. But even because conscience is an immediate perception
of right and wrong, a moral instinct for good and evil, and,
consequently, in form, wholly distinct from that function of reason
which infers and deduces consequences, I am indisposed to give it such a
name, and would rather regard it as a peculiar faculty of soul or heart,
subsisting by itself, and intermediate between will and reason. In any
case, it would be superfluous to observe how highly inappropriate it
would be to designate by this name that warning or punitive judicial
vision with which God looks through and penetrates the inmost heart,
even though we must seek here the root and origin of the lucid oracles
and simple revelations of the human conscience. As a property, however,
it can only be ascribed to those beings who, like man, behold the law of
God far above them, but by no means to that Being who is Himself the sum
and source of all moral laws. But let us now revert to our first
question of the predication of reason to the Deity. If, in our present
reigning systems, and especially in the latest German philosophy, reason
is, notwithstanding, ascribed to Him, or, rather, the eternal,
unconditional, and absolute reason is itself called God, and rationality
is made to be His essence; this is but the immediate consequence of the
predominantly pantheistic tendency of these systems, in which the Deity
is identified with the mundane All, and resolved into the universal
essence. For, inasmuch as it was felt that it could not be merely the
all-producing and all-absorbing--the all-bearing, infinite, vital power
of the heathen systems of nature--and, since a more scientific
designation was required, nothing remained for the totally abstract
designation of the one All, but the name of that faculty which even in
the human mind forms the principle of unity.

No doubt, in the preceding centuries, one or two great teachers have
employed very similar, if not identical expressions, in reference to the
Deity; still this, to my mind, appears an exception from the general
rule, to be explained and justified only by individual terminology and
points of view. And, at any rate, it is much safer to follow the ancient
usage on this point. Accordingly, I have made it a law scrupulously to
observe it throughout. But if people will at once subvert the ancient
modes of speech, and completely interchange and confuse the ordinary
signification of the terms reason and understanding, then all must
naturally turn on the thing itself and the internal thoughts and the
proper meaning which lies at the bottom of them. And then, by a due
consideration of these, a mutual understanding may perhaps be eventually
arrived at, notwithstanding the different modes of speech. With most of
the writers and philosophers of the present day this, perhaps, is
scarcely to be hoped for. The grave question, however, here (and which,
as it lies at the bottom, must ultimately decide on this difference of
phraseology), is this--whether philosophy in general is, according to
the rationalistic way of thinking, a mere philosophy of reason, or a
higher philosophy of the spirit and of spiritual revelation, or, indeed,
of a divine experience.

Further, whenever, in the olden phraseology, there are ascribed to the
Deity, memory and even desires, not to say impulses, which, viewed
nearly in the same light as man’s appetites and passions, are designated
by the same terms, all this is to be understood in the same way as the
expressions concerning His all-seeing eye, His ear, and His mighty arm.
They are merely figurative and symbolical phrases. In the use of them
there is no pretension to scientific accuracy, with which understanding
and will are universally and actually ascribed to Him. They are devoid
even of that apparent probability which gives rise to the question,
whether imagination and reason can, with the same propriety as the
former two, be attributed to Him. With as little truth can a soul be
ascribed to Him. For this is, exclusively, a passive faculty; whereas,
in God, all is energy and activity. The expression, however, of a soul
of God, is found, by way of exception from the general usage, in a few
among ancient writers.

A more correct mode of indicating what is meant by this term would be to
say that God is love, and that love is even His essence. Or the same
idea would be well conveyed by speaking, under the form of a living
force and property, of God’s fatherly heart as the center of His being,
of His omnipotence and omniscience, and of the infinite love which
results from the two. No doubt even this expression of God’s fatherly
heart is merely figurative and symbolical. Still it is one of high
significance, and, as such, it is not a mere figure without meaning.
For, the higher and profounder spiritual philosophy, from Plato down to
Leibnitz, has ever purposely employed such symbols and figures to
indicate that which properly is inexpressible. In fact, it has always
preferred them to the abstract notions employed by the rationalizing
systems of our own lifeless metaphysics of naught, which, as they are
void in themselves, so do they in reality say nothing.

Thus, then, has the very first step in this comparative psychology
carried us, at once, to the utmost limits of what is knowable by man.
Still it has tended, in passing, to place in an eminently distinct light
many important matters and essential properties and faculties which
belong to our present sphere of psychological inquiry. It is now,
however, necessary for me to turn my regards back to the point from
which we started. In order to commence our philosophy of life with the
center of life and of man’s whole consciousness, we set out from a
psychological fact, which immediately impresses itself on the awakening
consciousness. This fact is the perception of the discord which reigns
in our entire self, and especially of the deep-rooted dissension which,
in their usual state, divides the four principal faculties of the
consciousness, according to the twofold contrariety of understanding and
will, and of reason and fancy. I will here merely add the remark, that
further still, another essential property of man, and a state equally
characteristic and peculiar to him, is closely associated with, and,
indeed, is grounded in this internal discord, viz., the freedom of the
will and the state of doubt. Now, this freedom of will which belongs to
man is very different from the freedom of God, or even from that of the
pure spirits who were first created. The notion of free will, however,
is so deeply and firmly grounded in our inmost feelings, that man’s
universal conviction of it can never be wholly undermined by any doubts
of the reason, however subtilely advanced, and, in appearance,
demonstratively urgent. No objection or difficulty can totally
extinguish and annihilate the persuasion of its truth within our breast.
For even after the greatest shock which our faith in ourselves may
sustain, either from reflection or from subtilely refining on the
subject--after what, apparently, is a complete refutation of its truth,
this divine and inborn prejudice (if I may so term it) of our intrinsic
freedom still springs up again. As the inextinguishable vital flame of
the spirit, it rises anew from the expiring embers of those deadening
doubts, which are themselves nothing more than the dead notions and null
phantoms of a false semblance of thought. Now this freedom of will is a
liberty of choice, _i.e._, a will long vacillating between two different
series of ideas--of opposing grounds and reasons, and, at last, deciding
for one or the other. This volition, however, is, by its nature, so
little decided, and frequently finds so great difficulty in coming to a
decision, that even when externally it has already concluded its
deliberations, it often becomes again undecided and begins anew to
hesitate. Or this freedom of choice in man may otherwise be described
and thought of as a decision of the understanding, which compares
together two different volitions, carefully weighs the conflicting
grounds in favor of each, and, at last, in its final judgment,
recognizes the preference to one or the other. Consequently, this free
will and choice, so peculiar to man, depends intimately and essentially
upon that controversy between understanding and will, which, if not
inborn, has become, at least, a second nature to him. I have spoken of
this freedom of will as peculiar to man, since it is not necessary, and
rather would be a most arbitrary hypothesis, were we to go so far as to
assert, that, assuming the existence of other free but created essences,
our own special kind of freedom is the only possible and conceivable
one. Still, for our present purpose, it is allowable to make such a
purely hypothetical simile and comparison, if (a point on which the
experiment itself must decide) it be likely to render our own peculiar
form of consciousness more intelligible and conceivable. In this sense,
then, we may go on to say, that we must conceive the liberty of the
blessed spirits as being in its essence very different from that of
man’s. As such it belongs to beings who have long passed beyond the
probation of the still undecided choice, or who, at the very beginning
of their existence, were, by the design of the Creator, withdrawn from
it, and have, consequently, attained to eternal freedom, together with
undisturbed and undisturbable peace in God, who is the sum and
inexhaustible source, as well as the unfathomable, of all freedom, no
less than of all life.

But even irrespectively of this freedom of choice for actual life and
its particular objects and motives--irrespectively, also, of the freedom
which is conversant about external actions, and of the inward moving
causes of the will which contain the first ground and hidden germ of the
former, and of that state of uncertainty which follows therefrom, and
which not unfrequently long vacillates between one side and
another--there are, also, in pure thought, simply as such, a similar
state of internal hesitation or doubt--_i.e._, of a thought hostilely
attacking, undermining and destroying, denying, and annihilating even
consciousness and cogitation itself. Left wholly to ourselves, when,
closing our regards to the external world, and without any definite
object, we calmly commit ourselves to the stream of purely internal
thought, we soon become sensible of this fact. On the one hand, there
crowd on the mind the impressions of the outward senses, and the
manifold creations of the peculiar, never-resting faculty of cogitation,
seeking to gain the mastery over and to carry it along with them. On the
other side, the distinguishing and discerning reason comes in with its
questions and doubts, and chemical analysis, to resolve every thing
finally into naught, and to explain all the conceptions of the mind as
groundless and unsubstantial, as so many pure illusions of the senses,
conceits of caprice, prejudices of a limited understanding, and mere
pictures or creations of fancy. Thus, then, the ever-swelling flood of
thought in man’s inner being and cogitation is not any calmly-flowing
stream, in which wave quietly follows and succeeds to wave, as through
rich and fertile plains it pursues its course from some distant source
to the wide and open sea. The fearful conflict of thought is rather some
double current, where, amid the crags and rocks, the pent-in waters,
confining one another, beat up into foaming breakers--or, still more
dangerous, beneath their apparently calm and smooth surface, they form
the tearing whirlpool with its bottomless abyss, which, at the least
incautious approach, hurries, irresistibly, into its vortex the tossing
little boat of man’s brief existence. For the most part it is only in
natures originally, at least, highly endowed and noble, that doubt and
this internal struggle of thought rise to the height of despair. These
alone are finally driven, by the rejection of all belief in themselves,
into utter ruin both of soul and spirit. The tendency, however, to a
state of struggle and doubt is universal. It seems to be nothing less
than a characteristic property of human nature, and to have its
foundation in the dissension subsisting between reason and fancy, which
has so firmly established itself in the mind of man. It may happen, no
doubt, that in a mind whose opinions are settled both in theory and
practice, no instability will be found to subsist in the plans which
guide and regulate life, but that, on the contrary, they are, on the
whole, followed out with fixed resolution and decided energy. And yet,
even in such a case, particular doubts will occasionally arise affecting
many matters (which, although subordinate to the fundamental laws of
life, are, nevertheless, far from being unimportant), so as to force
upon us the remark, or even to extort the confession that, in general,
such a state of immovable determination does not belong to human nature,
and that this internal conflict forms one element of that warfare of
life to which man is called. The predisposition to this I have referred
to the discord between reason and fancy, and, for brevity’s sake, I have
employed, throughout, the latter designation for it. I must, however,
avail myself of the present occasion to observe, that fancy is not
limited merely to poetry and the fine arts, and their respective
creations, but inasmuch as all productive thought belongs to the
imagination in the same way that the negative does to the reason, it
also co-operates more or less with science. It is, therefore, chiefly in
this latter and larger sense that we here employ the term, since it is
from the contradictions of the productive and negative thought that the
struggle and state of doubt arise.

The first truth, then, that psychology arrives at, is the internal
discord within our fourfold and divided consciousness. Having commenced
with a slight characteristic sketch of this fact, I have attempted to
give a further and deeper grounding, and to invest it with a higher and
profounder significance. To this first perception we appended, as the
second member in the series of our philosophical investigation, the idea
of a triplicity of consciousness as restored to its perfect and living
action. According to this view, the simple division of the mind is into
spirit, soul, and sense. And this will, in all our subsequent Lectures,
form the basis of our psychological reflections on the human mind. It
will also serve as the transition from the ordinary state of the
consciousness in discord with itself, and with its fourfold division, to
the reunited triple consciousness. We shall make it the starting-point
and first step in this philosophy, which, as it sets out from life, is
also to lead to a higher life.

But now, even in the mind’s ordinary state there are many such
beginnings of a higher order of things--many moments of a more
concentrated energy, which bespeak a joint operation of the otherwise
divided faculties and powers of soul and spirit, and have for their
result a partial restoration, at least, of harmony to this otherwise
dismembered whole. Among these I would mention, first of all, that inner
fixity of character, where thought, will, and conduct are consistent
throughout; secondly, a true artistic genius in the creations both of
poetic and plastic fancy. Lastly, there is that ardent and disinterested
love, with its magnanimous self-sacrifices, which, though it surpasses
all the limits of reason, can not, nevertheless, be looked upon as a
mere imagination or illusion of fancy, forming as it does a profound and
natural energy of the human soul, and constituting in truth its true and
proper essence. No doubt the external phenomenon and effect of this
elevated principle of the soul is often tarnished and lessened by the
dull admixture of earthly ardor, and the bewilderment of passion. A true
and perfect manifestation of the feeling, consequently, is no less rare
than the truly felicitous creations of real artistic genius. Still it is
to it that we must look for the first principle of a higher living
thought and the true science thereof. The truly loving soul needs only
the excitement and guidance of a mind or spirit ripened and matured in
divine experience. Accordingly, the consciousness thus restored to unity
and completeness of perfection becomes actively operative in its triple
energy. And in the same manner the spirit striving with most ardent
aspiration after the divine, requires nothing but such an animating
contact with the loving soul, in order to attain fully and effectually
to its desired end.

In the series of combining elements or principles of union for the
otherwise divided consciousness there is yet another phenomenon, both
great and comprehensive in itself, and which also reveals itself as such
in actual life and experience. And this phenomenon is furnished by
language, with its wonderful variety and yet truly artistic uniformity.
For it is the vital product of the whole inner man. All the faculties
both of soul and spirit, however discordant generally, combine each, in
their full share and measure, to perfect this their conjoint production.
And yet, after all, many traces of inherent imperfection are visible
therein. It is only in the highest creations of artistic genius,
manifesting itself either in poetry or some other form of language, and
then only in the brightest and happiest moments of inspiration, that we
meet with the perfect harmony of a complete and united consciousness, in
which all its faculties work together in combined and living action.

In language, all the four principal powers have a nearly equal part and
share. The grammatical structure, the rules for the changes and
declensions of words, and their syntax, are furnished by the reason.
From the fancy, on the other hand, is derived whatever is figurative;
and how very far does not this reach, extending as it does into the
primary and natural signification of words, which often no longer
exists, or at least is rarely traceable? Lastly, the clear and distinct
arrangement of the parts, the nicely-finished and beautiful shape of the
whole of any composition, whether poetical or rhetorical, civil or
scientific, are the contributions of the understanding. And so, also,
whatever is truly characteristic--whatever, in short, goes beyond the
mere instinctive cry of animal nature, and the childlike, oft-times
childish imitation of external sounds--in short, that deep and spiritual
significance, that characteristic meaning which, in the original
stem-syllable and radical words of some rich old language, invariably is
regarded as a beauty, must be ascribed to the understanding, which so
profoundly seizes and precisely designates whatever is peculiar, unless,
perhaps, it is preferred to assign it to an immediate feeling, which
wonderfully harmonizes with or responds to it. Moreover, the magic force
of a commanding will, which carries all before it by its intrinsic
energy, is at least noticeable in those few brilliant passages of
highest inspiration or perfect poetic delineation, from whose clear and
perspicuous language, the apparently ineffable, shining forth like an
electric spark, kindles and influences every sensitive and kindred mind.

But before I go deeper into the question of the origin of language, and
examine the correct idea of this all-embracing and wonderful faculty of
speech, as man’s most remarkable and peculiar property, I would call
your attention to the intimate connection subsisting between thought and
speech, which is throughout reciprocal. For as speech must be regarded
as a thinking, outwardly projected and manifested, so, too, thinking
itself is but an inward speaking and a never-ending dialogue with one’s
self.

Judging, from all appearances, the consciousness of animals, so far as
we are justified in ascribing it to them, is perfectly simple, but sadly
defective and limited. But even here, however, the several melodious
courses of irrational and seemingly unconscious sounds appear like so
many echoes of a better foretime--lost traces of ancient memory, and
which, together with the moving and mournful cry of deep, painful
longing, seem to make tolerably clear to us the notion of the creature
waiting and groaning for its emancipation. Highly simple, too, but in
quite a different respect, is the consciousness or thought of the free
spirits in their pure activity, such as we may and ought to represent it
to ourselves--like the ray of light which in its rapid descent
penetrates all space. But marvelously intricate, on the other hand, and
highly complicated, is the so manifoldly rich, and, at the same time, so
versatile and changeable consciousness of man. Such, at least, is the
impression which a serious and searching glance into the unfathomable
depths of our inward man enforces upon us. And, indeed, just as in the
triple operation of the consciousness, when restored to the full
perfection of life, we may trace a certain faint signature of man’s
pristine likeness to the Creator, so also a slight vestige of the same
kind is, we might fancy, discoverable in its unfathomable depth, which,
however, now reveals itself in quite a different form from its original
nature, and appears to be converted into its opposite. How often does
the thought that seeks to penetrate the mysteries of nature--the hidden
thinker within man--believe that he has completely solved the riddle of
existence, and is able to explain and rightly interpret the many-meaning
but obscure words of the sphinx within us! And even then, when he most
flatters himself with his own ingenuity, this miserable Œdipus of his
own destiny is stricken with even more fatal and incurable blindness
than the old Theban, and can not discern the abyss of error into which
his whole life has been hurrying, and into which it is at last plunged
headlong and precipitated. Ever laboring to seize the changing Proteus
of its own self, our Ego may, perhaps, often arrive at a rare amazement
at the enigma of existence, and also is even seized many a time with a
light terror. Never, however, by itself, let it think and seek as it
may, will it be able, without some other guide, to find the object of
its longing, and, in its tragic blindness, to discover the clue of the
labyrinthic mazes of its own thoughts, and at last to arrive at harmony
with itself.

So profound, moreover, and lasting is this our intrinsic dualism and
duplicity--(and I use the term here, not in its usual moral sense, but
in a higher signification, which is purely psychological and
metaphysical)--so deeply is this dualism rooted in our consciousness,
that even when we are, or at least think ourselves alone, we still think
as two, and are constrained, as it were, to recognize our inmost
profoundest being as essentially dramatic. This colloquy with self, or
generally, this internal dialogue, is so perfectly that natural form of
human thinking, that even the saintly solitaries of bygone centuries,
who, in the Egyptian deserts or the Alpine hermitages, devoted a half
life to meditation on divine things and mysteries, were often not able
otherwise to indicate the result of such meditations, to invest it in
another dress, to bring it into any other form of exposition than that
of a dialogue of the soul with God. And in all religions, what properly
is true prayer but a kind of dialogue, a confidential opening of the
heart to the universal Father, or a filial solicitation of His
benevolence?

But to pass over at once to the directly opposite aspect of the matter:
even in the classical works of cultivated antiquity, at a time when
these depths of a loveful feeling were not yet so widely developed, nor
so completely revealed and unveiled, we meet with this same phenomenon
in another form, and one indeed of the highest intellectual clearness
and brilliancy--in the graceful ornament, viz., of a truly exquisite
diction. I am alluding to the characteristic distinction of the
discourses and teaching of Socrates--that peculiar irony, such as it is
found in the Platonic dialogues, and of which only a very slight trace
is to be found in the works of some of the earliest poets. For what else
is this scientific irony of the inquiring thought and of the highest
cognition, than a consciousness which, while it clearly perceives the
secret contradictions which beset the mind, even in its most earnest
pursuit of the highest aim of life, has attained, nevertheless, to
perfect harmony with itself.

I must not, however, omit to remind you that this term in modern
phraseology has fallen very far below its primary meaning, and is often
so taken as to designate nothing more than a mere playful mockery. In
its original Socratic sense, however, such as it is found in the whole
series of the thought and the internal structure of Plato’s dialogues,
where it is developed to its fullest measure and proportion, irony
signifies nothing else than this amazement of the thinking spirit at
itself, which so often dissolves in a light, gentle laugh. And this
light laugh again oftentimes beneath its cheerful surface conceals and
involves a deeper and profounder sense, another and a higher
significance, even the most exalted seriousness. In the thoroughly
dramatic development and exposition of thought which we meet with in the
works of Plato, the dialogical form is essentially predominant. Even if
all the superscriptions of names and persons, all forms of address and
reply, and, in short, the whole conversational garb, were taken away
from it, and we were merely to follow the inner threads of the thought
according to their connection and course, the whole would, nevertheless,
remain a dialogue, where each answer calls forth a new question, and the
eddying stream of speech and counter-speech, or, rather, of thought and
counter-thought, moves livingly onward. And unquestionably this form of
inner dialogue is, if not in every case equally applicable and
absolutely necessary, still it is all but essential, and at least highly
natural and very appropriate to every form of living thought and its
vivid enunciation. And in this sense even the continuous unbroken speech
of a single person may also assume the character of a dialogue. Yes, I
must confess that as it is my first object to attain to the greatest
possible perspicuity of a vivid development of ideas, I should then most
confidently believe that I had gained my end, if the present Lectures
should in any degree make the same impression on you as a dialogue
would--if they should appear like a series of questions, to which some
of you, if not throughout, yet here and there, should in your heart give
a tacit answer and assent--or even (and in this case still more so,
indeed) if, in the whole context of these Lectures, you should find and
believe to discover for many questions which your own hearts, your own
reflections and life itself suggested, if not a full, satisfactory
answer, yet at least one directly meeting the difficulty, and full of
suggestions for its solution.




LECTURE III.


True irony--for there also is a false one--is the irony of love. It
arises out of the feeling of finiteness and one’s own limitation, and
out of the apparent contradiction between this feeling and the idea of
infinity which is involved in all true love. As in actual life and in
the love which centers in an earthly object, a good-humored raillery,
which amuses itself with some little defect of character, either
apparent or real, is not inconsistent with sincerity--not, at least,
when both parties have no doubt of each other’s affection, and its ardor
admits of no increase--but, on the contrary, lends to it an agreeable
charm, even so is this true of that other and highest love. Here, too,
an apparent, or it may be an actual, but still only insignificant and
trivial contradiction, can not destroy the idea on which such a love is
based, but, on the contrary, serves rather to confirm and strengthen it.
But only there where love has reached the highest purity--has become
profoundly confirmed and perfect--does this appearance of contradiction,
which is thrown out in an affectionate irony, fail to alloy or weaken
all higher and better feeling. And what other foundation could a
philosophy of life well have and recognize as legitimate than the idea
of such a love? And this is even that supposition of life, viz., of the
inner life, of which I formerly said that it is the only one which
philosophy requires, and from which alone it must set out. Only it is
requisite that this love should be personally experienced or inwardly
felt, and the notion of it derived from immediate experience.

Directly opposed to those arbitrary systems which compose the reigning
philosophy of the day, the philosophy of life is a science of internal
spiritual experience, which, as it proceeds from, so it every where
rests on facts; though indeed the facts on which it is grounded, and to
which it has invariably to refer, are in many respects of a high and
peculiar kind. On this account philosophy may even be called a science
of divine experience. If man had never, and, in short, were incapable of
having any experience of divine things, what could he know of the Deity
with certainty? A knowledge devoid of experience would be but the
arbitrary creation or illusion of his own mind--an inward fancy, or the
mere reflex of his own reason--consequently an absolute nullity. And for
such a knowledge the task would ever be difficult to get rid of a mere
idealistic conception of the Divine Being, or at least to repel the
doubt whether He be actually any thing more than what such a conception
represents Him. And, in fact, in most treatises and elaborate
developments of that system of thought which makes man’s self the
exclusive principle and standard of truth, the manner of treating the
divine nature is extremely superficial. Such purely formal and empty
notions on this subject are advanced, that we are often justified in
applying to these speculations on the highest topic of human language
and thought, the remark that applies too often to lower scientific
treatises: “Thus it is that men write who have no real knowledge of the
matter.” “Here we at once see there is a total want of personal
observation; the work is not based on any solid foundation of actual
experience.”

Now the philosophy of life, in its highest range at least, is a divine
science of experience. This experience, however, is throughout internal
and spiritual. It is therefore easily conceivable that it can enter
readily and easily into all other experimental sciences, and into those
especially which more immediately relate to man, as, for instance, most
of the branches of natural history, and still more into philology, with
which at present we are most immediately concerned. And this it does, in
order to borrow such illustrations and comparisons as may tend to
elucidate or further to develop its own subject-matter, or else to
furnish applications to individual cases in other departments of life.
However, in thus proceeding, philosophy must take heed lest it overpass
its own proper limits or forget its true end and aim. It must not go too
deeply into particulars, or lose itself among the specialities of the
other sciences. On the contrary, it ought carefully to confine itself to
those points which more immediately concern man, and especially the
inner man, and, adhering to the meaning and spirit of the whole, seek to
elucidate and throw out this pre-eminently.

The question as to the origin of language, or, more correctly, the
question how man attained to the capacity for this wonderful gift or
faculty of speech, which forms so considerable and essential a part of
his whole nature, if it is to be taken merely as a matter of historical
research and philosophical learning, lies out of the circle which we
have marked out to ourselves. A discussion exclusively confined to this
special branch of philology has little in unison with speculations
involving the inner experience of life and psychological observation.
There are two opinions pretty generally diffused on this subject: the
one maintaining that there is one primary and original language, from
which, as a stem, all others have branched forth; and the other, that
several were cotemporaneously formed. These opinions, as unfavorably
affecting the right understanding of the essential connection between
language or speech and thought, I would wish to keep out of view, and
consequently I shall dismiss them with a few passing remarks.

The one is founded on an erroneous hypothesis, and is itself false. It
is in open contradiction to facts, as we now know them with tolerable
completeness. As for the other, even if it be not in itself truly and
properly false, it is, nevertheless, based on a great misconception, or
at least, as it is commonly propounded, involves one.

The former theory consists in this, that language generally, or, rather,
several cotemporary languages, as fundamentally distinct from each other
as the several races of men, who, as this view asserts, sprung up out of
the earth, and its primeval slime, were formed spontaneously by a
perfectly natural process. To the mere animal cries and various
instinctive exclamations, either of joy and grief, of passion and want,
were associated the deliberate imitation, together with a childlike
mimicry of different sounds, similar to what we may even now observe in
children, with whom such mimic intonations and mocking word-play is a
common and favorite amusement. From such sensuous beginnings, it is
pretended, a language might have grown up, gradually and slowly, indeed,
to the height of rationality and grammatic form and order. That these
two elements--the animal cries of nature and the mechanical imitation of
sounds--have contributed to the development of language, is a position
that needs not and can not be controverted. This element, however, is
not found in all languages in equal measure. It is strongest in those
languages which stand at the very lowest grade of development. Among
others, again, which having attained very rapidly to maturity, and
having at an early period branched off into several others, appear, in
their most ancient state, highly intellectual and significant, it is
scarcely traceable. But a fatal objection to the hypothesis as
explaining the universal and complete principle of the phenomenon of
language in all its ramifications, is the fact that the noblest and most
cultivated languages are found, upon investigation into their earliest
state, to possess, even at this date, the most artificial form, and to
be manifoldly rich, and at the same time highly regular and simple. And
this is pre-eminently the case with the Sanscrit or Indian, in
comparison with the Greek, Latin, and other kindred languages of the
West and North. In those, on the other hand, which appear to be at the
very lowest grade of intellectual culture (and generally these stand
quite isolated from all those in the midst of which they are found), we
frequently observe, on a closer acquaintanceship, a very high and
elaborate degree of art in their grammatical structure. This is
especially the case with the Basque and the Lapponian, and many of the
American languages. In the Chinese, this excessive and inappropriate
expenditure of art has been directed to a very peculiar and complicated
system of writing. There was no place for it in the language itself,
which is extremely poor, being in its basis excessively, not to say
childishly, simple, and quite ungrammatical. Its whole verbal treasury
does not, it is said, contain more than three hundred and thirty words,
which form the same number of single syllables. These, however, acquire
a different signification by means of accents, of which there are no
less than eighty thousand; and even though, as competent judges and the
learned aver, not more than the fourth of this large number are really
necessary and made use of in practice, still the liability to mistake
must be very great, since the entire language is founded on this
artificial system of writing, much more than on its living and spoken
sounds. Hence, not unfrequently, when even learned Chinese talk
together, they misunderstand each other. This, indeed, is occasionally
the case in other countries also. But the difference is, that in the
former the source of misconception lies in the language itself; and it
is only by writing down their words, that the Chinese can be sure of
intelligibly conveying their real meaning.

Modern and experienced philologists have, in consequence of these
difficulties, given up that view of language which would derive it
entirely from the imitation of animal cries. Plain facts, indeed, speak
too decidedly against it. And, in truth, the chief point to be guarded
against amid the great variety and the immeasurable richness of the
phenomena of language in general, is the explaining them all by any
single hypothesis, or the deriving them from one origin.

As to the other opinion respecting the origin of language: the view and
assertion that God himself brought language to man, and taught it to
him, can not properly excite any opposition, in so far as all that is
good, and man’s best and original prerogatives, must in reason be
derived from God as their first author. But when it is supposed that the
language which on this hypothesis the first man spoke in Paradise, and
which, as such, is the source of all other later and derivative
languages, may still be found, and is to be recognized in any one now
extant, as, _e.g._, the Hebrew--this assuredly is a great error. It
involves a total misconception of the immense interval which separates
us from the first origin of the world. Of the language which may have
belonged to the first man, before he lost his original power,
perfections, and dignity, we are not, with our present organs and
senses, in a capacity to form an idea. Indeed, we are no more able to do
this than to judge of the nature of the language employed by the eternal
spirits for the immediate interchange of their thoughts, which on the
wings of light fly instantaneously through the wide expanse of heaven,
or of those words, ineffable by any created being, which are uttered by
the Deity in His inmost being, where, to use the words of the Psalmist,
“deep calleth unto deep,” and where the fullness of infinite love
answers to Eternal Majesty.

But now, to descend from this unattainable height to our own level, and
to consider the first man as he really was: then in the simple statement
of the first authentic records of mankind, that God taught man language,
there is nothing, if we adhere to its obvious meaning, which is in any
way revolting to man’s natural feelings. For why should it make any such
startling impression on us, if, as it ought, this whole matter be
understood somewhat in the light of a mother teaching her child the
first rudiments of language?

Still, together with this simple and childlike signification, it (like
every other part of this divine book, thus written on the inside and the
out) possesses also a far deeper meaning. That name by which each living
creature is called by God, and designated from eternity, must embrace
the sum of its inmost essence--the key of its existence--the reason and
the explanation of its being. As, indeed, generally in the Holy
Scriptures, so here, also, a high and holy import is combined with the
notion of the name. Interpreted, then, by this profound sense and
significance, this brief narrative, as I previously pointed out, conveys
the idea that by this communication to man by God Himself, of the names
of all living things, the former was set up as the lord and king of
nature, and even as God’s vicegerent over the terrestrial creation. And
indeed this was his original destination.

If, then, no existing speech or language can afford us an access to this
veiled original, now become inaccessible to us, still the idea of one
primary language, or, perhaps, of several such, is certainly any thing
but devoid of an historical foundation. At least it is a very natural
hypothesis, and founded in some degree on facts, which must not be
forthwith rejected, but requires to be tested by further inquiry. It is,
however, of no light importance to the maintenance of this hypothesis to
form a right conception of the difference between derivatory and mixed
languages, and, above all, to take a comprehensive survey of the whole
of human language, in its nearly boundless wealth, so far as such a
survey is serviceable to our present object of arriving at a true
knowledge of man. And how can such a profitable application and
applicability be well doubted? For the genealogical tree of human
languages, in its manifold ramifications--the growth of language
shooting forth from epoch to epoch, with all the vast riches of art,
does but hold before us, as it were, a written monument and memorial of
the thinking consciousness assuming, so to speak, a bodily shape, and
visibly presenting itself before us, but still on a grand historical
standard, and according to dimensions which reach over the whole
habitable globe. That, _therefore_, the history of the thinking
consciousness stands in most intimate connection, or at least in very
close relation to the science of living thought, is surely a point which
requires neither lengthened investigation nor an express demonstration.

In the attempt at this juxtaposition, I shall only project those points
which either are of importance for the right understanding of the whole,
or of interest in themselves. For this purpose I shall avail myself of
nothing but the most certain and clearly demonstrated results of modern
research into the nature and history of language. All that may appear in
any way uncertain, or would lead us too far into the special branches of
philology, will be left unnoticed.

A simile from physical science will perhaps lead us by the quickest and
shortest road to the object we are in pursuit of. And, indeed, the
geological branch of natural history may well be considered cognate to
the inquiry before us. For what geology properly investigates is the
antiquities of this terrestrial planet, and the primal condition of the
mountain ranges, observing and seeking to read the long-hidden memorials
that are daily brought to light of pristine convulsions, and to number
the successive epochs of gradual change and decay. But it was not at
once that geological science made any progress beyond the mere
acquaintance with the surface of our globe. An insight into its primary
internal constitution and subsequent process of formation was not gained
until observation had enabled us accurately to distinguish between the
two kinds of rocks--the alluvial and the secondary, with their
fossiliferous strata of chalk and clay--and the primary, unstratified
rocks of granitic and similar structure, and by patient and accurate
observation of the superficial phenomena of the earth in different lands
and climates to establish this classification as a general law. Now this
geological distinction admits of application to language. Those
composite languages which have been formed out of a mixture or
aggregation of several, may be compared to the diluvial rocks which
belong to the secondary formation. As the latter have arisen out of or
have been formed by floods and inundations, so these mixed languages owe
their origin to the great European migration of nations, or perhaps were
formed by the East by similar Asiatic migrations, at a still older
epoch, and in primeval times. Those languages, on the contrary, which,
at least as compared with those which are manifestly mere derivatives
from them, we may call primary. In this class we may mention the Roman
among those of Europe, and the Sanscrit in those of Asia. These, then,
stand on the same line and dignity with the so-called primary rocks. No
doubt, even in these further investigation will discover many traces of
a mixture, no less palpable indeed, but one, however, in which the
constituents neither were originally so heterogeneous, nor since have
continued so totally unchanged. For in the same manner, granitic rocks,
and others of the primary order, are also found to be composite in their
mineral constituents. These likewise point to a still earlier convulsion
of nature, to which they owed their first production. Unquestionably,
however, the primary mountains form the first line and earliest
formation among the several epochs of revolution which the present earth
has undergone. But it would be an error were we from this simple fact at
once to draw any inference as to the interior of our globe; for this
geological and mineralogical distinction of the two classes of rocks can
not be proved to hold good beyond the mere surface and coat of the
earth. To this alone is man’s observation and experience confined.

It is impossible to penetrate very far into the interior or the central
mass of our planet, and investigate its internal constitution, and
consequently this ring of rock can not be regarded in any other light
than as analogical to the thin covering and epidermis of the organic
living creature. And just so is it with the science of language. There
are undoubtedly languages which, in a certain sense, we may term
primary. Only in so doing, we must not think that in any one of them we
have discovered and possess the long-hidden original of all existent
languages. If, for instance, from this correct geological classification
of rock, any bold speculator should go on to assert that the whole
interior of the earth, or at least the center of it, is a mass of
granitic or other primary rock, we feel at once that this would be a
baseless hypothesis. And it would be as grave an error, in the domain of
philology, were we to go on and draw a similar conclusion. The Sanscrit,
for instance, holds unquestionably the foremost rank, as the oldest
among those which belong to the same family, and, as compared with
these, may undoubtedly, in a precise but limited sense, be regarded as a
primary language; but it would be an idle assumption were we therefore
to consider it in the same light that Hebrew was formerly, and to look
upon it as the universal original, the first source and mother of all
other languages on the surface of the earth.

But not even the historical prerogative of a high antiquity--no, nor
even the merit of having preserved a primary form in greatest purity,
however valuable a quality, is the sole standard of excellence in a
language, nor that which alone determines its perfection. The English
language affords a ready illustration of our remark. To it, beyond all
others, the designation of being a mixed language applies; indeed it
corresponds altogether to this character. It furnishes at the same time
a striking proof of the height of excellence which even a mixed language
is capable of attaining; meeting as it does, all the requisitions of a
solemn and nervous poetry, the earnest appeals of eloquence, and the
calm flow of descriptive prose. And yet, on analysis, it presents to the
grammatical eye the somewhat heterogeneous compound of two wholly
different elements, whose originally chaotic mixture has been reduced
into a rare and happy proportion. For into its original High-Dutch, or
Anglo-Saxon basis, many words have been introduced from the Latin or
Norman-French, which among the living roots of the former appear so far
aliens and foreigners, as, being little capable of grammatical
declension or derivation, they do not, like the others, form so many
fruitful verbal stems, from which new forms and compounds shoot forth.
Of Asiatic languages the Persian is in this respect of a similar
constitution to the English. Here also the essential foundation and
living root of the whole is some peculiar and old national language,
closely akin to the Sanscrit and Gothic-German; but its Arabian
admixture is as great in degree as the Latin-French of the English, and
indeed both were brought in by a similar political revolution. Still the
Persian is generally, and with good cause, praised as a noble language,
abounding in lively poetical ornament, and moreover, like the French in
Europe is adopted throughout Asia as the general language, of business
and conversation. Those derivatory languages also which stand next in
order to the mixed, and in part also belong to them, and which have
rather softened down than abolished the stricter grammatical forms,
having rounded them off as it were for greater convenience of use, do
not necessarily stand inferior to the mother-tongue in grace and vigor
of composition. On the contrary, in respect of style, they are often
vastly superior to them. Thus the Italian appears softer and more
flexible for lyrical verse, and perhaps for every creation of the poetic
fancy, sweeter and more graceful than its Roman mother-tongue. The
French, too, at least as the language of society, moves with an
unequalled freedom, while, for precision and distinctness of expression,
its prose has attained to an unparalleled height of excellence. The
Spanish also, besides being praised for the excellence of its prose, as
admirably suited either for the dignity of serious narrative or the
ingenious play of wit, is in poetry distinguished above most of its
sister dialects by a wonderful richness and peculiar grace in the
playful sallies of the fancy. And yet it is a derivative language, and
compounded of the most heterogeneous elements. For not only it is highly
probable that the Gothic-German admixture is even greater in this than
in any other of the romance dialects which sprung up out of the Latin,
but the Arabic also forms a very considerable element in it.

But it was not to descend into the grammatical specialities of
philological erudition, or to heap up a mass of purely æsthetical
remarks, that I have alluded to these pregnant instances. What I chiefly
had in view was to remove, if possible, all erroneous notions from the
conception of the primal language. It was, in short, my object to bring
before your minds its origin and growth, according to that continuous
process which may even still be seen going on in any spoken language.
And although in our own neighborhood it is only in a few partial
instances, and these far from definite, that we can trace this living
process, still they are not on this account to be neglected, since they
furnish much instruction, and are calculated to throw much light upon
the whole matter.

Now, as regards the historical origin, not only of language in general,
but also of its several extant dialects, and especially those which
relatively to such as are derived and compounded out of them may pass as
primary, there is one essential point toward a right understanding of
the matter. We must not attempt to account for their origination and
development merely by a mixture and derivation from many individual
parts, but rather endeavor to set them before our minds as productions
similar in nature to that of a poem or any other piece of art. For the
latter are severally the result of a conception which, from the very
first, was a whole--they never could have been produced by any
successive agglomeration of atomistic parts. In this view of language we
must, in thought, place ourselves at a very different epoch of mind from
the present. Now we can not well hesitate to allow that, in the primal
period of the human race, and of nations individually, the productive
fancy would manifest itself in the creation of words with far more of
inventive genius and fertility than would be likely to be displayed at
a subsequent period of mental culture, when the analytical reason had,
step by step, succeeded in gaining the preponderance.

Commonly, indeed, men speak strangely enough of the origin of languages.
They talk of the matter somewhat in the same fashion as it would be to
say of a picture, that it had its origin in ochre, lake, ceruse,
asphalt, and such like coloring substances, together with the addition
of oil, which holds here somewhat the same place that in language the
reason does with its grammatical arrangement and logical combinations.
Of these motley materials, it might be said, one little particle after
another is laid on the canvas, till, gradually, long streaks appear,
which again swell gradually into fuller and deeper outline, until, at
last, a complete form and figure stands forth, to which, at last, there
accrues an expressive physiognomy. And so, at last, the picture is
finished. But in all this description it seems totally forgotten, that
unless the ideal conception--the picture as a whole--had, from the very
first, been present to the mind of the painter, it would never have
attained to such a realization, thus growing up, step by step, under the
hand of the artist. At least, without this it would not be a true
artistic work of genius, since this is, in every instance, the result of
some foregoing conception of a whole.

Not piecemeal, therefore, and fragmentarily, did language arise. It came
forth, rather, at once, and in its totality, out of the full inner and
living consciousness of man. We shall have no difficulty in thus
considering it, if only we can succeed in ideally transplanting
ourselves to that foretime when the thinking faculty was more creative,
and when, in the designation and expression of its ideas, it moved more
freely and with the elasticity of genius. But if speech answers to
thought, and if language itself is but a true copy, a shifting diorama,
as it were, of man’s inward self, then (to make use of that oldest
record of the human race, which, as it is better and more natural than
all others, so it also furnishes the best clew for unraveling the
riddles of olden tradition), we might well ask whether the language of
Cain, the accursed vagabond wandering over the face of the earth, could
have been the same as that of the pious patriarchs and saints of the
primeval world, some of whom, under other names, but in equal honor,
are found mentioned in the traditions of the ancient Persians, and the
sacred books of the Hindoos and other Asiatic nations? Or could it well
have been the same with that of Noah, the second progenitor and the
restorer of the human race, whom, likewise, the earliest traditionary
records of every people recognize and mention. The family of the
Cainites holds no inconsiderable place in the earliest history of
civilization, and the first working of metals, and the invention of
several useful arts, is expressly ascribed to them. But still their
difference in language from the other families of the antediluvian
world, and generally in their whole civil constitution, must have been
very great and palpably noticeable. And this favors the hypothesis,
which, in itself, is any thing but impossible, and deserves rather to be
called highly probable, of several primary languages, or, at least, of
different epochs in the primeval speech of the earliest foretime, which,
moreover, serve to indicate so many natural sections in the progression
which the mental development of the aboriginal family of man observed,
and the shapes which its mode of thinking successively assumed.

Now, if I may venture to suggest the course in which some such
progression may, in idea at least, be projected and traced in the entire
system of the vast multitudes of languages which exist on the face of
the earth, I would set out with the Sanscrit. For this is the best known
and understood of the whole Hindoo family, among which it holds the
foremost rank as the oldest and most complete. To the same class would
belong first of all the old Persian, the Gothic-German, and the
Scandinavian, all of which are most intimately related to the former;
then the Greek, and the Latin with its many derivatives; and lastly,
according to the opinion of competent judges, nearly the whole of the
Slavonic dialects. All these languages, each in its measure, and in
proportion to the cultivation it had enjoyed, are marked, especially in
their earliest stages, by a very artificial structure and a beautiful
grammatical arrangement, but pre-eminently by a highly noble poetic
shape, combined with an equal degree of scientific precision. This,
however, is but one family among many others which make up the whole
system. The latter, however, stand at a far lower grade of development
and perfection. Among those which, like the Tartaric-Chinese and the
African, belong to the latter class, the highly remarkable dialects of
America occupy an important and characteristic place. The traveler[64]
best acquainted with the American races and dialects has described the
former as singularly remarkable for the degradation to which their
mental faculties have fallen below the original standard, while he
speaks of the latter as resembling the relics of some great ruin or
mighty devastation. On this expression of the famous traveler, which
agrees so accurately with the idea I am here developing, and with the
result of my own investigation into the course of the human mind since
the old and primal times, I am disposed to lay very great stress. For
with him it was the conviction impressed upon his mind by personal
observation alone, unbiassed by any preconceived opinion or hypothesis
favorable to my views. This character of deep degradation belongs,
perhaps, to the better class of languages, since they present but little
analogy to each other in their material elements, and admit scarcely of
any classification. At least it forms a distinctive mark of them, and
awakens a melancholy impression.

The Egyptian, which, since the partial deciphering of its hieroglyphics,
is no longer totally inaccessible, belongs, I think, to this second
class. In it, however, it holds a very important place, and is eminently
distinguished. For its hieroglyphical mode of writing, by combining the
alphabetical with the symbolical mode of indication, gave it,
consequently, great liberty of choice among the different phonetic
figures which might stand for the same alphabetic character, so that the
phonetic word was, as it were, invested with a symbolical garb, and all
alike assumed an hieroglyphical tone. Some of the Greeks regarded the
hieroglyphical as the oldest of all human languages; and, indeed, that
somber melancholy which seems to reign in all the monuments of ancient
Egypt, might well be regarded as a silent witness to the great event of
the ruin of a primeval world.

In order to complete our subject, the Hebrew still remains for a general
notice in that brief review which alone our limits admit of. We must,
however, give such a characteristic view of it as will enable us
correctly to determine the place which it is to assume among the rest.
Apparently, it stands isolated by itself, belonging altogether to
neither of the two classes we have described. It seems to favor the
conjecture, that a new and peculiar class is necessary to embrace all
the phenomena in this first and oldest epoch of language. This, then,
with the two already considered, will form three classes. In its radical
words, the Hebrew exhibits only a slight relationship to the
Indo-European family. This, however, on further examination, will
probably be found to be still more considerable. For it is often
impossible to recognize it at once beneath a totally different
grammatical form and structure, and it is, moreover, withdrawn from
immediate notice by the difference of its predominant mental tendency.
We know, however, as an historical fact, that the Phœnician, which
differed from the Hebrew only as one dialect from another, was not
without some connection with the Greek, on which it exercised no
inconsiderable influence. Now, with respect to the peculiar character of
the Hebrew, every thing in it is directed to the attainment of the
highest vividness and profound significance. This is even the case with
its grammatical principle, which makes all its other terms, whether
names of objects or qualities, subordinate to the verb. The triplicity,
also, of the roots, which, with very few exceptions, consist of three
letters--which again, for the most part, constitute as many
syllables--was, assuredly, not without a significant design, and
possessed, collaterally, a certain mystic allusion. In its profound
significancy and compressed brevity--in its figurative boldness and
prophetical inspiration, far more than in any chronological precedence
of antiquity, consists the peculiar character and high prerogative of
the Hebrew. On the other hand, it is somewhat inferior to many others,
as, for example, the Greek, in poetical forms and shape, in richness and
variety of development, and in precision of scientific diction. In its
essential character, the Hebrew language is prophetical, like the people
itself, even in the present evil days of their dispersion--the people in
whom the living word of the twofold ancient prophecy, now that the Jews
have handed it over to the Gentiles, has first attained its perfect
accomplishment.

The whole system of the languages of man is but the external and visible
copy and true mirror of his inmost consciousness. The different epochs
of their ancient production are but so many terms in the progression
observed by the human mind in its development. Consequently, language in
general, as the clew of memory, and tradition, which binds together all
nations in their chronological series and succession, is, as it were,
the common memory and organ of recollection for the whole human race. It
is only in this relation, which is certainly important, and also
essential to the problem before us, that I have thought it allowable to
enter upon this episode. Many of the particulars may perhaps have been
unattractive enough. Still I trust that the general result, as throwing
light upon the origin, or, rather, the historical rise and oldest
development of language, has proved universally interesting, even though
at most it has but suggested matter for future meditation.

This result may be expressed or briefly comprised in the following
words: on our side of that obscure interval or great chasm which
separates us from the hidden and inaccessible history of the first
formation of language, the first grade in its growth is indicated by a
deep state of decline and a melancholy sense of the fact. And yet even
from this state a highly significant art is not altogether excluded,
since we see it expressing itself in the beautiful symbols of the
figurative language of Egypt. The second step in the further development
of human speech is formed by the lofty flight which the poetic spirit
took in the ancient languages, which greatly excel all others in beauty
of form and perfection of structure, in richness of poetical ornament,
and perspicuity of scientific precision. Some of the oldest fragments in
those languages are also marked with a peculiarly beautiful tone of
sarcerdotal solemnity, as is the case with many a relic from the
earliest period of the Latin.

But the fuller and higher initiation in divine lore, and a bold,
religious enthusiasm, form another and a peculiar grade in the
historical development of language; and this was the third step that it
took in this earliest and primeval time. And, as a proof that the
characteristic just alluded to is not derived solely from the spirit and
tone of the holy writings of the Hebrews, and that I have not, without
further corroboration, transferred it at once to language in general, I
will add one more remark, tending to show that in some degree it has its
foundation in the very nature and grammatical structure of human speech
itself. In the Arabic, which in many other respects is closely akin to
the Hebrew, many of these characteristic properties may likewise be
traced, even though the Arabians at a very early date, turning aside
from the simple faith of the old patriarchs, gave themselves up to the
superstitions of magic and astrology, and, since the times of Mohammed,
have been animated with an inextinguishable and fanatical hatred of a
profounder truth of godliness and the religion of love.

I called language in general--as being the store-house of tradition,
where it lives on from nation to nation, and as being the clew of
material and spiritual connection which joins century to century--the
common memory of the human race. Now, it is this faculty of memory which
I would here seek to give a more precise characteristic of. For the
present seems its appropriate place in our series of psychological
inquiries, according to the relative position which it holds in the
general system of the mental faculties. Before entering upon this topic,
however, the position that language must not be thought of as being in
the first instance produced piecemeal by the concretion of several
atomistic and unconnected parts, but as molded in one cast, and in its
totality, similarly to a poetical or other creation of art, requires
proof and corroboration. For this purpose, then, I would bring to your
remembrance a fact or phenomenon which is closely connected with the
investigation into the nature of memory, though it involves a marvelous
leap of the memory, or at least of its usual method of operation: I am
alluding to what, by an old phrase, is called the gift of languages--or
that natural gift by which certain individuals seem enabled to enter all
at once into the spirit and structure of foreign languages, and that not
merely in the case of very simple ones, but even the highly-cultivated
and artificial languages of modern Europe.

This phenomenon of the soul transporting itself, or, as it were,
transported all at once into a language previously quite strange to it,
so as to understand any spoken or written composition in it, is
certainly not one of ordinary occurrence; and, in truth, whenever it
manifests itself strongly and decidedly, it closely borders on the
marvelous. Still it is a fact sufficiently well known, and neither
unheard of nor rare. On the other hand, the higher and active case of
the same phenomenon, which is marked, not merely by the understanding
but also by the speaking of a language never before learned, and which
was meant by the gift of tongues in the old sense, is certainly a really
miraculous fact. But even this is acknowledged and believed, and there
is no sufficient reason for calling in question the ancient witnesses
to the fact, merely on account of the nature of it.

I called this fact a wonderful leap of the memory. For however
subordinate this faculty may in other respects appear relatively to
those which every where make prominent claim to the spontaneous burst of
genius, still, even in the case of memory, its first spring and origin
is often veiled and inexplicable, and it presents many points of view
leading to profoundest questioning, and suggesting grave investigation.

In our psychological survey of the whole human mind, we set out with its
four leading faculties, as arranged under the two contrarieties of
understanding and will, of reason and fancy. Besides these four leading
faculties, there are several, perhaps, just as many others, derived
indeed from the former, but still not so much subordinate to them (for
in another relation they appear equally important and not less essential
than them) as rather co-ordinate with them and having a peculiar
function assigned to them. Of these I have in my former Lectures
analyzed and described the conscience as the moral instinct for right
and wrong, when I named it the reason applied to the will, or, rather,
as I preferred to consider it, as a peculiar and independent faculty,
intermediate between reason and will, and being an immediate feeling and
judgment as to what is good and evil in human desires and actions. Now,
just as conscience is a mean between reason and will, so is memory
intermediate between reason and understanding. With both of them it is
closely connected. Memory, on the one hand, is the treasure-house of the
understanding; indeed, it is the understanding hitherto acquired and
worked out, now laid and stored up. On the other hand, as the clew and
thread of recollection, memory furnishes that ground and principle of
association in the consciousness, on which reason itself and its
exercise is dependent. So entirely is this the case, that the partial or
total loss of memory, from sickness or old age, though producing no
derangement of the reason, is, nevertheless, followed by a partial
decline and slowness of rational thought, which occasionally amounts to
a general deadening and extinction of the rational faculty. The close
connection between memory and understanding is especially visible in
children, in whom the first faint opening of intellect is generally
simultaneous with the first apperception of self and retention of
external impressions or signs. The understanding is that thinking and
cognition of individuals, which is even the act of intellection.
Consequently, the individual mark and characteristic sign in the
function of memory belongs to the understanding; but the combining link
between these individual conceptions or signs--their permanent
association--is the reason’s share in memory; for the latter is the
knowing and consciousness which, in the coherent whole of associated and
illative thought, is conversant about general notions.

And here arises a question similar to that which we started in our
investigation of language. Must we assume, at the first awakening and
hidden spring of memory, a divine impulse, so to speak, or a higher
foundation for it from before the beginning of this terrestrial
existence? Or, indeed, since on this subject many theories have been
started of old, and are ever springing up, to retain a place among the
world’s floating opinions, what are we to think of these views tested by
that knowledge of our inmost consciousness which the observation of life
furnishes? How far do our feelings and reflections justify or limit
them? Among these opinions is the hypothesis revived by Leibnitz, of
innate ideas, or, rather, according to the most recent exposition of it,
of certain forms of thought essential to the reason, existing,
antecedently to experience, in its fundamental scheme, and, as it were,
engraven in it. Now all such opinions, whatever variations they may
present, arise, without exception, from the Platonic notion of the
_anamnesis_ possessed by the soul from a previous existence, and,
moreover, they agree with the dogma of the metempsychosis, which, Indian
in its origin, is, however, widely diffused among other nations also.

A real and actual pre-existence, however, of the human soul, as it does
not admit of any historical proof, so is it not easily reconcilable with
our own feelings, nor with our general sentiments on the relation we
stand in to God, and the divine economy in the government of the world.
And as for the ancient belief in the migration of souls, it can not,
however remarkable for its wide diffusion, be regarded in any other
light than an arbitrary creation of fancy and a kind of mythology of the
soul. Moreover, with regard to the theory of essential forms of thought
impressed on the reason antecedently to all experience and prior to the
first awakening of consciousness, it is based on a view of the reason
which would make it a universal receptacle of the thought, divided into
greater and less chambers and compartments. It is thus made the residuum
or dead precipitate of the natural functions of the living cogitation,
and of the law of life which rules therein, which, thus arranged in rank
and row, are placed before us, like the dried specimens of an herbarium,
or like the butterflies pinned to the entomologist’s case, from each of
which, however, amid the mechanical arrangement, the true, delicate,
light-winged Psyche has long since flown away. And since in philosophy
our first object must be to seize, if possible, the living thought in
its very life, and to give to it also a living expression, or at least
to paint it after the life, it is not easy to see to what end this so
circumstantial procedure is to lead. The whole hypothesis, in short,
seems useless and superfluous. As to the principle or hypothesis of
innate ideas, which in truth requires to be kept perfectly distinct from
the one previously considered, it is quite conceivable that it may be a
right method for the artist, who is ever in pursuit of the ideal, and in
some cases also for the thinker, to present to his mind the object of
his conception, and which he is seeking ideally to manifest, such as
with a similar end it would appear before and be contemplated by the
divine mind. At any rate, such a mode of thought would greatly
facilitate the execution of his ideal conception. But if what is meant
by this theory is an antecedent intellectual intuition of the pure ideas
in the divine mind, then we are brought again to the difficult and
debatable hypothesis of an actual pre-existence. Moreover, when we go
into details, and attempt to apply this theory to particular instances,
we are at once involved in the greatest perplexity. For what, even in
the department of art, are we to understand by the inborn idea of a
noble, wide-spreading tree, of a beautiful flower, a grand and
well-proportioned architectural edifice, or other monument? or a
vigorous animal, or noble human form? and what meaning, in the domain of
practical life, would it convey, to talk of the innate idea of a
skillful general, or of a wise financier? We can not, indeed, imagine to
what good end this hypothesis can serve or lead, and, consequently, as
soon as it is taken for any thing more than a mere figure of thought, it
involves us in new, if it does not entangle as again in the old,
inextricable difficulties.

The question, however, admits of a more general sense. Without
supposing that there is, inborn in the human soul, a whole system of
notions and forms of thought--a whole world, in short, of all possible
ideas--may there not have been imparted to it from above a higher gift,
which, naturally, is only called into action simultaneously with the
awakening of the rest of the human mind, or of the mind generally? If
so, would it not appear to the soul in the form of a memory; and, in a
certain sense, be really such, though, indeed, not so much a memory of
the part as of eternity? This is a question which, advanced in this
sense, can not, I think, be absolutely negatived; not that any essential
necessity or actual ground exists for it; but that, carefully guarded by
certain limitations, it is an hypothesis that may, without hesitation,
be assumed or conceded. Can it, in truth, well be doubted that every
spiritual being, created by infinite love, has had imparted to him a
share in the source of eternal love, which is to remain his forever, or
so long, at least, as the connection with the supreme source of his
being is not violently broken and rent asunder? If, then, such a portion
is to remain forever the property of every created spiritual being, it
must assume a definite place in his consciousness, and, in the
development of the latter, manifest itself in its due place. As regards,
indeed, the human soul, this supposition can, with less justice, be
denied, the more universally and pre-eminently the prerogative of a high
degree of resemblance to the divine image is ascribed to it.

Now, this participation in God, as the primary source of eternal love,
which abides forever in the human soul, and which becomes extinct in one
extreme case alone--this divine endowment of the human consciousness
from above--can only be thought of and described as the recollection of
eternal love; and this, moreover, is the only innate idea in the human
mind which it is possible or allowable to assume.

The thought of an original recollection in man--which, properly, is not
of a mere foretime, but of eternity, but which, in all propriety, still
admits of being termed a recollection--has brought us to the notion of
time and eternity, and to the question of their reciprocal relation--of
which the true and correct view is probably very different from that
which commonly prevails. But this is a topic which, for its further and
complete elucidation, demands a special investigation.




LECTURE IV.


The idea of a pre-existence of the soul in an earlier and different
state of being from the present, is a delusion and groundless
hypothesis, arbitrarily tacked on to Plato’s doctrine of the anamnesis
or of innate ideas. As such, it is calculated to involve us in
innumerable difficulties. I have, however, endeavored to show that the
doctrine itself is distinct, and can be kept separate, from this
arbitrary admixture. Stripped of all extraneous additions, the essential
parts of this Platonic doctrine of a higher memory have always possessed
a powerful attraction for many deep thinkers and noble minds. From its
first authors down to Leibnitz, it has made a deep and lasting
impression, which has ever enabled it from time to time to recover its
ascendency. In its purer sense and more simple and legitimate view, we
may, I asserted, understand by it no completely lifeless and mechanical
system of all the possible ideas which reason may evolve in the human
mind, antecedently arranged and classified, but an idea of his divine
origin innate or implanted in his mind, which can not be otherwise or
more simply indicated than by the expression we have chosen to designate
it--of a recollection of eternal love. But this recollection, I
affirmed, is not so much the remembrance merely of some special past,
which would again lead us to an actual pre-existence of the human soul,
as a remembrance of eternity; and it is in this light that the whole
idea must be regarded, if it is to be allowed any force. Now, this gives
rise to and calls for a closer investigation into the mutual relation
and whole conception of time and eternity.

This faculty of remembrance is of an entirely different kind from the
ordinary exercise and function of memory. This state, this quality or
power of the soul, or whatever else it may be called, might be
appropriately termed a transcendental memory, if it were not out of
season, or if any advantage would be gained by renewing the already
half-forgotten and involved terminology of the philosophic schools of
the last generation. Yet this would but be a change of name for the
self-same idea and object, which at best could only serve to exhibit
more distinctly and clearly, and from many points of view, whatever is
peculiar in the nature of such an unusual idea, or its new and unusual
sense, as well as the proper and difficult focus of inquiries and
investigations of this nature. But the point upon which depends the
decision of the whole matter, or, rather, from which alone its right
explanation can and must proceed, is, as already stated, the mutual
relation between time and eternity, and a just conception of both.

Usually, or at least oftentimes, eternity is explained and understood as
being the entire cessation, the perfect nonexistence and unconditional
negation of all time. But this would involve at the same time the
negation of life and all living existence (+),[65] so that nothing would
remain but an absolute negative, which is a void entity and perfect
nullity.

In place of the endless contradictions to which all negation generally,
and especially the absolute negation of time, can not but lead--in place
of that to which the English poet’s phrase of “darkness visible” is
applicable, I would offer a description of the idea of eternity, which
may, perhaps, render it less incomprehensible. Eternity, as I should
define it, is the all-embracing, completely complete time, which is
infinite, not only “_a parte externâ_,” _i.e._, ever-passing, yet
everlasting, without beginning and without end, but also infinite “_a
parte internâ_;” so that in the endlessly living, thoroughly luminous
present, and in the blissful consciousness thereof, the whole past, and
also the whole future, are equally actual, equally clear, and equally
present to us as the very present itself. For can we form any other
conception of a state of bliss? Nay, is not this idea of the fullness of
time entirely one and the same, and exactly coincident with that state
which at least we are able to think of, and indeed can not well avoid
thinking of? and is not this also the only form of existence applicable
to the divine consciousness, on the assumption and belief not of any
mere divine essence, but of an actual living and self-conscious Godhead?
That, at least, the idea of time is not absolutely excluded from the
life and essence or the operations of the living God of revelation,
there exists in the latter abundant indication, testimony, and proof.
Almost all the expressions there chosen for this matter allude to that
full and divine time, in which yesterday and to-morrow are as to-day,
and “a thousand years as one day,” and many others which convey the same
idea, but in no ways apply to the false notion of eternity which makes
it the absolute negation of all time. The very Hebrew name of God
furnishes a confirmation of this assertion. And I may here indulge
myself with producing it, since we shall be able to accomplish this
object without entering into an analysis of the language itself, and its
sense can be made perfectly clear according to the sense of our own
language, without any circumlocution or periphrase.

In the sacred volume of the Old Testament, two names are used to
designate the Supreme Being. The one is perfectly general, and signifies
the idea of God or the Deity absolutely, being also applied to the gods
of the heathen, and occasionally employed simply to signify angels and
spirits. The other, however, is exclusively given to the true and living
God of revelation. This word is derived from a Hebrew root, which
signifies “to be,” or, rather, since we can hardly expect to find in
these ancient languages, and in the primary significations of the
radical words, the idea of a simple abstract existence, it means life, a
positive living existence. In one place this name, which is made up of
four letters, is explained and interpreted as signifying “I am that I
am,” or, more accurately, “I am that I shall be.” Now, this is as much
as to say, the true and living God of revelation, He who from the
beginning has manifested forth His glory in creation, and who ever since
is continually manifesting Himself, internally, at least, to the whole
human race and to each individual, though, in truth, often unattended to
and little regarded, and who will still more gloriously reveal Himself
in the end of time, that is, of this earthly duration and period of
change, or, as it is expressed in Sacred Writ, in the fullness of time,
or when time itself shall be accomplished.

Now, here it is evident the idea of time is not absolutely excluded from
a conception of the essence and operations of God. On the contrary, this
description involves the idea of full and complete time, which lasts
from eternity to eternity, and to the height of which, when the hour
shall have come, that is to say, at the final consummation, this our
earthly time, in whose fetters this our world of sense is now held,
shall be raised and glorified.

The question, therefore, is properly to determine whether there exists
such an absolute opposition between time and eternity that it is
impossible for them to subsist in any mutual contact or relation, but
the one necessarily leads to the negation of the other, or whether, at
least, there is not some conceivable transition from the one to the
other. Now, in the former view, since the absolute, universally, and
most especially thinking as well as absolute willing, forms the
destructive principle in life, there lies, perhaps, the first source,
not only of false systems, but also of the metaphysical prejudices which
man’s intellect nourishes, and especially of all the deeply-rooted,
inborn, or hereditary errors of the reason. On the other hand, according
to the theory on which our present speculations are based, both time and
eternity are not incompatible with or in hostile and irreconcilable
opposition to each other. Their ideas do not mutually destroy each
other. Certain definite connecting-links and points of contact and
transition exist between them. The contrariety is not an
incomprehensibly absolute one of eternal negation, but rather a living
one, similar to the distinction between life and death, or that between
evil and good. So long as we believe in a great and irreconcilable
contrariety between time and eternity, such as at the first delusive
aspect they present themselves, we can not hope to extricate ourselves
from the labyrinth in which external things and our own internal
reflections involve the mind. This can only be effected by the idea of a
twofold time, such as it is our purpose accurately to define and bring
before you. And this notion of a twofold time arises from the difference
between the one perfect and blissful time, which is naught else than the
inner pulse of life in an overflowing eternity, without beginning and
without end, and that other time which is prisoned and fettered in this
lower world of sense, where the stern present alone is prominent, and
lords it over all else with despotic sway--the past being lost in
darkness and sunk in the night of death; while the future, now
advancing, now receding, hovers like a shadow, in an obscure,
glimmering, and deceptive twilight, until the now brilliant present
passes away, and in its turn becomes as nothing, being buried in the
darkness of death, which shrouds all past and former existence. And as
there is a twofold time, so also may we, in relation to God and the
world, distinguish a twofold eternity. Let us, for this purpose,
contemplate the whole creation, including not only this visible world
of sense, but also the invisible world of spirits, either in its
original perfection, which it possessed when it issued unsullied from
the hand of the Creator, or even in that state of perfection, which,
glorified and perfected, and become imperishable, it is to enjoy when
the course of earthly time shall have run out, and when there shall be
no more death.

Now, relatively to either its original perfection or that to which it is
finally to be restored, we can not better designate the universe than by
terming it the created, while God is the uncreated eternity. The world,
however, according to what we know of it from revelation, is not
absolutely such. It is eternal only from one point of view, that,
namely, which looks forward to its everlasting, continuous, and blessed
duration, and not from that of its first origin. For the world (if it
was, as we are taught, created out of nothing) had a beginning--a
precise beginning--which took place in time. And this fact, again,
suggests and confirms the remark how the idea of time, which is
unquestionably involved in that of the beginning of the universe, is not
absolutely excluded from the essence and operations of the Godhead, at
least of the living and personal God of revelation. On this point,
however, I would wish to say no more than this: here is the decisive
point--two distinct, opposite, or diverging paths lie before us, and man
must choose between them. The clear-seeing spirit, which, in its
sentiments, thoughts, and views of life, would be in accordance with
itself, and would act consistently to them, must in any case take one or
the other. Either there is a living God, full of love, even such a one
as love seeks and yearns after, to whom faith clings, and in whom all
our hopes are centered (and such is the personal God of revelation), and
on this hypothesis the world is not God, but is distinct from him,
having had a beginning, and being created out of nothing; or there is
only one supreme form of existence, and the world is eternal, and not
distinct from God; there is absolutely but one, and this eternal one
comprehends all, and is itself all in all; so that there is nowhere any
real and essential distinction; and even that which is alleged to exist
between evil and good is only a delusion of a narrow-minded system of
ethics, or of conventional prejudices, that man allows to pass as such,
and holds externally in honor, but which intrinsically, and as tested by
the rigor of science, has no real and substantial import. Now, the
necessity of this choice and determination presses urgently upon our own
time, which stands midway between two worlds. Generally it is between
these two paths alone that the decision is to be made, since all the
doubts and opinions which branch off between them are nothing more than
the still unsettled oscillations, assuming in appearance a fixed
scientific shape, or a vague mixture of narrow and imperfect views,
which are just as far from having taken any precise form or
determination. But the choice between them must be perfectly free. No
one’s conviction can be forced to adopt either one or the other. For
that which is to constitute the inmost sentiment and thought of a man,
or the first, last, and deepest foundation of all his sentiments, does
not admit of being imposed upon him extrinsically as the condition of
controversial defeat, without his own internal consent and agreement. It
can not enforce his assent as easily as a mere process of calculation.

But now, if eternity is nothing else but time, vitally full, illimitably
perfect, and blissfully complete, who, we may ask, first of all caused
or produced this earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time, which seems
but the great bond-chain of the whole world of sense--and what, then, is
this time itself? I might answer this latter question by the words of
the poet, that it “is out of joint.”[66] For although originally
employed of a particular period of history, they admit, I think, of a
more extensive and universal signification, and possess an entirely
metaphysical application. And what, in short, is metaphysics, or what do
we name metaphysical, but that which transcends our ordinary nature and
the earthly and limited world of sense? And man can not abandon or get
rid of all hopes, all prospects of eternity, in short, the thoughts
which, partly, at least, outrun these narrow limits. For if so, he must
at the same time be willing to cease to be a man, in the full, and true,
and highest sense of the word. Consequently, as often as he adventures a
bolder flight of thought and inquiry into that elevated region, then his
words and phrases must also transcend the familiar sense and ordinary
use of language.

I would not, however, be understood as asserting that the language of
philosophy, in its descriptions of supersensuous things and ideas,
should anxiously avoid all living expression and every thing lifelike
(+). For, in strict rigor this is neither possible nor practicable, and
in any case would lead to a mere abstract nothingness. On the contrary,
the more vivid, the more striking, and apparently startling, the more
boldly figurative and rare are the terms or forms of expression
employed, the more pertinently and clearly do they often convey our
meaning, and the more happily chosen and to the point do they appear.

In proof and confirmation of this assertion, I would appeal to the
language of Holy Writ. Most, if not all its descriptions of matters
belonging to the invisible world, and the supersensuous regions of
thought, or metaphysical subjects, if we could still recall or still
experience the first fresh impression, would at once be confessed to be
the boldest that language has ever ventured upon. Long familiarity,
however, has made them seem ordinary and tame. And it is necessary to
contemplate them long and intensely, if we would revive their original
fullness and peculiar significancy. In a very recent epoch of science,
there prevailed a somewhat similar view of this subject. In Lessing
especially it is traceable. For, as often as he entered this region of
inquiry, he for the most part designedly employed a free and bold style
of language, similar to that which occasionally I have attempted myself
to adopt. Now, if it be allowable in this way to apply to time poetical
phrases, similar to the one above quoted of “Time out of joint,” giving
them at the same time a more universal and entirely metaphysical sense,
I would, in the further consideration of the whole question as to time,
advance the following remarks.

If eternity is essentially nothing else than the fullness of time, which
consequently is in itself complete and blissful, then the time which is
“out of joint,” the deranged and distracted time of sense, is naught but
eternity fallen or brought into a state of disorder. Here, then, the
further question presents itself, “Who can have plunged it into
disorder, and perpetrated this jarring interference with the primeval
harmony, disturbing the inner pulse of the world’s universal life, which
was originally so sound?” According to one of these two views which I so
lately spoke of as lying before men to choose between, all this is but a
deception--a mere illusion, produced by the imperfection of our senses.
Even pain and misfortune, equally with what is called evil, exist only
for the poetical purpose of creating, by the skill and spirit with which
they are treated, transient, overpowering impressions, which are
ultimately to give place to more elevating emotions. But in the other
view, which is here adopted as our fundamental conviction, the answer is
easily found. Or, rather, it is one long since given, and generally
known. Since all the elementary forces and original powers in creation
can only be regarded as spiritual, therefore the power or might which
threw both time and existence, universal life and the whole world, into
disorder, could have been no other than the spirit of absolute negation
which rose in revolt against the primary source both of itself and of
all. The power and influence of this spirit of eternal contradiction and
endless destruction, which in another place I designated the inventor of
death, can not be rightly deemed either slight or insignificant, if he
be with justice entitled “the Prince and Ruler of this world.” By this
term we can not understand any so-called “spirit of the age.” Not, at
least, in the ordinary sense of the term, in which it signifies the
spirit which has originally arisen out of the age itself, and in its
sphere brilliantly predominant, but which at the same time transcends in
some way that sphere, either blending itself with some equally great, if
not still more exalted, past, or with some new and future era. For with
all its excellence of greatness, it is still perhaps partial and narrow
in its views; and in any case, so soon as the particular age shall be
over, it too will finally pass away and decline with it. It is, rather,
the very spirit that originally introduced the whole of that disjointed
time. It is, therefore, the author of this fallacious world of
sense--the supreme ruler and universal king of all the several periods
and eras which belong to it, and are so linked together, that as one
succeeds and passes into the other, all of them in succession are
finally absorbed in the general abyss of eternal nothingness.
Consequently is it the supreme lord; all these so-called spirits of the
times which are derived from the primary and supreme spirit of the age,
being, so to speak, his absolute subjects and ministers. Now, the belief
in such a spiritual power of evil, and even the idea of it, simply and
nakedly as in other times it is presented to us, is almost wholly lost
sight of in the present day. The expressions of a former faith for what
it is now the fashion to call “the spirit of the age” have become
antiquated, and make but little impression, being for the most part
scarcely even regarded, or else ingeniously explained away, if not
derided from the height of a superior enlightenment. Amid the killing
monotony of a sleepy skepticism into which men’s views of the world and
things had fallen, and as contrasted with a philosophy, neutral from its
origin, and finally indifferent to every thing, the celebrated English
author of _Cain_ makes a gratifying exception by his vigorous and vivid
language, giving, at least honor where honor is due, and calling things
by their right names. Accordingly, he paints to the life the king of the
spirits of the everlasting abyss and the ruler of this world, in all his
majesty of darkness, so that we often wonder whence he could have
derived all the tints and touches of truth, and are almost tempted to
ask whether this striking portrait, thus executed with a genius and
fidelity surpassing all similar poetical delineations, does not owe much
if not all its truth to a personal acquaintance.

But, however, this deadly spirit of absolute negation, though the name
be now scarcely ever heard except in poetry, has not therefore lost, as
yet, his dominion over this world of time and the science thereof. On
the contrary, in the baseless and arbitrary systems which the philosophy
of the day propounds, he is acknowledged more than ever, though it be
with an unconscious reverence. As the idol of absolute rationalism, most
highly is he lauded, not to say deified. It is, in fact, remarkable
that, in many of the most extreme systems of absolute reason, the whole
section of theology is exclusively confined to the negative view of the
divine truth. Almost the whole of it, if only a few slight changes be
made in the more important phrases, may far more consistently apply to
the primal antagonist of eternal love and of revelation, than to that
beneficent Being himself.

And even in those systems of rationalism which are less spiritually
perverse and less extravagant, but still equally subversive of a right
knowledge of the highest truths, the divine nature is frequently if not
always confounded with that nothing out of which He has created the
world. Or, perhaps, in some more tragic view of the universe, that rigid
law of time which operates on the world of sense, and which gives it up
as a prey to misery, is, at least poetically, deified as the blind fate
of an iron necessity. Now, if eternity is in itself and originally
nothing more than the living, full, and essential time, which is still
invisible(+), and if our earthly shackled and fettered time of sense is
but an eternity “out of joint,” or fallen a prey to disorder, it is
easily conceivable that the two do not stand apart and have no mutual
contact. On this hypothesis they may possess many a common point of
transition from one sphere into the other. At least such a point of
transition is in general experience afforded us by death, which is
mostly looked upon and regarded in this light. Trivial as may sound the
sentiment so commonly uttered of the dead, that they have changed time
for eternity, still we can not well question the correctness of the
notion on which the expression is founded. Now, these questions about
time and eternity nearly concern, and in many ways interest, every
thoughtful mind, not only by their connection with life and death, but
generally with all existence and consciousness. I can not, therefore,
approve of the wish to exclude them entirely from the philosophy of
life, as lying beyond the ordinary range of the practical intellect,
and, therefore, with all similar matters of unprofitable disputation, to
be abandoned to the theologian and the student. On the contrary, I have
felt it to be most agreeable to the position which I have taken up, and
the view which it opens out, to hazard at least an experiment, and to
try whether it be not possible to express these subjects, and to set
them forth in language at once appropriate and generally intelligible.

Religious people often speak of death, sometimes generally as a
“return,” at others with a further addition as “a return home.” Such
modes of speaking, I admit, merely as such, and especially when they are
uttered as so many empty phrases, unaccompanied with real feeling, and
repeated without discrimination, in season and out of season, are not,
perhaps, calculated to make a very deep impression. Still a very
beautiful but grave meaning is, nevertheless, contained in them, and one
which throws out very strongly the purely spiritual aspect of the
matter. But here, then, a difficulty immediately presents itself. The
question arises, how can we be said to go back or return to a place
where, in fact, we never were before, or how can that be rightly called
our home, which in our present life we first seek, and are to find and
learn to consider as such. In short, the difficulty recurs in the same
manner as the somewhat similar questions which are involved by Plato’s
notion of an _anamnesis_, so long as it is conceived, not (as we would
understand it) as a recollection of eternity, but quite literally as
that of a former state of things. But if, agreeably to a vivid
conception of time and eternity, a less absolute distinction prevails
between these two ideas, and many points of contact and transition from
one to the other may be found, of which death is one, all the difficulty
is removed, and every thing in our view and hypothesis becomes easily
intelligible and self-evident. It is, at least, one aspect of death, and
a cheerful one too, which exhibits it as a transition from time into
eternity, or out of a fettered and distracted time into that which is
true, perfect, and blissful. In truth, however, much more is involved
herein. For death, in general, is no simple event, but a very
complicated phenomenon. No doubt that feature which stands out most
fearfully in the whole event, throwing into the shade and obscuring its
other higher and more spiritual elements, is the sufferings of disease,
which are often so agonizing--the pang of dissolving and decaying
organization in the last awful struggle of nature, as it tears itself so
reluctantly from life. But even in the midst of all this, occasionally,
at least, another and a better state intervenes. A cessation of all
physical pain seems suddenly to occur, and to be followed by an almost
joyous, or, at least, composed state, which may be often regarded as the
harbinger of approaching dissolution. Medical experience, moreover, has
recorded many special cases (the explanation of which, however, I leave
to others) of idiotcy and madness, which had arisen either from sad
defects and derangement of the thinking faculty, suddenly disappearing
at the approach of death, and of the full, perfect consciousness
returning with extraordinary clearness in the few brief moments which
precede the instant of decease. There is yet another remarkable element
or feeling in death; and it is one totally independent of the organic
pain of dissolution in its various modifications, or the striking
phenomena which may be observed in individual cases. I allude to the
feeling which shrinks at the thought of the decisive transition and
forcible passage into an entirely new sphere, which, however, must not
be confounded with an unmanly fear of death. In many instances, too, it
has no connection with any troubled thoughts or anxious cares for near
and dear ones to be left behind, nor yet with any inward doubts of a
restless and disturbed conscience. By no such feelings alone by
themselves can it be interpreted or explained. All this is entirely
distinct from that which I have at present in my mind, and which may
very simply be termed a slight mental shrinking before a wholly unknown
state of being, which is, at least, natural to all men, and affects
every one, more or less, if the change comes upon them in the full
possession of their faculties. But in those whose contemplations have
long been directed to this closing event of life--in whom a profound and
deep acquaintance with the thought of eternity, and the sublime
enlightenment of a confiding faith, have taken the place of a dark
uncertainty, and who also, between the last struggle of organic life and
the final pang of dissolution, enjoy for a brief interval the last
quickening breath of the departing energy of nature, there death is seen
in its bright aspect. For such it unquestionably does possess. How
often, on the very countenance of the departed, does a calm and
beautiful death like this leave its touching trace behind! How often do
we see with astonishment a sweet smile, like that of a sleeping child,
lingering on the well-known face, but in whose very sweetness is mingled
a slight though scarce perceptible trace of some faint recollection of
previous suffering. He who has once seen some dear friend or
acquaintance so die, or beheld the beloved countenance after such a
death, will assuredly cherish forever the remembrance of this soothing
expression. Nothing less than a blissful presentiment of eternity seems
to have preceded or impressed itself on the dying features, breaking
through the shackles of time before its full course was ended. And it is
only in this light that I have mentioned it as being one of the points
of contact or moments of transition which facts clearly establish
between time and eternity, since this final crisis of our consciousness
forms an important element for the psychological and perfect
comprehension of the human intellect and its development.

But even during life itself there also occur many phenomena and
occasions in which, for the brief continuance at least of such moments
of intense existence, the limits of time seem to be broken through or
removed. To this class belong those brief intervals of rapture which are
enjoyed in the midst of deep and earnest devotion--or of proper ecstasy,
which, so far as it is genuine and real, we can not but consider as an
interval of eternity in the midst of time, or as a fleeting glance into
the higher world of full and unchecked spiritual life. Even the inward
worldless prayer, in so far as it is preceded by a real emotion of the
heart, profoundly agitating its inmost feelings, is, as it were, a drop
of eternity falling through time into the soul. Genuine ecstasy, in so
far as it is real and actual, is often on its organic side accompanied
by a beginning, which indeed is little more than the appearance, though
a highly delusive feeling, of dying away, which precedes the higher
gleam or echo from the world beyond the grave. Such phenomena, however,
require attentive examination before we can draw from them any precise
inference. The general idea of them may be distinctly traced in the
human consciousness. The recognition of their existence is therefore
essential to a full knowledge of the latter. It is, however, often very
difficult to form a judgment of individual instances, which are often
more or less doubtful. On this account it will be sufficient in this
place if, without entering deeply into these necessary distinctions and
manifold doubts to which all of such phenomena are liable, we simply
notice the fact, as forming one of the most intimate points of
association at which time and eternity come in contact and mutually
intermingle.

Of such points several still remain to be noticed. One of the least
astonishing, and one which in its operation on the soul is no less
universal and beneficial than it is generally intelligible, is that
which is found in true art and the higher kind of poetry. For here also,
even beneath the earthly shell of sensuous phenomenon and the temporal
incidents of figurative poetry, the eternal brightens over all. And it
is on this mighty influence of the eternal, which gleams through its
external investiture of ornament, that the exalted dignity and
distinctive charm of true art and the higher branches of poetry depends.
Even here, however, as elsewhere, a strict distinction must be made
between the true gold and the worthless æsthetical tinsel and mere
mannerism of fashion. For such a distinction is necessary in every case
where the heavenly and eternal comes into close contact with the earthly
and transitory.

That recollection of eternal love, which is implanted, communicated, or
innate in the human mind, and which here swells out from its hidden
depth (and this is the true original subject-matter of Plato’s notion of
the _anamnesis_, which, as I have endeavored to show, thus cleared from
all foreign admixture and corrupting additions, is quite
unexceptionable), is not merely a principle of the higher life. Rather
is it one of the great vital arteries of true poetry and art, of which,
however, there are many others equally essential and no less rich and
prolific. Such, for instance, is the longing after the infinite, whose
hopes and aspirations are directed more to the future than is the case
with that remembrance of eternal love, which, as such, clings more
closely to the past, and is often also lost and absorbed in the historic
perception of some actual past. On the other hand, the true inspiration,
both in art and in life, is exclusively devoted to a something divine in
the present, which may be either real or what is at least held to be
such, being most intimately bound up with a feeling of such a divine
presence, and with a belief therein. Thus, then, these three forms of
the highest sentiment in man’s nature, as it yearns after the infinite
or swells forth from the eternal source, and longs to receive the
divine, are in their different tendencies tied again, not unnaturally,
to the three times, or rather, the different categories of our
earthly-divided time.

The recollection of eternal love, as far as regards its influence on
art, is in truth nothing but a feeling or an inborn idea, if some will
so call it. And yet its influence may be universal, and extend itself
over the whole field of man’s consciousness. For all other sentiments of
the inner man, all the thoughts, conceptions, and ideas of the thinker,
and even all the images, shapes, and forms--in short, the whole ideal of
the artist--are now forthwith imbued with this one fundamental feeling
of eternal love, being, as it were, bathed in a sea or stream of higher
life, spiritually refined, and exalted and transformed into a purer and
higher degree of beauty and perfection. And thus it is that this ideal
view of the world becomes at once conceivable and perfectly clear, to
all at least who can enter into and sympathize with Platonic sentiments
and ideas, and especially in its close relation to science and the
plastic arts. And thus, understood in this correct sense, within its
proper limits, and in that place of the human consciousness to which it
really belongs, may well be admitted, and even extended to a wider
application.

(+) In order, however, to be able to assign their fitting place in the
whole consciousness to those other two exalted feelings which are
implanted in man’s breast as so many suggesters of eternity, the
longing, viz., after infinity, and a vitally energetic enthusiasm, it
will be necessary still further to prosecute and complete our
psychological review, so as to take in the whole range of faculties
belonging to it, and to exhibit their mutual relations.

In my sketchy outline of man’s spiritual life and consciousness, I set
out, you will remember, with the four elementary faculties,
understanding and will, reason and fancy, as the four opposite and
extreme poles of the inner world. As conscience and memory presented
themselves to our consideration in the progress of our inquiries, they
were characterized as mediate and collateral faculties of the reason,
since the conscience stands midway between reason and will, and the
memory between reason and understanding. In a similar way I would now
attempt to explain man’s instincts, especially in that peculiar form in
which they belong only to man, as distinct from the brutes, and
subsequently become passions. Afterward I shall proceed to explain why,
in those instances when they appear to be exaggerated into passions,
they must, to preserve analogy with the view hitherto maintained, be
held to be nothing else than movements of the will, or as a will which
has yielded itself to the illimitable range of fancy, and thereby lost
its inner equilibrium, and finally all liberty, or at least its actual
exercise. This intermediate position of the instincts between will and
fancy, and the fatal and pernicious influence which both these
fundamental powers exert in that height of passionateness and sensuality
which constitutes them faults of character, are also especially manifest
in what are properly the natural instincts, as enjoyed by man in common
with the brutes, and the evil of which arises always, or at least
principally, from their excessive indulgence and undue excitement. It is
often possible for this excess to reach such a height, and to become so
deadly injurious, as to destroy the health, corrupt the whole soul, and
to debase the mind to such a degree that it is felt to be almost
injustice to compare such a human being, thus degraded by his own fault,
with the nobler animals, whose simple instincts and their gratification
alternate almost as regularly as day and night or the rising and setting
of the stars in heaven. In such cases, however, we may easily discover
what was the first cause of such aberrations.

In the better case, at least, the corruption, _i.e._, of what was
previously a noble disposition, it is invariably, in the first instance,
some false charm of fancy or imagination which has overmastered the mind
with magical power, and subsequently carried it away captive to its
will. In every case, however, it is some perverted apprehension, or
illusory power of the infinite, which causes a man who has once fallen a
prey to any strong passion to devote all his energies, thoughts, and
feelings to the one object, or to surrender himself, heart and soul, to
the despotic tyranny of some ruling habit or favorite pursuit. How else
could there ever have been any talk of the delusions of fancy, which,
however, exercise so wide and fatal an influence on human life, and
generally in the world, unless a distorted fancy had lent a hand and
co-operated therein? Even such emotions and impulses as fear and anger,
which are not directed merely to the gratification of the wants of
nature, but to self-preservation and defense, and which, consequently,
belong equally to the brutes--these also admit of being carried, by
unrestrained indulgence, to the height of passionateness. This is
especially the case with anger. Wherever long indulgence has made it a
ruling habit, and if, moreover, it is associated with envy, hatred, and
revenge (which, indeed, are not properly natural instincts, and in this
form can scarcely be ascribed to the brutes, but rather faults of
character in a demoralized rational being), its outbreaks of passion are
fearfully violent. Under their combined influence the wild outbreaks of
man’s evil principle often run into fury and madness. But even in
avarice itself, it is also some false and strangely-perverted charm of
fancy, which in its highest degree approximates very closely to the
nature of a fixed idea, that furnishes the first ground and deepest root
of this unblessed passion for the earthly mammon. And here, again, in
this insatiable love of riches, we meet with a false force of the
infinite, and one which can never be satisfied.

A further ethical investigation into these erring instincts does not lie
within my present limits. The context of our psychological inquiries
only brought them before us for a limited consideration, with a view to
determine the position they occupy in the whole consciousness. And here,
as in my former instances of comparative psychology, I do not wish to
cast my glance downward longer than is necessary, but rather, as quickly
as possible, to raise it upward again. In the present case this can
easily be done. For, for our present purpose, the simple remark will
suffice, that the power of infinity in itself, and the pursuit of the
infinite, is properly natural to man, and a part of his very essence.
All that is wrong in it, and the source of all its aberrations, is
simply and entirely boundless excess. Above all, we must blame that
quality of absoluteness, which in every time and place exercises a fatal
and destructive influence, both on thought and practice, or, perhaps,
the fault may be laid to a false direction of this pursuit toward the
sensible and material objects of this earthly and transitory existence,
which, for the most part, are utterly unworthy of it. For man’s natural
longing after the infinite, even as it still shows itself in his
passions and failings, can not, wherever it is still genuine, be
satisfied by any earthly object, or sensual gratification, or external
possession.

When, however, this pursuit, keeping itself free from all delusions of
sense, and from the fettering shackles of earthly passion, really
directs its endeavors toward the infinite, and only to what is truly
such, then can it never rest or be stationary. Ever advancing, step by
step, it must always seek to rise higher and higher. And this pure
feeling of endless longing forms, with the recollection of eternal love,
the heavenward-bearing wings on which the soul raises itself upward to
the divine. This, indeed, has been felt and perceived by Platonic
thinkers in all ages. From the earlier centuries to the present many a
deeply-significant sentence might easily be selected and quoted on the
idea of this longing after the infinite. And this testimony is not
confined merely to the comparatively modern philosophy of Europe and the
West. The sacred writings, also, of the Hebrews contain a beautiful
sentence on this head. Thus a certain prophet, as endowed with more than
ordinary power, as chosen for a high and divine destination, or mission,
is expressly called a man of longing [desires],[67] as by a title
peculiarly suited to him, and most clearly indicating the natural
preparation for all higher spiritual and divine avocations. And, in a
sense borrowed from, if not exactly identical with, the above, a
somewhat similar title has been given to the richest and profoundest of
his works by a French philosopher of our own days, to whom, while I can
not adopt unconditionally all his principles and sentiments, I must
concede the highest praise for the zeal with which, in all his writings,
he has maintained and promulgated a high and lofty tone, both in
intellectual and divine things, and that, too, in the midst of
revolutionary times, when the prevailing tone of thinking was decidedly
material, and, indeed, had assumed a thoroughly demoralizing and
atheistic tendency. At a former epoch, now more than twenty years ago,
when I attempted, in French, to set forth to a friendly audience the
principles of the Philosophy of Life, so far as I at that time
comprehended it, I thought that it was indispensable to make this pure
idea of an exalted longing the primary position from which the whole
view of life must be developed. This, however, was too exclusive, and,
for that reason, unsatisfactory. It is, therefore, my present wish to
embrace all higher elements of conscience, however manifold they may be,
and however different in kind they may appear, and, taking a
comprehensive view of them, to unite them in a whole.

Even for poetry and art there is more than one such primary fountain or
vital artery of higher sentiment. If, then, the recollection of eternal
love must be recognized as one of these, who can well doubt that the
pure longing after the infinite, which holds so deep and firm a root in
man’s bosom, also forms another? In poetry, the former is distinctly
traceable under the form of elegy--at least in the first simple poesy of
fancy’s earliest and youthful days. It sounds forth here a mournful
recollection of a faded world of gods and heroes--as the echoing plaint
for the loss of man’s original, celestial state, and paradisaical
innocence, or, lastly, in a still more general and higher sense, as the
faint and dying notes of the happy infancy of the whole creation, ere
yet the spiritual world had been divided by dissension, and before the
first outbreak of evil, and the consequent misery of nature. Viewing it
in this light, and designating poetry in general analogically to an
expression which we before made use of, we may term poetry the mind’s
transcendent recollection of the eternal. For the first and most ancient
poetry, as the common memory of the human race--its higher organ of
remembrance--passes on from century to century, and from nation to
nation; and though ever dressing itself in the changing fashion of the
day, yet, through all time, it refers us back to the primary and
eternal.

Music, on the other hand, is eminently an art of longing. To this it
owes all its ravishing enchantments--its magic and irresistible charms.
In music, however, as in every other form of art, the higher and the
earthly--the soul, as it were, and the body--the heavenly longing and
the terrestrial are often blended together in the same note and tone, so
as scarcely to be discriminated. It is this mingling of feelings and
emotions--where from amid the half-unconscious earthly longing a higher
and more heavenly aspiration gleams out, that in youth, when man’s
sensibility is first developed and expanded, gives to newly-waking love
its peculiar magic charm, the inner grace of the youthful soul
contributing as much if not more than even the bloom of corporeal
beauty. The question, indeed, whether in this youthful longing really a
higher love of eternal duration, as an inner light, which is continually
purifying and perfecting itself, be inclosed within the earthly
veil--whether this first love of youth be even the true love, or whether
all may have been nothing more than the transient and flickering flame
of a delusion--this question can be alone determined from its results;
in other words, by the life which proceeds and follows from it. It must
be proved by the unwavering truth and fidelity--I might almost say, the
inward truth of the heart and the outward character of the whole life;
and, in short, of a higher love in its every species, whether human or
divine.

Now this longing holds a most important place in man. Not only is it the
crisis of transition from childish, shall we say consciousness or
unconsciousness, into a more mature development--not only is it the
threshold under which youthful expectation enters on a fuller and more
perfect life; but also still surviving uninterruptedly to the end, it
ever remains the first, strongest, and purest impulse of the inner man.
The light of its never-dying flame, growing purer and stronger, lights
him on his way to a higher and better existence. It seems, therefore,
not out of place to add here the remark, how deeply hope, which is so
closely associated with this longing aspiration, is interwoven into the
very being of man, so as almost to form the characteristic peculiarity
of his inner life and whole state.

The lost spirits, we are told, “believe and tremble.”[68] Love, too, is
the essential property of God, and even his very essence, and in a
certain sense, also, it is common to all beings created by eternal love.
Even in the hidden veins of life, through all animated nature, beats
this pulse of universal love. Hope, however, can not be ascribed to God,
for in Him all is full and perfect. Nature can only sigh and bemoan
itself; and even though it be not hopelessly wretched, yet, properly, it
can not hope for aught, by its own power, at least. To man, above all
other created beings, belongs the prerogative of hope. We might almost
call him an immortal spirit, subjected to the condition of hope. And so,
before the rest of creation, he is destined and chosen to be the
evangelist of divine hope.

As the third of the inner life-springs of true art and higher poetry, I
spoke of a true enthusiasm and inspired feeling of the divine. Now,
among the various arts, I would especially appropriate this to the
plastic art--in that widest and justest sense of the term, in which it
comprises, also, the higher architecture. For, in enthusiasm and
inspiration, the divinity with which it is imbued is not viewed and
contemplated in the remote distance either of the past or the future. It
is embraced at once as something actual and present. And this holds good
both of the enthusiasm of art, and also of that which, in moral and
political life, often creates for itself an epoch, shaping and bringing
forth whatever is truly new and original. Now, the divine in beauty must
be actually present to the mind, at least, of the artist. It must have
stood vividly before his mental eye before it could have come forth in
outward and visible form. Since universally the perfection of art
depends on some antagonism and the artist’s triumph over it, it is
self-evident that even here the most exalted enthusiasm must be
associated with a thoughtful sagacity and persevering steadiness of
execution, if any great and perfect work is to be produced. Moreover, it
can scarcely be necessary to remind you that the arts, even though,
perhaps, in each of them there is a predominance of some peculiar kind
of higher feeling, or some spirit of higher life swells out in it, are
not, therefore, rigidly limited on all sides and irrevocably confined
within these narrow limits. On the contrary, one branch of art often
passes over into the domain of another. And this interference is not
always a misconception, owing chiefly to some confusion of essential
matters, and, therefore, in the highest degree erroneous and
prejudicial. Poetry, especially, often springs up indigenous in other
domains of art, being the most universal of all. And if in poetry itself
those ancient and primitive poems or epic songs of sublime recollections
occupy the first place, who, therefore, would exclude from it the deep,
inner, ardent longing--the oracular faculty of divination for exalted
love and eternal hope, with all its music of the feelings, forming, as
it does, the spiritual contents, the animating principle and distinctive
essence of the lyrical art? Who, too, would dare to censure poetry,
because, striving to give another and a newer expression to all that, in
these divine remembrances and longing anticipations, constitutes its
inmost soul, it attempts, by dramatic representation, to portray the
essential features of its inmost being, with all the vivid reality and
distinct completeness of the present? For does it not, in this respect,
approximate, so far, at least, to the plastic arts, and begin to assume
many points of affinity with them?

It is, however, necessary to guard here against a possible
misunderstanding. Not without good cause, I believe, before all things
is the rigid discrimination insisted on which must separate true poetry
from a spurious semblance. Poetry which condescends to minister either
to the passions or to fashion, or even to prose, or any mere prosaic
ends, can not deserve the name. But it is another thing when the poet
works his poetical view of things (and this is that which constitutes
the poet, and not the mere outward form of poetry alone) into the
prosaic reality of some present time, or some historical subject. So,
too, is it when in some consistent and artistic imitation of life he
takes for his theme the maze of human passions, by no means for the
purpose of prolonging it, and still less of inflaming it, but rather
because he clearly sees through its complications, to unfold and
disentangle them. This we might call--employing a term belonging to the
mathematical sciences, though in a different but still analogous
sense--mixed or applied poetry; and to this class belong many of the
highest productions of art in different ages and nations.

The different arts, or, rather, the different directions of one and the
same art, in the several epochs and ages of the world, or among nations
variously divided by language and manners, as well as by the style and
character of their thought and intellect, may be considered as merely so
many varying dialects of one and the same language, which have a common
origin and are nearly related. For they possess a common meaning, which,
interpreted by a profound and noble perception of art, will be found to
pervade all centuries and all people, uniting and enchaining them all by
this soul-binding tie of a loving and love-kindled fancy. These eternal
and fundamental feelings of the human breast, the remembrance of
eternity, an innate longing and high-soaring aspiration, stand in the
most intimate connection with each other, even though we can not take a
full survey of it, and often feel it profoundly rather than are able
perfectly to explain it. They are like so many stem-words and radical
syllables, and form together, as it were, one common language. And if,
as I before remarked, we should in vain seek for that common and
original language, from which all those now spoken on the face of the
earth can be derived, both ethnographically and geologically, may we not
still find in art a universal language intelligible to all men? Is not
this language (as I may term it) thus enveloped in the garb of art,
through which, however, a profound significance gleams brightly forth,
an original language of a higher and intellectual order, and at the same
time intimately akin with our own nature? Do not its echoes, however
faint and broken, when reawakened by true art and sublime poetry, strike
a chord of unison in every human breast?




LECTURE V.


The general notion of the inner life formed the point from which we
started in this attempt to portray the whole spiritual man. I
maintained, you will remember, that the philosophy of life proceeds on
the simple assumption of this inner life. Now, in the preceding
discourses it has been my endeavor to unfold this general idea into a
more fully-developed and more definite conception of human
consciousness, both in its several principles and total coherence. And
this almost completes the first division of our whole sketch. For fully
to complete a knowledge of ourselves, and of life in general, a few
particulars only remain to be added, and a comprehensive review of the
whole once more to be taken. And this, in the natural order of this
simple development of thought, forms the next subject of our labors. By
reason of the close vital connection which subsists between thought and
speech, language served in the first instance for an external basis of
comparison, which in the next place art enabled me to carry still
farther, inasmuch as the latter may also be regarded as an inner
language. For, however fragmentary and incomplete may be our collection
of languages and the science thereof, notwithstanding all the
enlargement it has received from modern observation and research, it is
still possible, by a rigorous distinction of the derivatory and mixed
offshoots from the more ancient and purer branches, to gain at least an
insight into the history and progress of language, and thence to trace
the probable course of its development, even while its origin, no less
than the equally incomprehensible phenomenon of its first exercise,
remains veiled in impenetrable obscurity. And when we called art a
language, we did not mean this merely in the same sense that poetry has
been styled--and indeed has even herself assumed the title of--a divine
language, on account of the ornamental figures of its external form;
neither was it because of the allegorical shapes and allusions, nor of
the symbolical garb which plastic art so often puts on. The so
transiently advanced metaphor was intended to convey the idea that art
in general, not merely in its outward form, but in its inmost essence,
and in all of its forms and species alike, is a language of nature of a
higher and spiritual kind, or, if the term be preferred, an inward
hieroglyphical writing and original speech of the soul, which is
immediately intelligible to all susceptible natures, and to every one
whose sensibilities a taste for any form of art has rendered open and
accessible to its appeal. For the key to it lies not in any arbitrarily
established principle, as is the case with that ingenious and beautiful,
but still merely conventional invention of the East--the symbolical
language of flowers, but in the feeling and the soul itself. For the
eternal and fundamental feelings of the soul are awakened, or, rather,
reawakened, in these inner-soul words of true art, which, in the same
sense that we speak of the riddle of life or of the world, making its
solution the object and aim of philosophy, we may likewise term a riddle
of hope--of that hope, in truth, which is eternal and divine. But high
art, like life and the world, remains a riddle, and must ever appear to
us as such, simply because in reality, or at least for the greater part,
it is only a few detached notes, without the full and coherent air, that
it allows to reach us.

There is, then, an intrinsic connection between thought and speech,
between language and consciousness. Moreover man, to judge of him by the
collective sum of his characteristic and essential properties, is
nothing else than the _created word_, the faint echo and very imperfect
copy of the uncreated and eternal, and stands amid the rest of creation,
midway between the world of nature and that of spirits. For these
reasons, then, in the further exposition of his inner life I shall
invariably make use of the idea of language, and even many of its
characteristic properties or peculiarities, as the external basis of a
comparison calculated to throw light upon much that in the inward
thought of man it is otherwise difficult to express and to make clear by
words. For, indeed, generally, living thought and the science thereof,
can not well or easily be separated from the philosophy of language.

The general idea of the inner life was, I said, the basis of all the
previous development of ideas, and this was the only hypothesis which a
philosophy of life stands in need of, or can venture to assume. An
objection may, it is true, be here started. In the various digressions
into which, in the further development of this one fundamental thought,
I have been led by my wish to expand it to a full and complete idea of
the consciousness, it may be said that much besides has been supposed or
taken for granted, if not expressly, yet tacitly; not indeed
arbitrarily, but still as the result of a merely personal conviction,
however positive and deliberate. To this objection, so naturally to be
expected, I can only reply, that if occasionally I may not have
expressed myself hypothetically enough, it was, nevertheless, my
intention so to do. Consequently all hypothetical positions, with the
exception of the fundamental one of the inner thought and life, hitherto
assumed by me, are to be regarded here simply in such a light. They are
advanced only for the nonce, and provisionally, until they can receive a
further and completer analysis, without in anywise anticipating the
proof, nor, by a hasty decision, assuming the truth, as if it were
independent of argument.

Now, since doubt is a necessary and inevitable property and an essential
principle of the whole man in his present state, we are brought by the
regular course of our analysis to the problem which is furnished by the
thought at issue with itself. To this subject, which now forces itself
immediately on our attention, we must devote an entire section of our
labors. The object of the first portion was to advance the simple and
general thought of the inner life (as being in this simple generality
too vague and undefined), or to raise it, step by step, to a full,
complete, and comprehensive, but at the same time rightly divided
conception of the human mind. In the same way, in the next division of
my speculations, the essential subject and proper aim will be to carry
that feeling, call it as we will, whether of pure love, or inner life,
or higher truth, whose existence we have, we think, clearly established,
through the crisis of doubt, to a determinate judgment of profound
certainty and unwavering conviction, or at least to a rigorous
distinction between that which is certain and that which must forever
remain uncertain.

Now, to render in any degree complete that characteristic of the human
mind which it has been our object or endeavor in the previous Lectures
to sketch in detail, we were obliged to take in also those higher
elements which by many are called in question, and by some positively
denied to exist. And herein lay the natural ground and the occasion for
our introducing the mention of them, at least as facts of consciousness
generally acknowledged by the common-sense of mankind. Not that we
thereby meant to exclude them from a profounder investigation, or to
guard them against the intrusion of that doubt which knows no limits to
its skepticism. We only reserved them to their appropriate place in the
natural course of our development of living thought. Some there are, we
know, who hold even a higher and genuine sense of art to be a mere fancy
either of genius, devoted to and displaying its excellence therein, or
of the mere _dilettanti_. Others again, and even celebrated writers,
have explained conscience and its still, small voice, by the acquired or
instilled prejudice of education, or as the delusive effect of custom.
How far more numerous, then, must be the doubts which such a system of
abnegation of all that is good and exalted would raise against the
Platonic doctrine of a recollection of eternal love, or that idea which
I have labored to establish, of a pure longing after infinity! If,
again, many question the freedom of the will, they deny, in fact, the
will itself; for a will that is not free ceases to be will. If,
moreover, others refuse to recognize in all human thought, fictions, and
inventions, any thing creatively new and peculiarly original, seeing
therein nothing but repetition or fresh combinations of external
impressions, consequently denying to the human mind all power of
invention, then must fancy be denied to be one of the mind’s fundamental
powers. For, in truth, in such a case, it is nothing more than memory,
or, rather, it is memory fallen into delirium. Others, again, would
refer even reason itself and the essential rational character of man
simply to a more delicate sensuous organization than is possessed by the
most highly-endowed among the brute creation. All such special and
eccentric opinions form but so many subordinate chapters of our second
part, which has for its theme reason and doubt, and the state of doubt,
which are natural to man. To it, therefore, they must be reserved for
investigation. We can not anticipate the period of their discussion in
the present place, where our first object is, by a development of the
simple thought and the general ideas of the inner life, to sketch a
perfect outline of the human mind, which shall take in all its higher
elements and capacities, as well as the earthly and inferior ingredients
which are blended with them.

The thought or conception, as the general manifestation of the inner
life, is in its nature and form indefinite, but still a cogitation,
which even at this step is already referred to a particular object, and
so in its contents limited thereto. An idea or notion, however, is a
conception mathematically proportioned by number, measure, and weight;
_i.e._, according to the number of its several constituents it is
carefully divided, and its subordinate genera enumerated; measured
according to its extent, and according to its internal value and
comprehension, and also its relation to other kindred notions of a
higher or lower order carefully weighed and pondered; in short, a
conception complete and perfect in itself. Hitherto, therefore, it has
been properly but a single notion that has engaged our attention, and
formed the subject-matter of our whole speculation--the notion, viz., of
the human consciousness. For it is not merely philosophy to link
together in a never-ending chain its own self-derived and arbitrary
ideas, by some specious rule of necessary connection. The duty of
philosophy is rather originally to combine facts--and, in truth, all the
given facts of a certain kind, and within a certain range, in one clear,
intelligible, and perfectly vivid notion, and it has generally to do
with very few ideas. Two or three ideas, in short, such as that of
consciousness, of science, or of man himself, are quite sufficient for
its purpose of solving, if not fully and completely, yet at least to the
full extent of what is not merely possible and allowable, but also
wholesome and profitable, the three riddles of life, of the universe,
and of a divine hope, which lie before the whole human mind, and thereby
to arrive at some abiding conviction with regard to them.

Now, in concluding our development of the human mind, and adding to it
all that is still wanting to its completeness, I shall observe the same
method of exposition as I have hitherto followed. Leaving for the nonce
unmooted, the grave questions whether there be any such thing as
truth--and, if so, whether man is capable of recognizing and attaining
to it in any degree--and reserving them to their appropriate place where
they will naturally arise, I shall adopt into the outline of the general
notion of the consciousness all those facts of it which are acknowledged
by the common-sense of mankind. I shall, as such, allow them all and no
more than their due weight. Occasionally, however, when any such
phenomenon appears somewhat questionable, I shall add a word or two of
explanation, in order to guard against the possibility of misconception,
or an overhasty inference, setting down the facts purely as such, and
so far as they are already apprehended, for further investigation and
inquiry.

The four opposite poles or extremes of man’s divided and discordant
consciousness are, I said, its four fundamental faculties or powers,
understanding and will, and reason and fancy. With regard to the two
first, every one may, both from internal experience of his own self and
from observation of his fellow-men, easily arrive at a conviction that
they seldom work together in perfect harmony, and that the discord is
often the most violent when either one or both of these two faculties
possess more than ordinary strength. The marked opposition between
reason and fancy reveals itself but too plainly, both in private and
public life. The men of mere taste and imagination, artistic and
poetical natures (to which category, in a somewhat loose sense, very
many really belong, though the happy exceptions of true genius be indeed
rare), on the one hand; and on the other, the men of practical
reason--the utilitarians, who limit their views, more or less, to the
public advantage to be derived from this quality of practical reason,
and look with distrust to every higher flight of fancy or feeling, form
two hostile classes of men, who with difficulty comprehend each other.
At least they are seldom in a position to understand one another’s
feelings, and rightly and fairly to appreciate them. Still more rare are
the exceptions, where both these faculties and mental characters are
found united in one and the same individual.

After these four fundamental faculties of the first order, come certain
accessory functions of the second order, derived from or compounded of
the former. Of these, conscience and memory, and after them the
instincts and passions, have been described as movements of the will,
passing over into the illimitable region of the fancy, and consequently
holding an intermediate place between will and fancy. We have now to add
a word or two concerning the external senses, and therewith to complete
our sketch of the human consciousness in its present divided and
distracted condition. But previously to entering upon this topic, I
would, with reference to this last-mentioned characteristic of instinct,
call your attention to a particular species of it, which is not
unimportant, but rather belongs essentially to a complete picture of
this part of the human consciousness. It will, moreover, furnish a new
instance, to show how in nature herself there lies a cause, or at least
a first occasion for many parallels of comparative psychology, similar
to those which have already presented themselves. I am alluding to the
artistic instincts displayed by some of the more sagacious animals, and
especially some of the industrious members of the insect tribe. These
present a remarkable affinity to human art, in which all, at least, is
not the effect of teaching. In the lower but still beautiful degrees of
artistic talent, there is much that seems instinctive in its operation,
and, as it were, unconscious and innate. True and lofty genius of art
can not be here included. It belongs, on the contrary, to a different
sphere. For in it the unconscious creative faculty is not narrowly
restricted to one rigid path or definite form, but has rather for its
essential basis a productive power of imagination, of universal range
and fullness, and which, as it were, travails in birth with the
infinite.

Now this notion, thus borrowed from natural science, for the purposes of
a comparative psychology, seems well applicable to that pure feeling of
infinite longing which is the most exalted of all man’s aspirations.
According to that idea of it which I have labored to establish, we can
name this profound inward longing, which nothing earthly can ever
satisfy, man’s instinct of eternity--an instinct which often long
remains, and at the first always is perfectly unconscious of a higher
vocation and divine destiny.

The external senses are in one respect the faithful organs and
instruments of the understanding in the material world, with which it
makes its experience or observations therein, and draws therefrom its
experimental science. In another point of view, they may not improperly
be termed an applied or practical fancy, which for a definite direction
exercises itself on the individual phenomena of the material world, for
the copying and reproduction of external impressions on the organs, as,
_e.g._, of the visible form or reduced image in the eye, is in any case
nothing but an inferior species or a collateral branch of the general
faculty of productive imagination. But that new and spiritual sense of
higher potency, which in the purely material can only develop itself as
an exception, or may appear to be veiled therein--I mean the keen
appreciation by the ear of musical tones, and the eye for picturesque
beauty of form in the plastic art--can only be regarded as a
lightning-spark of fancy passing along and operating through this
external medium and conductor.

One remark seems of importance in connection with our whole subject; at
any rate it will not be superfluous, as confirming our assertion that
the threefold principle of human life in general is found repeated in
its single members; and though on a smaller scale, is still manifested
in the same relation. We observe, therefore, that whatever
physiological, or, it may be, anatomical reasons physiologists may have
for counting five senses--and they may be perfectly sufficient and
adequate for the requisitions of physical science, still,
psychologically, it is far more accurate and also simpler, in a
philosophical sense, to limit their number to three. No doubt, in the
sensation of taste, not only a mechanical contact occurs, but there is
also a chemical decomposition of the tasted matter, by which the
sensation of sweet or bitter is produced. So, too, in smell, although no
visible evaporation takes place, still it is a fact that aëriform
floating particles are thrown off from the sensible body, and actually
taken in by the sentient. Still these are far from being adequate
grounds for making of them two independent senses. Even in the inner
organic perception of one’s bodily health and ease, and in the opposite
case of pain, it is something more than the mere mechanical contact from
without that is therein sensuously perceived. But are we disposed on
this account to agree with those who propose to divide still further the
single sense of material touch, and increase the number of the senses?
We feel at once that this would be superfluous, since all these proposed
divisions are, at least in a psychological point of view, to be regarded
simply as modifications--as branches or lower species of one and the
same sense. And by the same analogy, then, we may reckon all these
material senses for one. Thus, then, we have in all but three senses,
presenting in this smaller and meaner sphere an accurate correspondence
to the triple man, and the three elements which make up his whole
being--body, soul, and spirit.

Of the outer senses, the eye is incontestably the most spiritual. The
ear, whereby we are sentient of sounds, words, and voices, and melody,
and all music, corresponds to the soul; while the sense of material
feeling, which is also destined to be the ministering organ and guardian
of the health and welfare of the body, is corporeal, and corresponds to
the principle of organic life. After the loss both of sight and hearing,
the body may both be and long continue healthy and vigorous; whereas a
defect in the sense of feeling, so soon, at least, as it became general
and total, would be the commencement of death, or at least appear to be
so, since diseases temporarily take this form. However, this third and
corporeal sense of feeling is not always entirely external and grossly
material. It may develop itself, at least by way of exception (since the
sense of art in the eye and ear is not universal), as a sort of
intellectual perception, though still a physical feeling of kindred life
and of the inner light, which often gives rise to a peculiar and
remarkable immediate natural sense (not to call it an instinct) for the
invisible, which is enshrouded within the outward phenomena of life. And
though some would fain deny the reality of this capacity, still,
inasmuch as its existence is a matter of fact, adequately confirmed by
experience, as great, if not greater error may be committed in the
opposite direction. Because this acute natural sense does unquestionably
often arrive in a most wonderful manner at a just and right
conclusion--or this instinct make most remarkable divinations--we must
not, therefore, exalt it at once into a kind of invisible, infallible,
and, as it were, omniscient oracle. For such is not to be met with in
the path of psychology, nor in the whole circle of faculties which
belong to man as man, and least of all in that critical point of
transition out of the ordinary perception of consciousness into a
complete state of unconsciousness, and from this again into a clear and
bright consciousness; which point, even on this account, seeming to
stand midway between light and shade, exhibits here and there a strong
resemblance to the world of dreams. Such, in general, is the limitation
of the human intellect, that reason, as has been already often remarked,
can never be regarded as an unerring oracle and infallible organ of
truth; neither is the clearest understanding and the most experienced
artistic sense, even in its own peculiar sphere, always unerring. Still
less can either the will or the fancy make such a claim. Even the inner
voice of _conscience_, although its name alludes directly to an inward
_knowing_, and the _certainty_ thereof,[69] is not always and
universally recognized as such an infallible guide--otherwise many a
thinker and writer on the subject would not have set up, as necessary to
explain at least some cases, the idea of a mistaken conscience. It
appears, then, that this natural sense, even where it exists in the
greatest strength and clearness, must be always regarded as an entirely
individual and peculiar gift, and can only be understood and judged of
as such. This remark involves, perhaps, the most important
consideration, which, in judging of it, we must always keep in view.
Moreover, even where it really and decidedly exists, whether in a state
of complete or half-consciousness, or in full conscious wakefulness, it
always requires the closest observation and the most watchful care
before it can attain to its full perfection; for its development must be
extremely slow and gradual. In this respect it must resemble the
expansion of that high and spiritual sense of art which forms a bright
and luminous point within the material organ of the ear or eye--which
lies enshrouded in the external organ like a spiritual germ, or--as we
may justly term the artist’s vision as compared with that of other
men--an _eye within the eye_.

We have now taken a general view of the whole human mind, finding it to
comprise four great fundamental faculties of the first class, and then
certain secondary ones--viz., memory and conscience, with the appetites
and external senses, which, at least in the psychological point of view,
appear to be mixed forms or derivatives of the former. The four first
are occasionally found combined together in due proportion. When this
combination is the natural endowment of genius, they attain to their
noblest energy, and even by a lively and careful development, they often
attain to a most exquisite unity of operation. Mostly, however, we meet
with a decided preponderance and exclusive ascendency of some one, which
in its external effects is only limited and checked by the fact that it
is thus isolated. The four rarely co-operate together; and, for the most
part, by their dissension they prove checks and hindrances to each
other. But not merely in the individual and his personal life and
conduct do these four fundamental forces display such strength and vital
energy in the grand development of the whole human race; and in its
history we may also observe the same fact. Among the Greeks we
recognize, distinctly and clearly, a profound and ingenious intellect
predominating in life, no less than in art and science; in the Romans,
an irresistible and sovereign force of will, reducing the world to its
subjection, and often no less gloriously imposing laws on itself; in the
Christian middle ages, the lovely devices of fancy giving its bold
shapes to life itself as well as to art; and lastly, in modern times,
reason squaring every thing to the measure of its own mind and laws,
coupling often, and associating, or, by its middle terms, equating
together the remotest elements, and not less frequently exercising a
destructive energy against all, and even against itself. Thus this
ground-scheme of human consciousness, which formed the first result of
the psychological investigation of our own selves, meets us here also on
a grander scale as a part of the world’s history, and in the large
dimensions of successive ages and centuries, as the first striking
result in the history of man’s civilization during the twenty-five
centuries which, as lying nearest to our own times, we are best
acquainted with. Much as may be wanting to fill up, both in the
commencement and the middle--much, in short, as it would be necessary to
add or more closely to define, if it were our object to draw a universal
sketch of the four historical epochs and ages of the civilization of the
world within the limits best known to us, yet for our immediate object
these mere hints are sufficient; for they prove how, even in history, in
its place each of these four fundamental powers of man developed itself
in the most decided form and displayed a marvelous and uncontrollable
energy. Here, too, we see that an intrinsic equilibrium between these
several powers forms in general but the rare and happy exception, while
on the whole it is mostly wanting. Indeed the absence of a complete
vital union and co-operation is but too painfully felt and perceived in
the history of the world.

Quite different, however, is the case with the mixed and mediate
faculties of the second rank, which are derived from the former. To
these may be applied the remark we lately made on the American tribes
and languages, in relation to that degradation of the human race so
especially noticeable in them, and its still advancing degeneracy and
dismemberment. The external senses, whose meager powers of cognition are
but a sorry make-shift for man’s mind, which in its thirst of knowledge
would embrace all existence, the Godhead, and the universe, are narrowly
restricted to the material world immediately around him. From such
slight and unpromising beginnings, science is no doubt occasionally able
to evolve many a great and noble truth. And even in the external senses
themselves a feeling of art or a clear and pure sense of nature gleams
forth at times, like a little spark of purer light. Still even here many
and great impediments affect them and their sure application. Memory,
too, is on the whole little more than a mechanical readiness, with
difficulty acquired, and soon weakened and blunted. The appetites or
instincts are liable to numberless aberrations and passionate excesses.
As to conscience, there is but too much reason to fear that it is for
the most part in a state of weakness and apathy, dwarfed and mutilated
in its powers and operations. At least, the remark is no very strange
one that conscience, which has an ear as well as a small, still voice,
does not always hear very quickly, and often fails to hear very much
that it might and would do well to listen to. Whether there are not men
who in this respect may be considered perfectly deaf, is a question
which can only be answered by an accurate and specific history of human
crimes, or by those whose calling it is to study this sad and gloomy
side of the picture of human life. Such complete moral deadness as this,
however, which happily forms a rare exception in humanity, may, perhaps,
be rightly regarded as a kind of moral imbecility for all higher and
moral sentiments, even though it is frequently accompanied with great
clearness of intellect and a high degree of instinctive shrewdness or
cunning. On the other hand, the cases are probably rare, where the
delicate moral sensibility or inward perception of right and wrong among
nobler natures, is developed in such purity and strength, and carried to
such a height of perfection and stability, as the musical ear and
artistic delicacy is by great musicians and amateurs of the art.
Probably, too, it is more suitable, and also more profitable, for human
nature in its present degraded state, that its higher senses and organs
for the invisible should not manifest themselves in us in all their
extreme and overpowering energy, and for the most part should but shine
with a subdued light, or, as it were, gleam through some shrouding
envelope. Even of the conscience this is true. At least, it admits not
of denial that a few moments’ brief enjoyment of a truly bright and
clear-sighted conscience would be enough to tear the soul forever from
its present indifference, and to plunge it into an abyss of unspeakable
grief, for which earthly language possesses no adequate expression, and
for which the human bosom has no suitable notes of lamentation and
mourning. It is, therefore, only the greater proof of beneficence if the
invisible world, and the mysteries of eternal woe which await the lost
spirit--in comparison with which every earthly pain and all earthly
suffering are as nothing--is in mercy shrouded with a veil, which only
seldom and on rare occasions may lawfully be lifted. Now, generally, it
is at the uttermost confines of error, in the very depths of
degradation, and the lowest level of narrow-mindedness, that the first
higher impulse and beginning of happier times exalts itself, opening out
the way of return to a newer and better life. The same probably may be
the case in our present shackled and distracted consciousness. Those
very gross mistakes and aberrations to which the limited and discordant
faculties are liable, may furnish the common basis for the growth of
another vitally complete and harmonious co-operating consciousness.

For now that we have, by the enumeration of these eight faculties, made
a complete sketch of the human consciousness, the question may arise,
naturally enough, “Which is the common center of this sphere, or what is
there found or demonstrable in this center?” It was with a view to this
question that I attempted to give a refined interpretation of the
Platonic idea of the _anamnesis_, taking it to mean the recollection of
a higher love, not so much in a former existence as of and from
eternity. We explained it, consequently, to be a species of
transcendental memory. And in this sense we justified it, demonstrating
at the same time, in that other region which is formed of man’s instinct
and desires, the existence of the pure idea of infinite longing as the
highest effort of the human soul. The sense of art, and profound feeling
of natural beauty, which belong to true artistic genius, are recognized
as being in their sphere extraordinary endowments. In the same way no
one will wish to deny that the moral feeling, as the natural expression
of the inner voice of conscience, constitutes in social life the
fundamental condition and the surest foundation for all lofty and noble
sentiments. Thus feeling is that center which we were in search of, of
the otherwise divided and distracted consciousness. I might call it the
moral feeling, only then it would not be of so universal an application
as it really is. For the moral aspect constitutes only a single view and
energy of the whole, since the feeling of art, and every other kind of
higher sentiment, belongs equally to it. With much greater propriety I
might term it the inner, by way of distinction from the external and
material sense of feeling. Less clear than the understanding, and not so
decided or definite as the will, with more vitality and life than the
reason, but at the same time more narrowly limited than the fancy, the
immediate sphere of individual existence--feeling, occupies the central
space between the four fundamental faculties, as well as between the
four intermediate faculties of the second order. It is the apparently
indifferent, but in truth the full and living center of consciousness,
where every vibration of all the other isolated powers meet and cross,
either neutralizing each other, or combining together into new life and
harmonious co-operation It admits, indeed, of the most various degrees
of development and of every kind of progression, from the simplest,
almost indifferent, and passive sense of mere existence, up to the
highest and self-sacrificing enthusiasm, which heeds no form or phase of
death, or up to that highest state of rapture which loses itself on the
very verge of unconsciousness. In this respect we might well say, with
the poet, “Feeling is all.” It is the center of life, and the heart of
the whole, each single and individual faculty, in and by itself, being,
as compared with it, but “noise, powder, and smoke,” “shrouding the
bright empyrean.” And yet this center of the consciousness is not,
however, such as to be able, by its inherent force and activity, to
organize and regulate the whole, holding in union all those otherwise
isolated powers and states of the human mind. In this respect it is, on
the whole, passive. Indeed, viewed in a more accurate light, feeling is
not so much an individual and peculiar faculty as an entirely formless
and indefinite, but still vitally moved and frequently excited,
condition of the consciousness, which is to form the point of transition
from its present state of fourfold division, into the living, perfect,
and harmonious co-operation of its triple state. When reason and fancy
have ceased to be divided, being restored to oneness by the living
feeling, but are blended together in the thinking and loving soul, we
have the basis on which a restoration of the consciousness to harmony
and perfection must in every case be commenced. When the great faculty
of the understanding no longer stands aloof by itself, coldly inactive;
when the strong will ceases, by its blind obstinacy, to impede its own
efforts; when the two have now grown together into an effectual potency
of the life-enlightened spirit, in which every thought is at once an
act, and every word a power (a state which is only possible and
attainable in this center of a higher love)--we have then the second
step on the path of return to the original perfection of the
consciousness.

But before I attempt to add to this scale of progression the last term
which is yet wanting, I must episodically introduce and discuss another
question. It relates to the phenomenon of judgment, which as yet has not
had its place assigned to it in the consciousness. Is it to be
considered as an independent faculty of the soul, and in what relation
does it stand to the other mental powers? Now, by judgment, in the
merely logical sense, nothing more is understood than the connecting of
a predicate with a subject. For instance, in the complete syllogism,
“All men are mortal: Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal,” the
minor premise, where the middle or general term is specially applied,
and, consequently, predicted of an individual, alone forms such a
judgment. Now, since it is the reason that logically connects thoughts
together, it is not easy to see why this one act, by which the predicate
and subject are connected, should be separated from all others and set
up and regarded as an independent and especial faculty. For by so doing
nothing is explained, and an unnecessary addition is made to the
subdivisions (already too numerous) of the human mind and its thinking
powers. Quite otherwise, however, is it with another class of judgments,
which, in fact, are highly deserving the name. For these in their proper
sphere actually decide. And their decisions are generally regarded as
authoritative because they are based on natural talents, a practiced
eye, a multifarious and extensive experience, a long study of the
matters they are concerned about, which in practice render them more or
less certain and trustworthy. In this case the act of judgment is no
simple function of the thinking faculty. It is, rather, the sum of the
manifold elements and spiritual perceptions on which it exercises
itself, and which it presupposes. For the most part it is the highly
complicated and composite result of many fundamental premises. We can
not, however, reckon this higher function of judgment in any particular
sphere as a peculiar mental faculty, since in such a case a special one
must needs be assumed for every one; for a right discrimination in any
one sphere does not by any means imply equal certainty in another.
Moreover, the several species and branches of the general gift are found
to exist quite separately and distinct from each other. Since, then, the
general notion of an independent faculty does not afford a satisfactory
explanation of the phenomena of judgment, we must seek it in some other
direction. And here a few examples will greatly tend to illustrate the
whole matter. How much, for instance, is comprised in a genuine artistic
judgment! It is compounded of a multitude of observations, impressions,
reflections, and emotions. And yet the opinion resulting from all these
is simply one, and definitely comprised in one simple sentence. Suppose
the opinion pronounced to be, that this or that beautiful and ancient
painting is not from the master to whom it is commonly ascribed, but
belongs, rather, to this or that other school. Of course I am not
supposing the case where such an assertion can be proved historically by
documentary evidence. In such a case the decision would turn on a matter
of fact, and not on judgment--at least, not on true artistic judgment.
The judgment in question must principally, if not entirely, be drawn
from the work itself--from the style of the handling, and similar
indications, by a practiced and almost infallible tact. So various, in
short, and manifold are the observations on which such an artistic
judgment depends, that they often furnish matter for a whole book, or,
at least, for an essay. Whenever, however, it is really artistic
discernment, and not merely historical knowledge, that is involved, we
invariably meet with some one point or other which does not admit of
mathematical demonstration, and on which the ultimate decision must be
left to each man’s personal judgment, or that immediate perception which
forms a feeling of art. Most justly, therefore, does our language
closely connect the two expressions. For a true artistic judgment
[_Kunsturtheil_] is itself nothing else than this intuitive feeling of
art [_Kunstgefuhl_] applied to a special case or subject, and brought
out in perfect clearness and comprised in a definite shape. Just so it
is in the sphere of social life with regard to the judgment on what is
proper--the feeling, in short, of propriety. Here, for instance, it is
no uncommon question whether this or that word, spoken in some delicate
posture of affairs, was really necessary, exactly what was right to be
said and thoroughly suitable, or altogether ill-chosen and unseasonable.
Or with regard to some step still in contemplation, it may be disputed
whether such or such a method be the best and the most appropriate. How
many little niceties and delicate considerations are here involved,
which a fine feeling can alone enter into! What various and intricate
contingencies, for which it is often difficult to find words
sufficiently expressive, must such a judgment take into account, in its
deliberation on such matters! And in social converse on such instances,
is not the casting-voice generally left to the acute sensibilities and
quick tact of woman?

For in all such cases the decision invariably depends upon an immediate
feeling of propriety, which, though first called forth and developed by
the social intercourse of life, is in truth original and innate. Such,
indeed, it must ever be. For where it does not exist naturally, it can
never be learned nor artificially acquired. The original want of this
inward feeling can never be replaced by any varnish of external culture,
however brilliant. And the case is also the same even in the sphere of
science; for instance, in the shrewd, searching glance by which the
skillful physician takes his diagnosis of disease; or in the clear,
perspicacious sagacity which enables the judge, in some highly
complicated suit or doubtful criminal trial, to seize the right point on
which truth and justice hinge. For in judicial cases, with much that
admits of demonstrative proof, or which, as matter of fact, is
unquestioned, there is still more where nothing but this psychological
penetration, long practiced in such matters, and to which past
experience has given confidence in itself, can immediately see through
all the sophistical wiles not only of the pleadings and the skillful
advocate, but also of the litigant parties themselves, or of the crafty
criminal.

The same remark applies also to a sphere, apparently, indeed, related to
the one last mentioned, but, in fact, essentially different and widely
remote from it. I allude to the unerring tact of the experienced
statesman, by which he not only penetrates, through his knowledge of
mankind, the political designs of others, but is also enabled to read
the great events of the world and their tendencies, and infallibly to
seize the right moment for action.

In all these instances (and many others might easily be added) it is
upon an immediate perception or feeling of what is right that the
decision finally turns. And this fact is almost confessed by such
expressions as a “penetrating glance,” an “unerring tact,” and many
similar ones to be found in our own and other highly cultivated
languages. Such a judgment may, therefore, not inaptly be termed an
intellectual feeling; for it implies the existence of intellect. And
this not only as an inborn natural talent, for the special domain within
which the judgment is to be exercised, but, moreover, a certain
development of the understanding, strengthened by long practice, and
confirmed by varied experience in the particular province. But still,
with this intellectual element there is invariably mixed a feeling, or
immediate perception, of what is right and just. It is this, in short,
that properly decides and makes the opinion ultimately expressed to be a
judgment. On this account I can not attribute the act of judgment
exclusively to the understanding, for the former involves something more
than the simple intellection of a single object. It comprises, at the
same time, a rigorous distinction between two objects, or a decision
between yes and no. Perhaps, therefore, the best and most perfect
explanation of judgment would be to call it an intelligent feeling of a
correct discrimination, comprised and expressed, and also communicated
to others, in a general form. The last-mentioned quality, however, does
not always belong to the judgment, since it often remains merely
internal; at least, it does not form an essential or necessary part of
it.

Thus, then, this digression (though, in truth, it is not properly a
digression, since the question concerning the faculty of judgment, and
the position it occupies in the whole soul, is essentially connected
with the consideration of the latter) has again led us back to feeling,
as the living center of the entire consciousness, where all its extreme
tendencies converge and reunite. Here it is that the dull and
unpromising state of calm, contemplative indifference meets together
with the highest excitement of energetic activity, the lowest and most
insignificant states of consciousness being found there, as well as the
most exalted and most sublime--the enthusiasm that carries all before
it, no less than the clear self-possession in the spirit’s feeling of a
discernment of truth, or, as I called the judgment, an intelligent
perception of what is right and just. In this advance of feeling in the
mind or spirit [_geistigen_] up to that height of self-possession and
clearness at which it receives the name of judgment, the former bears
the same relation to the latter as the mere thought, in its first vague
generality, does to the notion which I have defined to be a thought
perfectly divided into its organic members, and mathematically measured
both inwardly and outwardly--both, _i.e._, as to extent and
comprehension.

Now, this inward feeling, taken in the full comprehensive sense of the
word, is the same as what I previously called sense, when I spoke of the
human consciousness as consisting of spirit, soul, and sense. In these
places, however, you will remember, I reserved to a future opportunity
the further and closer determination of the relation in which this
general sense stands to the other two elements of the mind. But inasmuch
as the notion of sense always carries us back to a special kind of
sensation, limited and only open to a special sphere of objects, the
expression of an inward feeling seems far more strictly appropriate to
the third element of the mind. For the term feeling, by its vague
generality, comprises all objects of consciousness, or, in other words,
all kinds and species of a higher sense. Now, this higher and
all-embracing internal feeling is the starting-point from which we must
set out if we would hope to arrive at the complete reunion and living
co-operation which marks the consciousness in its original threefold
state. It is not, however, the key-stone of consummation. It is simply
the foundation on which all the rest must be built, or it is the deep
fountain out of which rich nourishment springs up on all sides for the
other two elements of the mind, viz., the soul and the spirit. The
latter two, in fact, constitute the whole essence of the inner man. Now,
since the spirit is an active faculty, while the soul, though possessed
of a creative vitality, is on the whole mostly passive, their undivided
union and constant co-operation may, by way of figure, be designated as
an inner intellectual union or marriage in the consciousness. Indeed, we
might not inaptly explain man’s essence as consisting in the spirit
being wedded to its soul, and in the soul being thereupon clothed with
an organic body. But, to pursue the same metaphor: this marriage between
spirit and soul is not always a happy and harmonious union. Whenever the
soul, drawn off by every external impression and attraction, loses
itself in the manifold ways and by-ways of the material world, or
wanders to an unsafe distance with fancy, as she roams at liberty amid
the things of sense; whenever the spirit, trusting to its own inherent
powers, follows their dictates alone, and recognizes nothing above, and
disregards all that is without, itself, then this marriage is invariably
distracted by passionate discord and unquiet. Here, perhaps, as well as
in the external world, the words apply: “What God hath joined together,
let no man put asunder.” A complete and total divorce is indeed scarcely
conceivable, such is the coherence of the living consciousness. By death
alone is it possible to be brought about, or perhaps also by that
flaming sword of the Holy Word, which it is said pierces to the bone and
marrow, dividing soul and spirit. Where the first bond of union was
given by God, it must be maintained and continually strengthened by
recurring to this supreme center, if it is to be permanent and to look
finally for perfection. This is only possible where the spirit
recognizes a divine standard above itself, and where, in all its
thoughts, works, and deeds, it acts upon this exalted principle, and
where also the soul seeks before all things this eternal center of love,
and is ever reverting to it. In such a case both soul and spirit are
united in God, or at least are ever yearning for such a union. And, in
truth, nothing more is required of man than what has always and every
where been required of him, though, alas! this requisition has seldom
been fully realized. God, then, is the keystone which holds together the
whole human consciousness; and this is the point to which our
investigation has, step by step, been leading us. And now our notion of
the whole scheme and delineation of the human mind is complete.

Its general basis and outline, such as we find it within ourselves, is
formed by the four fundamental faculties first described, together with
four others of a lower and secondary order. Feeling--_i.e._, the inner
feeling, comprising every higher form thereof, is its center. It is that
by which we first are awakened to its present existence, and also at the
same time the point at which we pass into a higher state, wherein its
operation will be more vivid and its union more harmonious. But as to
the threefold life of the inner man, it consists in spirit, soul, and
God, as the third, in whom the first two are united, or at least must
seek their union.

In proportion, therefore, as this key-stone is removed from the human
mind, it falls a prey to discord and the isolation of its several
powers; nay more, the latter sink continually lower and lower, and fall
from one depth of degradation to another. And when occasionally, as in
the might and strength of genius, there occurs a preponderance of some
one faculty, it exercises for the most part a destructive tendency
against the harmony of the whole, checking, if not suppressing
altogether, the free developments of other powers as necessary and as
essential as itself.




LECTURE VI.


According to that outline of the human mind which we have just sketched,
its whole alphabet, so to speak, consists but of twelve letters or
primary elements. These are formed first of all into the stem-syllables
or radicals of higher truth and knowledge, out of which again, in the
inner language of true science, entire words and connected propositions
are constructed. And these again must further combine into one universal
key and all-embracing fundamental word of life. In this internal
alphabet of the consciousness, however, there is one point on which a
few words of further explanation are necessary to a right understanding.
And it is one of the very highest consequence, since it concerns the
final aim or even the first foundation, being nothing less than the
center of life and perfection of unity. God, it is said, must form the
key-stone in the arch of the whole consciousness; and no other real
point of union can be found. But now God is without, or, rather, above,
the human mind. How, then, are we to designate that by and through which
this center of unity, which we feel and acknowledge to be raised far
above us, is to be seized and retained, so that it may livingly operate
within us? I know no other way of indicating it than by the word
_idea_--the idea, viz., of the divine and of the Divinity Himself. As,
then, feeling forms the common center of life for the lower and ordinary
consciousness of man and its eight elementary faculties, so it is this
idea that, as the third internal principle, makes up, together with
spirit and soul, the higher threefold living consciousness. But by this
idea we mean not a merely speculative or abstract and dead idea, but an
effectually operative and living idea of a God, who, having life in
Himself, is the source from which all life proceeds. In its outward
form, and as compared with the other functions of the consciousness or
acts of the thinking faculty, this idea is a notion. At the same time,
however, it is also a figure or a symbol. For it is only figuratively
that that which is not so much inconceivable, as rather transcends
conception, being far above and beyond all possible notions, can be at
all indicated. It is by symbols alone that such can be conceived or
comprehended. Indeed, the word _idea_, in its original Greek sense,
alludes to some kind of visible figure and figurative shape lying, as it
were, within the notion itself. All that is highest of every species can
only be apprehended by such a mode of thinking as is at the same time
both logical and symbolical--in which the logical thought of reason and
the symbolical of imagination--the scientific, viz., or of that which in
cognition is the inward productive faculty, are once more in unison,
being thoroughly combined or wholly blended together. The idea, however,
is not merely a conception, which is a notion, and yet, at the same
time, as properly transcending all notion, a figure or symbol; but
looking to the inward form of the consciousness, rather than to the
object itself, it is a conception which is also a feeling. Indeed,
without the supposition of the latter it can not exist, and, strictly
speaking, is not even conceivable. That this is the case, the following
instance will fully show: How could we, if we wished it, suggest the
idea of true love, or make it clear and comprehensible to one who had
never felt any thing of the kind, and was, in short, totally incapable
of such a feeling?

Properly, however, and in scientific rigor, there is only one idea truly
so called. And that is the one idea of the Godhead. All else that we
call ideas, whether in this higher signification, or in a kindred and
similar sense--like the innate ideas, without number, of which the
Platonic philosophy speaks, or that idea of true love which I lately
alluded to (having previously made frequent use of such expressions, and
intending to do so again whenever they appear calculated to lead to
accuracy of distinction or vividness of indication)--all such can only
be called ideas in a certain sense and analogy. Such a mode of speech,
however, is allowable whenever we are treating of such notions and
conceptions as stand in any relation to the higher and divine. For,
contemplated from this spiritual center of the divine idea, they shine
in a new light. Being purified in its flame, they seem to be elevated
and brought many degrees nearer to this one supreme idea of the living
God, in all His perfection and beauty. In all its fullness and
completeness, however, this idea can not truly be said to be innate in
the human mind. At most there are there only the elements of it, viz.,
the remembrance of eternal love (which Plato’s doctrine of the
anamnesis, when purified, amounts to), the infinite longing, the voice
of conscience; and then, completing the number, as the fourth element,
comes the genuine and exalted enthusiasm for art and natural beauty. All
these higher elements, however, of the divine in man, form but a weak
echo of the whole. They are, as it were, but so many faint dying notes,
or the first infantine lispings of this one divine idea, which in its
full force and brightness must be given, imparted, and revealed; while
that which is thus given and experienced, and indeed personally
experienced, can only be embraced, understood, and retained by faith
through love.

He who has never had any feeling or experience of God, who is a stranger
to love, and incapable of faith of any kind, to such a one, so long as
he remains in this state, it would be lost labor to speak of God, or of
the divine idea, with all that flows immediately from it. This idea may
indeed exist as a rational notion necessarily emanating from our own
cogitations. But in this form, as the creature of our own conception,
but not as a given and revealed, it is little better than the fixed
reflection of ourselves--the objective projection of our own Me. For
such in all purely rational systems it ever is--emptied and utterly void
of all effectual living power, and of all truth and reality. But when
the idea of God has been received by a higher experience (and thus only
can it be vitally imparted), then may we in truth call it divine. For it
is no longer the barren, unfruitful idea that it is in all other cases,
but it contains in itself an effectual living and life-giving energy.

The fundamental elements of the human consciousness are, then, twelve in
number. The first universal basis is formed by the eight special
faculties, with love as their living center. To these must be added the
three principles of the higher inward life--soul, spirit, and the idea
of the divine--such as we have accurately defined and characterized it.
These together I have called the alphabet of the consciousness. And this
alphabet, like a fixed and established logical notion, I shall
henceforth adopt in this precise shape and number, making it, without
any essential variation, the basis of my subsequent remarks. It is, no
doubt, of great advantage, and even necessary for the elucidation of any
matter, rigorously to separate the several elements of the general
notion, duly arranging them, and accurately preserving their number.
Still we may be overanxious in this respect. And, indeed, language
itself is not always very precise in its designations; and the
different dialects of human speech, with their fluctuating phraseology,
often assign a different rank and position to the parts of the same
whole. Much, for instance is set down as an independent faculty, which,
more correctly regarded, is but a state--or even only a passage from one
state into another--or it may be merely a natural talent; or, perhaps,
some such happy coincidence and harmonious co-operation of several
powers of the soul as constitutes true genius. An instance of this kind
gave rise to that question which so lately engaged our attention,
whether the judgment is rightly to be considered a special faculty; and,
if not, how is it in strictness of truth to be designated? And in a
similar respect, I now find occasion to say a few words on wit, as being
nearly related to judgment (if the latter be, as I have explained it, an
_intelligent feeling_), and as holding an intermediate position between
judgment and genius. For now we have given a complete sketch in outline
of the whole consciousness, it is desirable to fill in, as completely as
possible, all the lesser and nicer features. In other words, it is
expedient to assign their proper place in the entire consciousness to
those properties of soul and spirit which are not so much simple or
first principles as complex phenomena of a secondary order, and
compounded of several distinct elements. Now wit, like judgment, is an
intelligent feeling, marked, however, with the qualities of
immediateness and pertinency. But it is not, like the judgment,
associated always with a special knowledge and insight. On the contrary,
wit often arises from a certain _naïve_ ignorance of the entire province
to which belongs the object on which it exercises itself. We might
almost say that the disposition to wit consists in a _universally_
intelligent feeling, for its quickness of perception is confined to no
particular department of life, but exercises itself on life in general,
and finds therein its proper arena. But this describes rather the notion
of what is commonly called “sound sense,” or “natural intelligence,”
which, in itself, is not wit, and is often found existing totally
unaccompanied with the latter. Nevertheless, this at least is manifest,
that if an individual be said to be entirely devoid of judgment--which
is nearly the same as saying that he possesses no _intelligent feeling_
in any species or form--it would be in vain in such a person to look for
much, if any, wit. That, moreover, which forms the chief characteristic
of wit, and essentially distinguishes it from judgment, is its
unconsciousness. On this very account children even, if they be at all
lively, are often witty. And, indeed, this childish wit forms, perhaps,
one of the most graceful of its many forms and kinds. To prove how
greatly this childish wit depends on its very unconsciousness, we may
appeal to a fact, which, moreover, will teach us at the same time not to
lay too much stress on the fact, if children, even at an early age,
appear very clever and witty. It is no unfrequent observation that when
children, by the development of their understandings, attain to greater
clearness of consciousness, their wit suddenly ceases, and their
character assumes a touch of dry, solemn, but still childish
earnestness. That genial unconsciousness which ever remains the property
of true wit, both of social conversation and of poetry, at once forms
and attests its affinity with genius. But, still, wit alone is not a
complete creative power. By itself it rarely gives birth to aught. It is
but a single element, which is added as the last finishing grace to all
the creative productions of fancy, and to every other work in which a
fertile and original mind gives utterance to its thoughts. On this
account it manifests itself in the most varied and opposite forms. It is
not limited to social conversation, or to art and poetry, but even in
philosophy--and the Socratic especially--assumes a peculiar and
important place as the essential ingredient of irony.

Now the variety of forms in which wit so richly displays itself is a
further point of resemblance between it and judgment. Still this common
property has a different cause in each. The immediate judgment, or
intelligent feeling, presents so great a variety of forms, because the
human mind is not equally conversant in every province of thought, being
generally familiar with some one in particular. But in the case of wit,
it is its very versatility, by which it suits itself to and insinuates
itself in every object of intellectual attention, that is the source of
its manifold diversity. But that it would carry us far beyond our
present limits, it would be highly instructive in a scientific point of
view to take a survey of all the several forms in which this mental
quality gushes forth in all the rich fullness of genius.

But now, since our exposition of the human mind has been hitherto
carried on by means of a parallelism with the idea of language, it will
not be out of place to make a few remarks here on the real alphabet, or
the elementary letters of different languages, as bearing a relation to
what we have called the alphabet of the consciousness. For the former
presents more than one remarkable analogy with the higher principle of
the inward life, and its whole organic framework. Properly, syllables,
and not letters, form the basis of language. They are its living roots,
or chief stem and trunk, out of which all else shoots and grows. The
letters, in fact, have no existence, except as the results of a minute
analysis; for many of them are difficult, if not impossible, to
pronounce. Syllables, on the contrary, more or less simple, or the
complex composites of fewer or more letters, are the primary and
original data of language. For the synthetical is in every case anterior
to the elements into which it admits of resolution. The letters,
therefore, first arise out of the chemical decomposition of the
syllables. But the results of this analytical process are very different
in different languages, as is proved by the difference of results in the
variety of alphabets. While in our own we reckon four-and-twenty
letters, in many others the number is far greater. In those oriental
languages nearest akin to our own, they amount to more than thirty;
while the Indian family counts as many as fifty.

It forms no easy problem to indicate most of these by our European
characters; and to pronounce them requires the organs of speech to be
more than ordinarily flexible. On the other hand, profound and
philosophical inquires into language, by rejecting all mere
modifications of harshness or softness in the same sound, and whatever
is manifestly a mere variation of the same letter, or a mere compound of
simpler tones, have reduced the whole alphabet to ten primary elements.
According to this system, which has not been established without great
acuteness, so much at least is evident, that properly there are but
three vowels,[70] instead of five, as we usually count them, the E being
a softened I, and U a deadened or faint O. The diphthongs, and other
tones intermediate between the simple vowels, in which the German is so
rich, are evidently to be considered but as so many musical transitions
from one to the other. We may here appeal to the Hebrew, as being in its
system of letters, notwithstanding its other ancient oriental features,
highly simple and profoundly significant and coherent.[71] Its
two-and-twenty characters may be divided into two orders. The first and
higher, as I would term it, contains the three vowels, the aspirates (of
which more by and by), and then the simplest and softest (they might
almost be called the child’s) consonants, B, D, G. The twelve letters of
the second contain all the other grosser, more corporeally-sounding
consonants. Usually, indeed, all letters, and especially consonants, are
classed into labials, linguals, and dentals, according to the organs
principally employed in their utterance, distinguishing, on the same
principle, certain nasals and gutturals. But however correct this
classification may be in an anatomical point of view, and
physiologically considered, still, for that parallel, which is grounded
in nature itself, between speech and thought, and for the analogy which
subsists between man’s inward and outward language, it is both
unsatisfactory and uninstructive. For it looks exclusively to a single
aspect. The ordinary grammatical division also of letters into vowels
and consonants, is at least incomplete. It would be far more correct to
associate with them a third class of aspirates. For the latter may be
distinguished from the former by many a characteristic property, even
though they are indicated by signs which resemble those of the other
class and often pass into and may be resolved into them. In the various
alphabetical systems the aspirates stand out most individually. They
assume the most diversified forms, even in their mode of notation, and
it would almost seem as if the ethereal breathing which floats around
them refused to be corporeally fixed and confined with as much easiness
as the other elements of language. In some languages, as the Greek, for
instance, according to the extant system, which belongs not to the
earliest period of its development, the principal aspiration is not
denoted by a letter, but is indicated in the same way as an accent. In
the oriental, and, generally, in all ancient languages, the aspirates,
according to the different forms into which they enter, hold a very
important place. It almost seems that the more aspirated a language is,
the nearer it is to its original state. It is also remarkable, that
wherever this element appears in undiminished vigor, it gives to the
whole language a character of antiquity and grandeur, and lends to it a
pervading tone of spiritual gravity, such as has been observed in the
Arabic, and prevails also in a high degree in the Spanish; though,
indeed, an undue prevalence of this high and solemn note, unrelieved by
others, is apt to degenerate into monotony. In our own German the
aspirates were originally far more numerous than they are at present.
And, generally, the more a language is softened down and refined by
daily use and conversation, the more it loses this impress of antiquity.
And it even happens with some, as with the French, for instance, that
the aspirates cease to be articulated, even though they are still
marked.

Now, while the aspirates form the spiritual element in the whole system
of elementary sounds, in the vowels, on the other hand, predominates the
soul-full voice of song. These, in short, form the musical ensouling
principle of language. The less a language is overladen with consonants,
and the more fully the simple vowels sound out, the better adapted is it
for music and songs. The consonants, on the other hand, which only in
part imitate sound, make up the material element of language. They are,
no doubt, necessary to the richness of a language, and its variety of
expression; nevertheless, when they greatly predominate, they render it
corporeal and heavy.

Now this remarkable analogy between this division of the alphabet into
aspirates, vowels, and consonants, and the triple principle of human
life and operation, as consisting of spirit, of soul, and of body, or of
bodily exterior, I could not but notice in passing, and throw out as
distinctly as possible.

But now this analogy and parallel between speech and consciousness
presents another view of the matter, which it appears desirable to
consider. In the alphabet of the human consciousness, which furnishes
the several elements out of which syllables and then words are framed,
which again form the first elements of all man’s higher knowledge, I
would pre-eminently consider as its vowels those eternal feelings of the
Godlike which have their foundation in the very nature of man. Now it is
usual to designate these fundamental feelings of man as faith, hope,
and love (charity). But, however customary it may be to class the three
together, the intrinsic connection between them is not easily pointed
out. And yet, perhaps, if we have recourse to another analogy with the
visible world, it will help us to trace this bond of union. This method
will probably be both easier and simpler than a direct refutation of
erroneous views on the subject, or any critical enumeration of elements
which in the psychological apprehension are incorrectly associated with
them. Now, these three feelings or properties, or states of the
consciousness, may be regarded as so many organs for the cognition or
the perception, or, if the term be preferred, for the suggestion of the
divine. In this respect, then, and relatively to their different modes
of apprehension, we may compare them with the external senses and their
organs. Thus love, in its first soul-exciting contact, abiding
attraction, and finally complete union, strikingly corresponds to the
external sense of feeling. Faith is the inner ear of the spirit which is
open to, catches up, and retains the imparted word of a higher
revelation. Hope, however, is the eye, whose clear vision discerns, even
in the remote distance, the objects of its profound and ardent longing.
The latter brings us to a thoroughly vivid idea (or, rather, presupposes
the existence) of faith, according to which it is no arbitrary and
artificial idea, but one real throughout and vital. Although intelligent
and spiritual, it is still a feeling, and ultimately rests also on a
feeling, that, viz., of love, out of which, as its root and foundation,
it arises. Indeed, faith is nothing else than love, through a pure will,
maintained with consistency of character; and this applies to it even in
its nobler relations among human things, and does not apply to it merely
in a higher and divine reference.

In the last age (if it be not also in the present), the notion of faith
was taken in a very different sense, and the phraseology arising from
that view is, in part, at least, still prevalent. On this account a few
explanatory words are necessary for the sake of caution and distinction.
The following is the historical occasion or scientific origin of this
other notion of faith. At a late period of so-called enlightenment, in
the midst of which, however, many grave misconceptions prevailed, reason
was set up as the sole authority. As the highest and greatest of man’s
endowments, it was almost deified, whatever did not appear at once and
easily explicable by reason, being forthwith and indiscriminately
pronounced a prejudice, and, as such, to be got rid of with all
diligence. In this state of things, modern German philosophy commenced
its career with attempting to show that this sovereign reason, which had
set itself forth as the first and highest in man, is extremely
defective, and comes far short of the requisitions both of science and
life. The position was honestly and earnestly maintained, and the proof
worked out with tolerable completeness. Subsequently, however, its
validity has been questioned, or only admitted under many limitations
and qualifications. But even this modified praise can not be bestowed on
the scientific remedy with which men hoped to supply the defects of
reason, and to cure the old and universal evils of rationalism. For, in
fact, the method by which they sought to get rid of this great and
manifest deficiency was simply by suddenly opening an unlimited credit
for the reason, which going beyond all actual need, and based either on
arbitrary assumption, or a confiding generosity, should be sufficient
for all emergencies. But this expedient, in the existing state and panic
of the rational market, could not remove the evil; it only exaggerated
it. In a word, it was the same old reason which (its claim to
supersensible honors having been rejected) had been just thrust out of
the temple of science by the front entrance, that, under the disguise of
faith, was now being smuggled in by the postern. It was but a mere
arbitrary substitute for reason that had assumed this new name. Now such
a faith as this requires to be carefully distinguished from that living
faith which springs from and is founded on love. For this purpose I have
attempted to show, from the very outset, the great difference between
the two.

Now, if occasionally I have felt myself called upon to set bounds to and
to protest against the illimitable requirements and assumptions of
reason in science, my remarks have been directed, not against reason
itself, but chiefly against that absoluteness with which it pretends to
reign paramount. In our German tongue--and since the comparative
parallel of thought and language is a part of the general plan of our
present exposition, this trifling but not insignificant philological
remark will not here be inappropriate--in our vernacular tongue, the
close limitation of the thing is furnished by the term itself. For as
understanding [_Verstand_] comes from the verb to understand
[_verstehen_], and implies the existence of an object which stands
before the mind, to be penetrated and searched through by it, so reason
[_Vernunft_] implies a _Vernehmen_, a perception or apprehension, and is
itself nothing else than the organ of spiritual perception, which is
threefold: 1st, of a higher law and rule above us and given to us; 2d,
of the inward voice of conscience and the pure self-consciousness within
us; and, 3d, of other rational thought around and beside itself. Now it
is only against that reason which is unwilling to perceive any thing,
or, at least, any thing beside or above itself, that all my objections
are directed. For when the reason refuses to acknowledge aught above
itself, but absolutely rejects it, then will it estimate but little
whatever is beside itself. At any rate it will never be eminently
successful in its attempts to comprehend or understand it. In this case,
it will continually make the greatest mistakes and blunders in its views
and conceptions of that even which it really finds and perceives, or at
least believes to discover within itself. Reason, in itself, and in its
due limits, is, indeed, but one of man’s various fundamental powers;
still, in the present state of his divided and discordant consciousness,
it is a highly essential faculty. Like all the others, consequently,
which severally do but present so many different aspects of man’s
external and internal life, reason, when it oversteps its due limits, is
liable to great, nay, the greatest of aberrations. But it might here be
asked, are not the possible aberrations of fancy still more dangerous?
We must answer, Without doubt they are; and this is the only answer we
can give to the question put thus generally. But in the special
reference to our own age, there is far greater and more frequent
occasion to call attention at present to the evils produced by the
errors of reason, than to warn men anxiously against the possible abuses
of fancy. And this for the simple fact, that of all the powers of the
human mind, which, when isolated, are, more or less, destructive in
their action, reason has, in the later ages, and in our times,
especially, been decidedly predominant. Consequently, we have on all
sides before our eyes obvious and instructive examples of the mazes and
abyss of error, fatal no less to science than to morals, into which
reason not only falls herself, but hurries all that come within her
influence, when, having once started from a false position, she has
followed out this wrong tendency with full rigor of consequence. We see
in it the cause of all the catastrophes of the age, and the fearful
struggle of party. The dangers which might arise from the exclusive
ascendency of fancy are, in our generation, less likely to be general,
and they are less threatening, less urgent. And the explanation of this
fact is equally simple. The occurrence of lofty and genius-gifted powers
of imagination is extremely rare; and, at any rate, many instances are
seldom met with at one and the same time. Here, therefore, it is often a
false alarm; the threatening clouds quickly disperse, the blue heavens
again shine forth, and the wide horizon of the all-spanning reason once
more becomes bright, and even clearer than we had ever known it before.
And if occasionally an overabundance of genius-gifted power does
manifest itself in the domain of fancy, the general effect that results
from it is, at most, a recognition of its excellence, which, however,
only slowly and with difficulty gains possession of men’s minds. This
feeling may, no doubt, sometimes amount to a profound admiration, whose
language, sparkling with the exquisite ornaments and flowery tropes of
exaggeration, may seem to border closely on a deification of its object;
still this feeling, however great and universal it may appear, is very
far from that height of enthusiasm which wholly engrosses and carries
the mind along with it. Indeed, for the most part, it carefully avoids
and keeps aloof from such a state.

In short, however much any particular age may admire or even worship
great powers of genius or art, it is very rarely indeed, if ever,
carried away by its partial and erroneous tendencies, or its arbitrary
and quaint peculiarities. At least, the same party zeal is not to be
witnessed here that divides both science and life between the rival
systems of absolute reason. However, the consideration of the
prejudicial effects of the despotic ascendency of the reason has, almost
of necessity, brought before us the somewhat connected topic of the
hinderances which art may occasion to the pursuit of the highest truth
and certainty. We will, therefore, now examine the evils which arise
whenever art, as the executive power in the region of fancy, usurps an
undue authority over the rest of the consciousness, and when, in its
judgment of things, taking an undue position in some merely poetical or
artistic view, it assumes a reality that belongs not to it, and dreams
of finding in itself the final cause and firm basis of all existence.

For the right exposition of that notion of faith, hope, and love, which
we made the foundation of the knowledge of all higher truth, it was,
above all things, necessary that we should carefully and accurately
discriminate between the true living faith which is grounded on and
springs out of love, and that spurious faith which reason arbitrarily
devises to cover its own weakness and deficiencies. In the same way it
remains for us to point out the true end of hope, establishing the
internal foundation of its idea, and making out, at the same time, its
intimate relation to art, as it arises from its connection therewith and
with time. Now, as all high hope stands in close union with man’s inmost
character, and forms a principal element of his being, his whole life
and activity being based on hope, so likewise in art--so faithful a
mirror is it of human nature--man’s holiest hopes form the chief aim and
the animating soul of its representations. A perfectly faithful, though
artistically expressed, imitation of a love higher than any actual
manifestation of the feeling (of whatever nature it be), may simply, of
itself, constitute a work of art, and, indeed, is its natural
object-matter. But still, isolated and by itself, it would furnish but a
fragmentary feeling for the fancy, without a true beginning, and without
end or aim, or proper conclusion. Faith is but, as it were, a straight
line--the rule of sentiment for this life, of expectation for the other.
But now, in the mind of man, above every actual love and every definite
faith, there is a _superabundance_--if we may so speak--of feelings,
thoughtfully forecasting, ardently loving, and hoping, even beyond hope
itself--of thoughts, dreaming, at least, of a higher truth than is to be
met with on earth.

And this divine superabundance in the human soul, if I may be allowed
this bold expression, is properly the sublime matter, the invisible
object and spiritual essence of true art and poetry. Not that this inner
soul, this vital breath of high art and poetry, must, even in the
outward form, invariably express itself (as it does in music generally)
as a feeling of longing. Neither must it in its definite direction to
the future, always manifest itself externally in the form of hope; and,
consequently, speak only in lyrical strains, as the music of enthusiasm.
Such a limitation would, indeed, have a most monotonous effect. On the
contrary, even in a highly-finished picture of some actual and present
scene, this idea of hope, as the soul which animates the whole, may be
present, and like an invisible thread of higher life, be interwoven in
it. And this envelopment, or, rather, this veiled manifestation and
indirect revelation of spirit, is often to be found, not only in
creations which are permanently artistic, but also in those that are
profoundly poetical and enthusiastic. Even the sorrowful remembrance of
a by-gone foretime of infantine innocence, and of sublime grandeur, is
properly nothing but a reflection of this divine hope, and, in a free
and comprehensive sense, which thus combines poetry and art, may be even
counted as a part of it. And if ancient art and ancient poetry
especially, with their mournful back-glances at the olden majesty long
past and gone, come over us with emotions something like those of
eventide, when the last parting gleam of the brilliant sun is fast
setting behind the distant hills, so in their opposite aspect, as hope,
turning its bold, enthusiastic eye toward the future, they may smile
upon us as the rosy dawn which runs before the rising sun of truth, and
that new time which is to shine and glow in its beams--or as the first
beautiful ray of enthusiastic promise. Such, in all probability, seems
the position most suitable to art in our own days. Now, with respect to
this peculiar position of art relatively to hope, and their intimate
affinity, and their relation to the present age and to the two other
elements of the harmonic scale of human life, viz., love and faith, the
frequent and expressive sentiment of a poet whose intimate friendship it
is my privilege to enjoy, will convey most forcibly the conclusion which
I would wish to enforce upon your minds. Although his remark with regard
to the harmony and union which ought to prevail between the true
elements of higher feeling was addressed primarily to the present
generation, it admits of application to every age. He asks--

    “The age has neither faith nor love;
     How, then, for such should hope remain?”[72]

This voice first sounded forth in fateful days, when danger and alarm
were so instant and threatening as almost to cut off and extinguish
hope; but the storm so dark and menacing passed away. A new prospect has
since opened upon us, and all is changed. As a just estimate of our own
times, however, it appears to me, in its present unqualified form, too
sweeping and severe. The age is not so entirely without hope as the poet
here asserts. No doubt we have been somewhat lukewarm, inconstant, and
unsteady in this respect. Or, more correctly to express the real state
of the case: in itself and in that faith in itself which, as it was
overhastily embraced, was set up without limit or condition, and
generally in all faith, from its highest degree down to that lowest
grade of it which moves within the ordinary pursuits and relations of
life, it has been somewhat confused and wandering; nay, at times it has
proved somewhat forgetful, not only of the old and transitory, but also
of what is modern, and even what was most recent and within its own
experience. Accordingly, to the eye of the observer, it appears, on the
whole, to be devoid of all ruling principle, and to be still in search
of some regulative standard within itself. If, in this search after
faith, some few have taken up too quickly, and rested satisfied with
that arbitrary expedient and device of a faltering and meager reason,
this was, no doubt, a symptom of a partially sickly state, but by no
means such as to justify us in passing a sweeping sentence on the whole
age, as totally unsound and diseased. For in all human affairs and
relations, such a profound longing as this, when it is lasting, and
generally whenever it does not proceed solely and entirely from some
want or defect, invariably presupposes some natural disposition and
capacity, though it may be one which is neither rightly cultivated, nor
as yet expanded to full vigor and stability.

And as little, or rather still less, would it be just to deny to the age
all love--if, at least, an enthusiasm which readily and cheerfully makes
the greatest sacrifices be a part of love. Consequently, I can not
concur with the opinion which will not concede to the age in which we
live the least spark of hope. Even though many of its expectations--as
being at least precipitate or wholly immaterial--as being founded, in
short, on naught--have terminated in naught, and even in their desired
fulfillment, must have ended in a nullity--still we dare not, therefore,
throw aside all higher, holier, and diviner hope. For in this we feel
every earthly expectation, so far as it is real and well-grounded, will
receive its final accomplishment, being realized to a degree surpassing
all that we had ever ventured to look for. And even if dark clouds are
again gathering on the horizon, and if to many an observer, whose
position in the political world affords him a wide and distant prospect
of society, the dangers menacing our own generation seem still more
fearful and terrible even than those which have but scarcely passed
away; still there is no need of despair. Rather, taught by past
experience in like fearful circumstances, and recognizing in this lesson
of experience a teaching higher than man’s, we will, even though our
fears be fulfilled in the worst and most awful form, regard it all as
probably forming, if not a necessary, yet certainly a most salutary
crisis of transition to a higher state of divine hope. To this divine
hope it is sufficient for me thus briefly to have alluded. For whatever
I have at any time in my past life attempted--it may be feebly and
inadequately--to give expression to, and all that it is my object to
convey to my present respected auditory, and all that hereafter I shall
have to say in this world, has had and will have no other end or object
than to point to and to preach this sacred and eternal hope of a true,
not merely earthly, but profoundly new era, and of a spiritual life
advancing in it toward the perfection of majesty and glory. To gain a
full assurance for such a hope, and to establish it to the best of my
power firmly and immovably among the actuating motives of life, has ever
been and will always be my first and dearest wish.

But still, though the poet’s distich, in its immediate reference to our
own days, requires to be greatly qualified, I would, nevertheless,
venture to apply it to art. At least, it admits of such an application;
though in this case likewise it must undergo some restriction and
limitation. As passed even on the present condition of art, the sentence
is harsh, if not unjust. If, however, there ever was or should be a time
of which, if not strictly and absolutely, yet generally and on the
whole, it could with truth be asserted, that the existing condition of
art “had neither faith nor love,” then might we go on confidently to add
the inference, “How then should hope remain for it?”

I must once again repeat it: such a sentence, if applied to German art
in our own days, would be both harsh and unmerited. If, however,
art--which itself is nothing but the significant hieroglyphics, the
deeply-moving and elevating song of eternal hope--should have for its
basis, instead of a true and unwavering faith, one merely artificial and
self-imposed, or at best, the unreal faith of feeling, fugitive and
transitory, and unable to stand the fiery trial--if, too, love, instead
of being deep-felt and profound, be but the cuckoo-note of a fashionable
admiration, unthinkingly caught up and repeated without nature; then
the harsh sentence we have just quoted, together with its sad inference,
finds a due application. At least, it is so far applicable as it is true
that in this sad deficiency of living faith and earnest love, we can
alone discover an explanation of what otherwise seems so strange in the
history of art within the recent century. If, after many a truly noble
beginning, the further development and result corresponded but little
and most imperfectly with the expectations that had at first been
excited--if, with truly great talents and rare endowments of genius, so
much has fallen to the ground, like imperfect blossoms, without maturing
any useful and lasting intellectual fruits--it was simply because art
was deficient in this its firmest basis. And partly it was, also,
because she mistook and was unable to take her proper position in the
times, or even if she did understand, was too weak to retain it by an
abiding feeling of love. For the true position of art must not be
misunderstood, nor the natural order of things reversed, if it is truly
to flourish, and the age itself is not to be deprived of, or checked and
disturbed in, its true enjoyment of it. True art and poetry are the
beautiful crown, the promising blossoms, yea, the very flowers of hope,
on the nobly-grown tree of humanity, as it widely expands itself in rich
and marvelous intellectual development. But it can not also be its root;
and if any where it pretends or desires to be such, there assuredly some
strange perversion must exist, or some profound and essential defect
must have led to so singular a pretension.

We hear, no doubt, in horticulture, of inverted trees, whose heads being
placed in the ground, strike root and grow, while the natural root
freely develops itself into branches and leaves. The experiment so
successful with plants can not be imitated in mental matters without
fearful peril. Here the blossoming crown, if reversed, will not take
root, and never bear real and genuine fruit. No! an absolutely æsthetic
foundation is insufficient even for this life, and much more so, then,
for the next. Of the origin of life and the world, a mere poetical view
of things can give but a specious and cleverly-evasive account; but as
good as none of that of hope, of which, in such a case, it must wholly
have lost the clew. If, then, that which is at most but the bright
morning tint of hope should seek to keep back the sun, or would set
itself up for the true luminary, then--supposing it for a moment to be
possible--it would itself soon lower into dark clouds, and instead of
the longed-for splendor of the full and glorious daylight, a dull, gray
sky would cover the whole earth. This intrinsic weakness often betrays
itself in poetry (and frequently, also, in other spheres of human
invention), by what at any rate appears to be an inflated display,
which, instead of concealing, does but create a suspicion of a deep
internal hollowness. What I allude to may take two forms. Sometimes it
manifests itself in an excessive luxuriousness--often we might call it a
very deluge--of the most unintelligible exaggerations of sacred
feelings, such as I regret occasionally to observe in our modern school
of poetry. At other times it comes forward in an equally lavish and
boundless prodigality of wit and raillery; sometimes, too, a serious
humor lurks in the wit, while a mocking parody makes sport with the very
humor, or a still loftier tone of irony, from its height of spiritual
exaltation, soars above both wit and humor, and the whole work
itself--nay, above all besides, and even the very universe. It is in
this one-sided preponderance, and in the absoluteness with which reason
or fancy is allowed to take a decided but exclusive direction, that the
first cause lies of that alienation already mentioned as subsisting
between men of a purely æsthetical temperament and poetical nature, who
on the one side judge of every thing by the rules of taste, and the men
of practical reason on the other, whose only standard is utility. This
estrangement is only too apparent in real and actual life, where in the
degree which we have supposed, and by the methods ordinarily pursued, it
is utterly irreconcilable. They stand, indeed, as fully estranged from
each other, and as hostile, as two wholly different races. And in this
light a well-known _savant_, at the close of the last century, seems
really to have regarded them, since, on the whole face of the earth, he
saw only two races--noble-minded, elegant, and tasteful Celts, and dull,
ordinary, and stupid Mongols. Here, however, I must repeat my previous
remark, that, in these days at least, by far the greater danger is to be
apprehended from an absolute ascendency of reason. For the rationalizing
system of thought which results from such one-sidedness, is not confined
merely to the schools and their scientific theories, but it too often
extends its pernicious consequences, and its fatal and debasing
influence, over the whole range of public and social life. On the other
hand, the slight aberrations of taste, or (if they most be accounted
such) the little extravagances of genius, may always be easily and
promptly reduced within due limits, especially in an age like our own,
so thoroughly pervaded with a correct feeling of art.

To give a solid basis to the whole of life, a firm internal conviction
is necessary. It must be a deeper feeling than any that a mere
aspiration, however beautiful, or any poetical visions of enthusiastic
hope, or even that irony which exalts itself above both, can ever give.
Now, for the attainment of this inward certainty and irrefragable
science of life and truth, pure thought, though it does not form the
only road, is, nevertheless, in every case a necessary agent, whose
co-operation is indispensable. In the further prosecution, therefore, of
our pursuit of the science of life, as deducible from the very notion of
the consciousness, according to that theory of it which we have been
developing, thought, in and by itself, must now, as we hinted in our
first sketch, form the subject of a special inquiry. But here the
principal thing to be guarded against is, the delusion that philosophy
must aim at the rigor of mathematical certainty, and a mode of proof
derived, on such an hypothesis, from that science, by a servile copying
of its method; for, often as this has been attempted, it has never as
yet led to a felicitous result. This misconception in the domain of
science is something like to what it would be if in poetry, from an
undue consideration of music, the mere play of tones--the rhyme and
rhythm--which do indeed contribute to the ornateness of its figurative
investiture, should be held to be the very essence of the art. Or, to
take another illustration, it is much the same as if, with some of the
more recent English poets, we should wish to make picturesquely
descriptive poetry to be a peculiar species; whereas in truth it forms,
or has a tendency to degenerate into, a mere faulty mannerism.

You will remember that I explained a notion to be a conception
completely determined, both inwardly and outwardly (_i.e._, in extent
and comprehension), according to the mathematical dimensions of number,
measure, and weight. But this, perhaps, is the only mathematical formula
that in the domain of philosophy is universally applicable. And even as
such it only applies to the notion as a standard and fundamental idea by
which we may judge of the correctness of its formation, and the
completeness of its division into its several organic parts, or lower
genera and species. It is no use further for the combination of the
several notions into entire scientific periods and conclusions; for we
may regard every complete system of science and speculative thought as
some such perfect period and syllogism. But with regard to the notion
and its object, it is unquestionably of the highest importance to
determine whether it be absolutely simple or compound. If the latter, it
may suggest many questions. If double, it may fall into an intrinsic
contrariety, or be involved in a twofold want of harmony. If it numbers
three constituents, we may have to inquire whether in its triple energy
it enjoys a living unity of operation; or if possessed of four opposite
directions, it may be involved in binary contrarieties and double
discord; or, again, we might have to inquire whether the essential
accession of some fifth element forms the living center to hold together
and reunite the four which otherwise are divergent and apart; or whether
the whole in triple couplets, or a double trine, forms a six; or whether
seven arise from the union of a trine and quartain, either in the world
of thought, or the realities of life and outward experience; and again,
eight may be a double square in the one or the other relation; or yet
once more, we may have to inquire whether in the still advancing inward
reckoning and development of life, nine arise from a thrice repeated
triple energy. And lastly, whether all these first elementary numbers
are in various ways perfected and combined together in the decade.

Rightly understood, the Pythagorean theory of numbers--however
unintelligible its single statements may appear, when detached from the
general context--is perhaps as little devoid of foundation as the
Platonic doctrine of anamnesis. The latter I have endeavored to justify,
by explaining it in a better sense than it is ordinarily taken; the
former, however, from a deficiency of original and genuine historical
authorities, it is far more difficult to judge of correctly and
impartially. In the first place, the Pythagoreans as a body stand very
far indeed above the ordinary standard of the Grecian intellect and
enlightenment; for Plato was but a single great mind, and stood almost
alone even in the Socratic school.

The degradation of the female sex, though founded on the habits as well
as political institutions of the rest of Greece, was decried by these
earnest and deep-thinking men, who, in their reform, adopted quite an
opposite sentiment. And if in their measures for its removal something
seems still to be desiderated, and even something to be blamed, both
defects arise chiefly from their having fallen into the other extreme of
error, by proposing to give to woman a culture too decidedly masculine,
and seeking to establish it as the rule of their new society. Women were
concurrent and co-ordinate members of the governing body of the
Pythagorean league, and an essential element of the splendid aristocracy
of merit in this new model of life and society; which, however, as
clashing too directly with the inveterate habits of their countrymen,
soon provoked a revolution, and was entirely overthrown. It was,
however, from this source that Plato, and also Socrates, chiefly derived
their respect for highly-gifted women and their general view of the
female sex; which in a degree, though very imperfectly, anticipated the
purer Christian notion both of it and human nature, possessing on the
whole a right but vague notion of the true dignity of both.

With respect to the theory of numbers in this ancient philosophy, and
its true and simple sense, we have the following remarks to make. There
is, we know, a certain chronological feeling by means of which the
skillful physician strives, with acute and often happy conjecture, to
determine the impending crisis of disease and its probable termination.
There is also a similar tact which enables the experienced politician to
measure the under-current of the rapid flow of mundane events--to feel
the pulse of life as it beats in its thronging and quickly-passing
incidents. In both cases, however, we feel that it is no infallibly
certain and perfectly omniscient oracle--for none such is to be found in
the whole range of the human mind. Neither is it any prophetical
forecasting--not to speak of any pre-destined necessity. It must be
regarded as a delicate and sensitive tact, which may deceive, but whose
perceptions subsequent results most frequently prove to be correct. Now,
of somewhat similar nature to this, there is a kind of immediate,
searching, arithmetical glance into the internal and essential numerical
relations of things in general, and also of all the objects of nature
and phenomena of life, which does unquestionably form an essential
element in every innate talent for scientific thinking. In some such
simple sense as this we may understand the Pythagorean doctrine of
intrinsic life-numbers in things and their manifold relations. Under
such limitations we may adopt it, or at least allow its validity. And
at any rate we must admit that it was an advance (or at least the first
step thereto) in scientific thought, to be able, by this way of
regarding things, to count, in the analysis of them or their notions, up
to ten, or even to fifteen or more.

Thus, then, as regards the general notions (but only in regard to
these), the mathematical view and method may be profitably applied to
philosophy. In any case it is highly important, and indeed essential,
for the correct formation of notions (and also for the complete division
of them into their organic members, whatever may be the sphere to which
they belong), that we should be able to determine the true inner number,
both of them and their objects, since on this number the right quantity
and weight of any one notion relatively to others, whether kindred or
distinct, and especially to the whole, most intimately depends.

The combination, however, of single notions into propositions, or
complete systems of science, can not, in philosophy at least, follow a
mathematical or any similar principle. For philosophy, we have seen, is
a science of a higher life, derived from an internal experience. It
rests, therefore, on the triple basis, inasmuch as the latter is given
from within, from above, and from without. Consequently, the great
object here is, naturally, not, as it is in mathematical science, to
link together, in apparently rigorous connection, the several phenomena
of these higher data, or (if, as some will have it, there be only one)
its single momenta, and manifoldly to concatenate them as so many pure
schemes and formulæ. The essential point is rather to gain a pure
apprehension of the imparted data of this higher life; and rightly
understanding them, to clothe them correctly in words, and by giving
these again in correct grammatical coherence, to express them clearly
and forcibly. But this would imply that the method of thought in this
self-cognition of life, thus expressed in words, is of a thoroughly
grammatical nature; and then the higher logic--if we must so speak, and
isolate and detach the latter, as an elementary science, from its
connection with the living whole--the higher logic would consist simply
of the rules for this inner language, and be nothing but a correct
grammar of living thought. And, in truth, I for my part do believe that
it ought so to be treated. And it is from this point of view, and
according to the idea thus advanced of such a higher grammatical
correctness of thinking, that I shall proceed, whenever any point
connected with the form of thought and the right method of science comes
into question, or requires to be noticed in passing. An instance will
place clearly before our mind the different points of view taken by
these two modes of judging and doctrinal methods. In compliance with a
similitude which accurately enough corresponds to the truth, let us
consider a system of philosophy as a whole period of higher thought, or
as a perfect proposition of science. Now, in that estimate of a period
of this kind which observes the usual requisitions of mathematical
certainty and mode of thinking, it would be said: “This system is
wonderful, and quite perfect, for all its positions are rigidly
demonstrated.” But even supposing the system were thus rigorously
demonstrative in all its parts, still the whole system might be
radically false; for it might originally have started from an erroneous
principle, or, being devoid of any truly real and abiding
subject-matter, be based on some empty phantom of scientific
imagination, or the unsubstantial absolute of the reason. But the same
system or period of thought being judged from the opposite position of
what I have called a higher grammatical method, will be thus spoken of:
“It is all empty words, without worth or substance, for nothing in it is
taken from actual life, and nothing of the kind has ever been felt in
man’s experience.” When, however, the subject-matter is real, and
furnished by the realities of the inner life, there, in the special
details, much may be wanting, here and there a word may be missing, the
structure of the periods of the whole system may not be perfectly
distinct, and the general arrangement not sufficiently lucid:
occasionally also a faulty and inadequate expression may be met with,
and yet the whole work may, nevertheless, constitute a great advance on
the road to higher knowledge, and furnish a valuable contribution to
truth. With the exception of the case of the total inanity and
perversity of view, our judgment must never be indiscriminate or
rigorous. Scientific thought in general, and especially in philosophy,
consists of notions, intuitions, and judgments, if only the latter term
be taken, in its usual logical sense, to signify the combining together
notions or intuitions. Now, of the true mathematical mode of proceeding
with notions according to the pure and simple acceptation of the
Pythagorean mystery of numbers, and, secondly, of what in its inmost
essence is a grammatical method--their combination in methodical
thought--we have already spoken. As to the inward intuitions that we
enjoy of that higher something which is in three ways imparted to us,
the mathematical mode of procedure is plainly inapplicable to them. Even
the grammatical one ceases to be fruitful here; at least it is
unsatisfactory. Natural science, which is itself pre-eminently based on
intuition, will perhaps most readily furnish a comparative illustration,
calculated to throw light on and explain that perception of a higher
something from which philosophy sets out. And this illustration will be
best borrowed from those experiences in natural philosophy which appear
to seize the fundamental phenomena of nature and her inmost life; even
though the experiment itself set before our eyes these wonderful
phenomena, and the secrets which are brought to light therein, in the
greatly-diminished proportions of scientific abbreviation. Extremely
trifling as the imitation of lightning by our electrical apparatus may
appear, still that little spark has kindled a great and universal light
in the domain of physical science. The magnetic needle, which at first
sight was looked upon as an insignificant marvel of nature, taught man
first of all to fix his position on this earth and to find it again
after quitting it--and so, by leading him on to the discovery of the New
World, founded thereby a great epoch in the history of the human mind.
Not merely does it point to the terrestrial north-pole, but it also
guides the thoughtful observer to the inmost center of nature, where, in
this mystery of living attraction, the universal key of interpretation
seems to lie hidden. And who would mock or despise the thoughtful
naturalist who delights, by the prismatic analysis or division of the
elementary colors of light, to produce or copy in miniature the rainbow
which spans the heavens?

Now, in these first simple and elementary phenomena, external nature, as
it were, spontaneously presents to us beautiful emblems for still higher
phenomena belonging to another and internal region. They enable us
metaphorically to express the divine phenomenon of truth, and its vivid
apprehension and intrinsic adoption, till it becomes a fixed and
imperishable knowledge, and to narrate intelligibly the intrinsic
genesis of truth and true knowledge. For the following is, if we may so
speak, the history of the growth of living science in the human mind,
whenever the latter is capable of it, and is raised or raises itself to
the height thereof.

The beginning is made by the first kindling spark of truth, which works
like the electric shock--by the first ray of knowledge, which afterward
gradually expands into the nourishing flame of love.

The second step of further progress is formed by the magnetic attraction
of the soul, which from the first contact to the ultimate union, strives
still to penetrate more profoundly, and more accurately to investigate
the object of its love. In this remark, I proceed on the hypothesis
(which hereafter will still oftener be spoken of) that no living
cognition is possible or actual without a previous vital contact and
union between the knowing and the known.

When, lastly, the moment of completion arrives, then the close of this
pursuit of a highest knowledge will be made by that full expansion of
divine light which often, like a heavenly token of peace and
reconciliation, shines forth in the very midst of the clouds of
discontent, and dissolves all doubts before it. But now philosophy,
according to the original sense of the beautiful Greek word, does not by
any means signify the highest wisdom, the everlasting truth itself, or
the perfect science. It denotes rather the pure longing, the love of a
genuine knowledge of divine truth, which spiritually conquers and
triumphs over every difficulty in the way of its attainment This, then,
implies that this science does and must set out from love as its basis.
For the indication of this foundation of true knowledge, in its
characteristic features at least, natural science has furnished us with
the adequate symbols.




LECTURE VII.


“Feeling is every thing,” I would again repeat; in words only does there
lie a possibility of misconception. When philosophy sets out from the
false semblance of necessary thought, it must always have a similar
result. It can not extricate itself from its own subtile web of
scientific delusion. Abstract phrases, _i.e._, words deprived of their
living significance (if ever they possessed any) and reduced to empty,
lifeless formulæ, are easily found, or, rather, have long since been
found, for this seeming knowledge, which as such does, in truth, remain
ever identical with itself.[73] And if, from time to time, it changes
its expressions and assumes quite a different terminology, this is only
done for the sake of appearing new, whereas fundamentally it is still
the old error which continues to be propagated in a changed form and
dress. Sometimes, no doubt, it is done with an honest intention, under
the persuasion that truth and science will, perhaps, in the new magical
form be more easily seized and comprehended than was possible in the old
one, whose unintelligible obscurity and intricacies were deeply felt,
and which it is hoped are avoided in the somewhat altered arrangement of
the ideas. But the unintelligible obscurity lies, not in the words and
phrases or the terminology, however strange and barbarous the latter may
sound. It arises entirely from a defective point of view, and the
perversion of thought involved in the very theory of identity; and no
phraseology or skill of composition, however unparalleled, will ever be
able totally to remove it. Quite otherwise is it when philosophy sets
out from the feeling of that which it desires, and which from the very
first it has propounded and sought as its proper object. In this case
the difficulty does not lie in the thing itself, or in the view on which
it is based. For the latter, inasmuch as it results from life itself,
and man’s inmost feelings and experiences, is as obvious and
intelligible as the visible shape and phenomenon and as the pure
consciousness of life itself. At least it is sufficiently clear for all
the purposes of life, and sufficiently intelligible for the kindred
feelings on which it rests. But in this, as in every other case of
profound internal emotion, it is extremely difficult to find the very
right word for it, the exact appropriate term which happily seizes and
vividly expresses its essential character. Accordingly, in
philosophy--so long, at least, as it proceeds from this fundamental
principle of life and a living feeling--I think it best not to shackle
our thoughts and notions by the fetters of a rigidly-fixed and
unchangeable terminology. For such sciences as are distinctly limited to
a particular sphere, this method may be profitable and salutary. Indeed,
it may not only appear but actually be indispensable. But in the present
case it would be inappropriate. We must seek, on the contrary, the
greatest possible variety of expression, availing ourselves of all the
riches of language in the copious diversity of scientific, and even of
poetical and figurative diction, and not refusing to borrow the terms of
society or any sphere of life. For our first endeavor must be to keep
our exposition vivid throughout. Continually advancing with a living
movement, we ought to avoid, above all things, that propensity to using
stiff and dead formularies, which almost seems to be inborn and
hereditary in rational science. For as the living philosophy is a higher
and clearer consciousness, or self-conscious knowledge--a sort of second
consciousness within the ordinary one--it requires for its indication
and exposition, as it were, a language within language; only the latter
can never be a system of lifeless formulæ, but must even be in the
highest degree vivid and flexible. The philosophy of life may, in short,
borrow its terms from every sphere, but principally from life itself;
and even, the fugitive terms and evanescent forms of conversational
language will often supply it with the happiest and most pertinent modes
of expression. Such, too, it may occasionally borrow from all the
subordinate sciences. Even the obsolete and cumbrous terminology--the
barbarous school phrases of a recent German philosophy--might furnish
many a valuable contribution to that rich copiousness of expression
which is indispensable to the philosophy of life. An occasional phrase
or term borrowed from this source, but differently applied, or employed
in quite a new sense--and thereby for the time rendered intelligible,
may often serve to express most happily and most pertinently what
before seemed to be almost inexpressible and to elude all the powers of
language.

But, above all things, we must remember that its exposition must not be
a mere dead framework of fixed terms--a system of empty formularies.
This is a point which appears to me to be most intimately connected and
mixed up with the very essence and spirit of scientific truth. On this
point my feelings are so strong, that if, in that attempt which for some
years I have been making to give a new development of philosophy, I
could consider it allowable to adopt the course which has so often been
followed in German literature and its several school-systems, of
detaching some single notion from its general connection, in order more
rapidly to gain for it, like small coin, a wider circulation, even
though by so doing its peculiar stamp of intrinsic truth is quickly
abraded and lost--if, I say, I could bring myself to adopt such a
course, I should confine myself to opposing, and using every means to
counteract, this killing of the spirit by words which in and by
themselves have no signification. If it were possible, nothing would
give me greater pleasure than to see all the old and customary terms
rejected and dropped, and new and different ones found for the same
theme.

The philosophy of life--one, _i.e._, which sets out in its speculations
from life itself and the living consciousness--neither can nor desires
to be all-comprehensive; not at least in the same sense that that
philosophy does which proceeds from the assumption of a necessary
connection of thought. It does not presumptuously suppose that it
possesses the power of measuring the whole sum of all that is
conceivable or possible, and of setting it down as an unalterable result
forever. It does not arrogate to itself such omniscience. But in one
sense the philosophy of life may justly be called an all-comprehensive
science; and that is in so far as, keeping in contact with the center of
life, and, consequently, of thought also, and of knowledge, it attempts
to seize and rightly to apprehend them. And so long as it does not lose
sight of this center, but is constantly returning to it, it may be
allowed many liberties. Around this center it may revolve in circles,
now narrower now wider, with the view of contemplating it more
advantageously, so long as it does not rest too soon in any definite
focus of thought. While it refuses to confine itself to any fixed form
of language, it may, with unshackled choice, select from the whole
range of life and thought whatever expressions appear the most
significant and happiest for indicating that fullness of feeling which
is so difficult to give words to, and which indeed can never be
adequately comprised in language. Nor in such a case will it ever be
made an objection if, in the succession of its ideas and its manifoldly
varied turnings, it avails itself of the same liberty, frequently coming
back to the same starting-point, though always presenting it in some new
light and relation. The test of the scientific correctness of a true
method of thought, which must ever be living and vivid, is an internal
one. It is independent of all such little and external matters, and it
can even exist unimpaired alongside of many apparent irregularities.
Here the case is nearly the same as with actual conversation. In both
alike, when we would express ourselves on any grave point of feeling,
and clothe it in such language as is likely to gain the concurrence of
others, or, by making it clear, to enforce it upon the general
conviction, we feel it perfectly allowable to follow whatever course may
seem most convenient. At one time we preliminarily advance some question
more or less remotely bearing upon it, or we take up a narrative or
simile which will serve to introduce it. Or, it may be, by explanation
we try to clear away some possible misconception, or, perhaps, to limit
and determine some preconceived opinion on the matter, in the hope of
removing or solving some apparent or troublesome difficulty. Some or all
of these means we freely make use of in order that the desired result of
our discourse may finally stand out clear and distinct before the mental
eye of our auditors. I shall, therefore, I think, be justified if I
follow the same course in these Lectures which it is my wish should
leave on your minds the impression of an internal dialogue. In the
seemingly rhapsodical flow of its thought I shall assume the same
liberty. Far from abstaining from episodical matters, when they suggest
themselves, I even think it essential often to introduce them; and by
frequently recurring, under many a variation of expression, to the same
leading idea, it will be my endeavor to place it in a still clearer
light. By this course, in spite of its seeming tediousness, I shall be
able ultimately, in a few simple ideas, to set the whole matter more
distinctly and intelligibly before you. And, at the same time, I trust
that the rules of internal language for the correct composition of the
whole, the right arrangement of the words (if I may so call it), that
internal grammatical order of living thought, of which I previously
spoke, will be found to be duly observed, even though in the details
many a term may appear imperfect and inadequate, and many a happier
expression might have been found. The most vivid diction, even the best
and most felicitous, falls always far short of feeling. “Feeling is
every thing”--the full center of the inner life, the point from which
philosophy sets out, and to which it invariably returns. We might call
it, if such an every-day expression would not sound and strike us as
strange, the quintessence of the consciousness. However, in its original
sense (which, in truth, arose out of a very superficial and meager view
of ancient philosophy), as used to denote the essential fifth over and
above the four opposite poles of inward existence, or the four divergent
directions of reality, which, like the mind, is also divided into
quadruple dissension, the term quintessence is not inappropriate for
this center of the consciousness. For feeling is, unquestionably, such a
fifth, both in relation to the four great fundamental energies of the
inner man, as the latter are manifested to us by experience, and also to
the four faculties of the second order, which are composed of or derived
from the former. But it is not only difficult to find an adequate
expression for the full central feelings of the inner life, but
especially to indicate accurately in words all the more delicate
perceptions, with their shades of difference and distinction, which
spring from it, and rigorously to keep them as distinct in the
expression as they were in the actual emotion. Clearly, too, and
accurately as the inner sense may distinguish between a genuine and a
spurious manifestation of the higher feelings, it is not so very easy in
language to keep them separate, or so precisely to characterize them as
to exclude every false accompaniment, and to prevent the possibility of
confounding the spurious and the genuine. How great, for instance, is
the difference between the two kinds of irony which we meet with in the
philosophical dialogue, either as introduced by the Socratic school, or
as similarly employed in modern dialectic. The one kind, overflowing
with skeptical shrewdness, makes illimitable doubt the end of its
dialogical expositions, and is that acrid and biting irony which is
based on universal negation. The other species, more amiable and
benevolent, is intimately allied to a lofty enthusiasm for the divine
and the true, being almost one with, or, at least, inseparable from it,
since it arises from a sense of its own incapacity to comprise in any
form of words the plenitude of divinity, as the spirit discerns it in
truth. And yet, notwithstanding such differences in the expressions and
turns of the dialogue, they often border close upon and nearly resemble
one another; whereas the inner purpose, the spirit, the design of the
line of thought, is often thoroughly distinct in the two cases, and
almost directly opposed. In the same way, true artistic genius and its
mere imitation are even in their external manner and productions easily
detected by the feeling. And yet we often find words fail us when we
attempt characteristically to indicate their differences, and to pass a
discriminating judgment upon them. So, too--to illustrate this topic by
the instance of wit--a forced humor, with its wearying repetitions and
mannerism, or the ceaseless straining and empty play of an artificial
wit, is very different from the overflowing fullness of genuine poetical
wit, in which the lively genius of a sportive fancy is every where
welling forth, and a profound poetical enthusiasm shines through the
coat of ever-shifting hues which its motley humor puts on. But still,
even here it is extremely difficult to explain one’s self, and to
distinguish the different impressions they make. Accordingly, in a
general judgment upon them, many mistakes and misconceptions are both
possible, and are frequently made.

Now, in the sphere of feeling, the mere counterfeit, in particular cases
at least, is frequently in its language so deceptively similar to the
true and genuine, that at last the judgment can find no other words
suitable to itself than the simple ones, “I feel it to be true and
profound,” or “I feel it to be spurious, intrinsically vain, a mere
counterfeit, and a cheat.” Again: faith, hope, and love or
charity--(those three states of the soul-springs of life--those inward
organs of the moral sense--those decisive acts and diversified forms of
manifestation of one common sentiment, directed to the good and the
divine--or by what other terms they may be expressed)--this sisterhood
of spiritual qualities often mentioned together, and, in fact, closely
allied and united, are presented to us as forming a complete scheme and
all-embracing and significant symbol of a higher life. When they are
felt and regarded in this light, they do, indeed, become such for all
higher thought and science, in so far as the latter ought to be living
and to have their foundation in life. Too frequently, however, and that
not merely in the poems of an æsthetical piety, but also in many a dull
work of edification, we see this triple symbol of a higher life degraded
into the commonplace of a morbid fancy, which, in the gratification of
an idle vanity, trifles with the best and holiest feelings of our
nature. Even here, therefore, as elsewhere, a strict separation between
the genuine and the spurious is very necessary, calling for and claiming
all our watchfulness. But the counterfeiture lies not in the tone of
solemn earnestness and depth of pathos with which men broach these
subjects, or generally touch upon them; on the contrary, the affectation
mostly announces itself in a certain external pomp of word and phrase.
But now, if this symbol of an internal religious triplet contains at the
same time (so to speak) the fundamental harmony of that higher life
which is devoted to the good and directed to the divine, then must this
apply not only to the inner but also to the outer life. In short, this
scheme of the fundamental moral ideas must be again met with in the
ordinary relations of actual life. In such a case it is clearly most
agreeable to truth to speak of this internal and better life simply and
unpretendingly in a perfectly natural manner, while a holy reverence for
what is most exalted in humanity is best testified by an intrinsic
delicacy in the mode of treating it, by the absence of all pedantry of
sublimity, or affectation of a sentimental formality.

With an especial reference to the end of science, I have, in the case of
these three elements of higher consciousness, attempted to distinguish,
strictly and precisely, the true and genuine from the spurious, which
often runs parallel to it, and the well-founded from that which rests on
no right basis of reality. In the case of faith, we drew a distinction
between that intrinsic living faith which is based on the feelings of
personal experience and love, and that counterfeited imitation of it
which is only externally assumed. In the case of hope, too, it has been
my endeavor to show that, besides a narrow-minded, egoistic, and
passionate and partisan hope, whose anticipations are seldom realized,
but if so, only to their own punishment and disgrace, there is also a
higher hope, which is both Godlike and divine. To this hope it is that
art and poetry owe the magical charm by which they win upon us. But in
actual life also it is the stay to which we must resolutely cling. For
even though she be rightly named eternal, yet at certain particular
moments and appointed historical epochs, after being long looked for in
vain, she often appears in a far different shape from that which
expectation had lent to her, and to our surprise stands forth
unexpectedly in the full majesty and splendor of final consummation.
All, then, that now remains to be done in this way is, in the case of
love (since the earthly passion is for the most part only transitory,
often confounded with the phantom of passion, and is, perhaps, totally
blind), to point to a higher and better love, which is abiding and
eternal, and, at the same time, endued both with sight and knowledge.
For such alone can be of real value for the cognition of truth, and the
right understanding of life. Such alone, in short, can contribute to the
acquisition of that science of man, and especially of the inner man,
which we are here in search of.

But now those three principles which constitute the grand harmony of
that higher intelligent feeling which leads to science and also to
religion, are at the same time, though in a less dignified relation, the
impelling motives and ruling influences of actual life. For it is almost
impossible to take one step forward in life without some feeling or
other of trust and perfect faith in the general result. All our
proceedings, in short, are based on some confident assumption or other,
even though it is one which, perhaps we can not mathematically
demonstrate, and which, when the moment for action is pressing upon us,
we are unable perfectly to analyze. And hope, too, in some shape or
form, is universally acknowledged to be the true moving impulse of our
whole existence. So, also, love of some kind, true or false--it may be
pure and lofty or mixed and sordid, if not altogether counterfeit--forms
the very sum of life and of all enjoyment of it--ay, even life itself.
An example or two, consequently, from the ordinary relations of actual
life, will enable not so much to demonstrate, indeed, as rather to
remind you of the difference which subsists even here between a trust
and confidence that is merely reasoned out by logical inference--a faith
externally assumed, and one that is the result of personal experience
and confiding love. Thus reminding you of what in this life is manifest
enough, I hope to set most distinctly before your eyes the difference
which subsists also in the higher region of faith. Let us suppose the
case of a friend dangerously ill or in a state of extreme suffering, and
we are in search of a physician able to relieve and heal him. One is
recommended to us of great reputation for extensive knowledge and of a
judgment strengthened by long experience. We are told that he has
effected remarkable cures, that he has never been known to lose a
patient by neglect, or by mistaking his disease, and that withal he is
very kind and extremely attentive. These, we are aware, are great
recommendations: but he is a perfect stranger to us; we feel a kind of
reserve and restraint toward him--as yet he has not our perfect
confidence. How very different is the case when we ourselves have
experienced all this--when we ourselves have witnessed his comprehensive
view, the number and variety of his remedies, and the penetrating glance
of genius in the moment of danger--when with grateful recollection we
feel that we must ascribe to him either the preservation of some dear
one’s life, or our own unhoped-for restoration to health and strength!
Such is the difference between a reasoning faith on rational grounds and
a personal faith based on our own experience and vivid conviction. And
in truth this simile is not remote and far-fetched. It comes very close,
indeed, to the matter itself, if only it be true that the soul is often
diseased, and that religion presents to us no inexorable lawgiver of a
rigid rule of reason, no stern judge of severe truth, but a wise
physician touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and able to save
to the uttermost.

Or let us take another case, which will go still more deeply and touch
more nearly the very root of the social relations of life. An individual
of high rank, as often happens, is about to enter into a lasting union
with one of whom he personally knows little, if any thing. In regard to
rank and fortune, of agreeableness of person and manner, as well as
accomplishments, not to say mental endowments, he has the best and
strongest assurances. But the character of youth is generally
undeveloped. Not only may all that is morally beautiful, and every great
and noble disposition, lie therein, but there may also be slumbering
within it the violent elements of passion. It is only the full
development of life and love that will expand the one or the other. The
question, then, for one contemplating such a union is, can he have such
a confidence in the character and sentiments as naturally ought to
precede a union which is to last for life. She has received an excellent
education--she enjoys a spotless reputation--her whole family stands
high in the respect and esteem of men--its friendship and society are
every where sought and valued, not merely for its rank and station, but
also for its amiable qualities. Moreover, another lady of established
character for all that is good and estimable, has the most favorable
opinion of her, honors her with her friendship, and loves her as a
younger sister, or as her own daughter. All these considerations are,
perhaps, sufficient grounds and rational warrant for an anticipatory
confidence in such a case. But how widely remote and how different a
feeling is this from that deep trusting confidence which springs up
after the union--which a wife’s conduct instils into a husband’s
heart--when, no longer captivated by mere personal charms, but almost
entirely forgetting them, he rather rejoices to notice and to
contemplate those qualities of the inmost soul, which, being most
congenial to his own tastes and habits, afford him a sure prospect of
unbroken harmony and felicity in the remainder of their wedded life.

It is extremely difficult to lay down any general rule by which in
individual cases the boundary line may be drawn between a mere reasoning
faith, resting on external considerations, and one that is founded on
personal feeling and experience of life, in its gravest and most
decisive moments. Very often a confidence that in its origin was quite
arbitrarily taken up on a cold calculation of reason, will suddenly
receive a full confirmation, and pass into that profounder assurance
which draws its strength from our own feelings and experience. And as it
is in actual life, so it is likewise in the higher sphere of faith. In
matters of religion, and of science also, that which originally was
merely a belief of the cold and abstract reason is subsequently
transformed by degrees into a profound faith, rising at last into an
abiding personal feeling, and even a deep intuition of living truth. As
a first beginning, then, and as the foundation of a better, and as the
first step of a higher and fuller development, a merely rational faith
requires to be treated with respect and judged of with all due
allowance. But when it is set up as perfect and complete in itself, and
challenging the most rigorous requisitions of science, or when it is put
forth as sufficient in itself, then our decision must be that this
self-devised rational belief is only a substitute for, and not faith
itself. For this must ever be vivid and based on an immediate personal
feeling, and on this account full of love, and indeed both founded upon
and proceeding from out of love.

Properly, the three elements of higher life are inseparable; and it is
therefore extremely difficult to propound any invariable law applying to
individual cases, as to the order in which these three grades of
internal development must or ought always to succeed one another.
Essentially they are one and indissoluble. As faith and hope are based
upon love, so is love dependent on both the former; and this is as true
of genuine love on earth as it is of that which lives in a higher
domain. If its faith be hostilely disturbed, then it loses its hope
also, and the very root of its existence. If hope is entirely cut off,
it does not, indeed, lose thereby faith itself, and its object, but it
preys on itself.

That in which all these three grades of feeling are most perfectly
united, blended, and fused together, is enthusiasm. All genuine
enthusiasm is based on some exalted and elevating faith; it is a form
and species of the higher love, and involves in itself a grand and
divine hope. And this is true of genuine patriotism, and of artistic
enthusiasm, no less than of the religious, which is most akin to
scientific, especially as the latter was understood by the ancients, and
according to the place it held in the Platonic philosophy. But though
thus combining all three, enthusiasm is yet essentially distinguished
from them. Enthusiasm is only an elevated state of the consciousness,
which, although in capacity it admits of being durable, is generally
regarded as transitory. Accordingly, it is of a passing state that the
term is generally understood. But the three degrees of feelings are
elements of a permanently exalted consciousness--of the mind generally,
in its highest state. And this is even that triune living consciousness,
restored again to perfect unity, and to fertile operation. It is even
that to which I have been, from the commencement of these Lectures,
continually alluding, and especially in the assertion that it is
necessary to pass from the existing state of the consciousness--which is
neither its fitting nor original condition--with its four parts, one of
which is mostly divorced from the rest by its undue exaggeration, and to
revert to its higher and living constitution; which return I spoke of as
the essential condition of true philosophy, if not its very self. Now,
if any should desire to give one common name to this higher, or, rather,
highest, state of the consciousness, inclusive of its three elements,
and call it enthusiasm, it would be necessary to add the remark, that
this enthusiasm is absolutely one, universal, and of the highest kind,
having for its object the divine itself: and that, moreover, it is
abidingly permanent, and at the same time reconcilable and even really
associated with the most clear-sighted prudence.

Some such a highly exalted and sublime conception of true enthusiasm is
to be met with, and, indeed, predominates throughout the Platonic
philosophy. So far, therefore, it might be said, that the essential in
this _harmonic triad_ [_Dreiklang_] of Christian sentiment was not
wholly unknown to it, even though it knew nothing of the ideas of faith
and hope in this form or direction. Comprising all in one, it gave such
especial prominence to love as to make it by itself the very basis of
science--of that science, at least, of which alone there can be any
question in the present place, the science of the inner and higher life.
For it considered such a science as being simply a love which has
arrived at intelligence, and has thereby become firmly fixed, and,
moreover, elevated to the highest degree of clearness and perspicuity.

The relation in which these three properties stand to spirit, soul, and
sense--those three principles already mentioned of the consciousness,
when in its undivided perfection it attains to a full, vivid
operation--is somewhat of the following nature. Faith is an act of the
spirit, by which the higher feeling, being distinguished and separated
from all that is not essential, and being purely and spiritually
apprehended, is set forth as an intelligent feeling, and consequently as
a judgment, and in this light comprised in an imperishable idea. Love is
the turning or directing of the whole soul toward the higher and divine,
that is, even to God Himself. Hope, however, is the new life which
emanates from them both, and in which the divine ideas become actual and
active; or, in other words, it is the internal sense and fruitful
susceptibility for the divine idea and its energies and influences.

Now, the next problem which properly comes before us in this place of
our exposition of the human mind, and of the degree of certainty which
is attainable by it, is accurately to determine and to indicate the true
intrinsic essence of science. What, then, is it to know? How is it
brought about and accomplished? In the next place, it will be necessary
to explain the origin of error, which is ever opposing science, often
imperceptibly deluding or undermining and destroying our convictions.
This will, then, enable us to solve the questions and difficulties
suggested by doubt in general, after we have once ascertained the place
which is to be assigned to it in the human mind. And thus we shall at
last be able to determine completely, precisely, and satisfactorily, the
relation in which faith and enthusiasm, love and revelation, stand to
science.

Now, in order to arrive at a full idea of science, it will be essential
to distinguish its several elements--understanding and generalization
[_Begreifen_], and also discernment--the different forms, too, of
thinking--the necessary in reason, the possible in fancy, as well as the
scientific cogitation of what is actual.

But before entering on this field of our labors, I would premise one
general remark. It refers to the nature of that certainty which we have
to look for and may expect in philosophy, according to the idea of it
which we have made the basis of our speculations, as being the noblest
and highest manifestation of man’s desire of knowledge. And here the
examination of the words of a great and famous thinker, with regard to
his own system, will best serve me for the introduction and exposition
of my own views. The system of Spinosa--for I allude to him--is, it is
true, in ill repute for its obscureness and unintelligibility. The
remark, however, to which I refer, is wholly unconnected with his
system. It is an estimate of his own knowledge, and is quite clear and
intelligible to all, as every one will admit when I come to quote the
words. And, perhaps, the obscurity of his system arises chiefly from the
matter, and the position taken up, rather than from the author’s method,
and the form of exposition. For, if only we can once bring ourselves to
allow that the mathematical method is suitable to philosophy, we must
pronounce Spinosa’s style most excellent. It is, in fact, remarkable,
not only for the rigor and precision of its definitions and proofs, but
also for the structure of its sentences and general composition, so far
as excellence was attainable in the modern Latin of the schools, to
which, however, Spinosa has succeeded in giving a wonderful evenness and
uniformity of expression, having handled it with a facility never before
paralleled.

As to the system itself, and the rank which, according to the position
here assumed for the philosophy of life, ought to be assigned to it, it
will hardly be necessary to enter into a particular review. Generally we
have already expressed our opinion, and the judgment we should pass
upon it may be deduced from the remarks which I formerly made when
distinguishing between the two directions or views which, in its search
after truth, present themselves to the reflecting mind for its choice
between faith or doubt. One of these views of the world and things is
based on the idea of the living triune God, whom faith embraces, love
desires, and in whom all our hopes are centered. Now, this hypothesis
implies, by a necessary and inevitable consequence, that the world is
not self-existent, but, as we have all been taught, had a beginning,
having been created by God out of nothing. According to the other theory
(and to one of these every profound and truly scientific system of
philosophy must in its essential principles belong), the world had not a
beginning, but is eternal, being one with God--or, indeed, speaking
absolutely, _all_ is _one_, and necessary thought and necessary
existence are not properly and essentially distinct, but only so many
different forms or aspects of the one eternal and necessary essence.
Now, of the latter system, according to the opinion of all competent
judges, either of his own or our times, the work of Spinosa is the
ablest and most consistent exposition that science has ever yet
produced. But between these two systems and views of the universe, the
philosophy of life can not long hesitate. Seeking to arrive at a clear
insight into all that is divine, so far as it is traceable within the
higher life and inward consciousness, and adopting and regarding it as
an imparted fact of an internal, no less than of an external revelation,
she can not be at a loss to decide between faith in a living God and
that idea of one necessary essence which is at the same time both God
and the world--an idea which, making thought and being identical,
proceeds to give to all else correspondent arbitrary definitions.
Indeed, the question can hardly arise for the philosophy of life, or if
it does, it may at once set it aside. Now, this general observation on
all such systems of necessity implies, of course, the condemnation of
that of this great and famous thinker. It too must be at once rejected
as fundamentally false. Such a censure, however, does not involve any
thing of personal vituperation. All such feelings need not to be mixed
up with it. For, in truth, it often happens that the greatest and most
richly endowed minds, and the most single and straightforward
characters, if they once take a wrong direction, fall into the
profoundest, or, as they have been termed, the _most violent_ errors.
But in every case it is but equitable to make a distinction between the
author and his system, however severe may be the judgment we pass on the
latter. In the case of Spinosa, too, we must bear in mind that he was by
birth and education a Jew. As such, he was not only without the pale of
Christianity, but even regarded it with strong national prejudices. If,
therefore, his system is not consistent with the truths of religion, or,
rather, if it even violently clashes with them, he is scarcely obnoxious
to reproof. At least, he is not half so much open to censure as those
who, not having this palliation to urge, assume a hostile position
toward religion, while their animosity is not relieved by any splendor
of great talents, but marked throughout by the meanness and narrowness
of their views and the ordinary character of their scientific theory and
system.

The expression of this great thinker to which I have alluded, relates to
his own self and the object he had in view by his literary labors--to
his work, in short, or system. It is contained in a letter to one of his
most intimate friends, and runs as follows: “Whether my philosophy be
the very best, I know not; at least I do not wish to decide that point;
that, however, I have discovered the true philosophy, I have not the
least doubt.” All this sounds modestly enough; and in all probability it
expresses his real sentiments and opinion. It sets up, however, a
pretension which I can not by any means admit. Spinosa here takes the
term philosophy in a different sense from its old and original
signification. Among the Greeks, the Sophists alone derived their name
from a pretension to perfect wisdom and science. But the followers of a
true wisdom, from Socrates’s time at least, explained philosophy to be
what its name imports--a desire of the highest knowledge, and a pursuit
of divine truth. And this is the essential point which, involving a
total difference of opinion, has divided the minds of men through
centuries and tens of centuries, and is as yet far from having attained
to a satisfactory solution. And herein the Socratic idea of philosophy,
which is also my own, receives a species of historical confirmation
which that other mathematical notion of it stands still in need of. But
to return to our author. By philosophy, as indeed is clear from his very
system, he understands a perfect science and absolute truth. Now this
perfection of knowledge does not, it is true, pretend to extend to and
embrace all individualities. Still it is at least intensively an
omniscience--which by the further development and expansion of what it
possesses within itself unevolved, would in its external
comprehensiveness embrace every particular case. And can such infinite
knowledge and omniscience be ascribed to any other being than God? If we
at once acknowledged this, it would surely be more agreeable to truth to
consider man in this life as being merely in a preparatory state, where
at most it is permitted him, step by step, to approximate still nearer
to the height of knowledge. If that degree of knowledge which is
conceded to and is attainable by man, really suffices for the wants of
life, we might, or, rather, to speak more properly, we must be content
with it. Probably even that which it is allowed to man to reach, has
never yet been actually attained to by any individual. And why in any
case are we unwilling to wait, if, as it undoubtedly remains forever
certain, that when this period of preparation shall have closed in that
eternity which is really life, man will in one way or another arrive at
perfect certainty and clearness of insight into the nature of himself,
the world, and the Deity, and will also fully understand the now
inscrutable relation of God to man and the universe?

Now, while we regard the last half of the judgment which this great
thinker has passed upon himself, as a pure self-delusion naturally
arising from, and, indeed, closely connected with, his whole system, we
must also qualify the first half, and subject it to many essential
limitations. The _best_ philosophy that of Spinosa most assuredly can
not be called, and this for two reasons. On the one hand it sets out
with the pursuit of mathematical certainty and precision--an end not
attainable in this branch of human inquiry; on the other, it commences
with a principle fundamentally false, starting from the imaginary notion
of absolute necessity as the original first and last _illusion of the
reason_. Better, however, it most unquestionably is than many others,
which, no less false, are with their superficial dullness, their half
compromise and jumble of inconsistent principles, still more pernicious.
_Violent_ errors, to use an old phrase, are those which serve to give a
new impulse to science, and arousing it from its stationary point of
imperfect development, excite it to advance one step nearer to the
truth. They serve to accelerate a whole crisis of movement and
transition. In this respect, accordingly, a system of philosophy which
is far from good in itself, may, nevertheless, be pronounced good in a
relative sense. In other words, it is one the study of which may
occasionally prove salutary and profitable. It will benefit those
individuals, or even a whole nation or age, who are in the very crisis
of transition, and capable of digesting such strong meat, are healthy
enough to elaborate such a system of error into the sound elements of
truth. That this opinion is by no means unduly lenient, or overtolerant,
but that its justice is not unsupported by historical experience, is
proved by the history of our national philosophy in these later days.
Thus, on the German philosophy of nature, in the first stage at least of
its development, the system of Spinosa exercised a great and decided
influence, which, however, has now altogether ceased. All the most
original, too, of our thinkers, whether they belonged to the older or
later schools, who stood aloof from all system or party, have also paid
his works great attention. For this they riveted by their wonderful
simplicity and rigor of consequence, and their loftiness of scientific
thought, even while they failed to win a general, much less a complete
adhesion to his theory. But this feeling is quickly fading away. A great
internal victory has been gained over its seductive charms, which is of
inestimable importance to the cause of truth. It is fast quitting the
field of human thought and inquiry; and if it still holds its place in a
few minds, it forms there alone the last remaining obstacle to the
complete triumph of the science of life and revelation--the last
lingering mist of mental darkness and demoniacal illusion before the
rising sun of a newly breaking day.

It may perhaps appear inappropriate, and indeed highly objectionable, to
have spoken of a pernicious system of metaphysical error before such an
audience as the present, especially as from the first I expressed my
unwillingness to enter at large into its details. But I have, I think, a
full and complete justification. A very similar, or, rather, the same
view of the world and things as that which it propounds, and whose
essential peculiarities I have, I think, correctly characterized as one
of the leading branches of human error, still prevails, and is not
confined in its manifestations to a metaphysical form. It meets us every
where in still more accessible and highly-attractive shapes--in every
form and dimension--in the interesting but simple tale, and in the magic
creation of poetical pantheism. And since so many poets and other
popular writers are a kind of half or whole, conscious or unconscious,
Spinosists--to use this name in a wide and general sense--it would be to
affect an unscrupulous delicacy, which would neither be in measure nor
in season, were I to abstain from all notice of what is otherwise so
notorious. If the philosophy of divine experience, with its totally
different form and spirit, were but carried out as perfectly and
completely as this silently-reigning system of rationalism, with its
consistency of error, then should we at last be able fully to
comprehend, and, to our great amazement, discern all that is meant by
this its dangerous rival, and how very much it involves.

My object has not been to make a polemical attack, and to give a
complete refutation of this system. Such a design neither lay within my
prescribed limits, nor could it be other than useless and superfluous in
a philosophy which took its position from life, and especially the inner
and higher life. What I had chiefly in view was, to establish a precise
and rigorous distinction between the Socratic notion of philosophy, as a
gradual approximation to eternal truth and the first science, and that
false mathematical conception of it which sets up a claim to absolute
knowledge, and by a rigid observance of system, pretends to the
attainment of omniscience. And this was a distinction which, both from
personal considerations and with regard to the present undertaking, it
was incumbent on me to insist upon, in order to avoid the slightest
misconception. Having myself long since recognized the three categories
of an elevated consciousness--faith, hope, and love--to be also the
essential elements and primary foundation of all higher thought and
knowledge, so far at least as the latter, having life for its matter and
subject, must take life for its starting-point and foundation, I have
therefore publicly advanced this doctrine. Still, nothing could be more
foreign to my whole mode of thinking and feeling, or so directly opposed
to it, as the design of forcing adhesion to _my_ theory of faith, hope,
and love, by the might of logical demonstration, or even the thought of
constraining, by the weapons of science, the convictions of any one.
Nay, even if I were gifted with magic powers of persuasion and
irresistible eloquence, so as to be able to win the whole world over to
my own way of thinking, or, rather, conviction on these matters, still I
should have no wish to accomplish such a general concurrence in this
manner. Such a method would not be appropriate to this domain of
philosophy, and, above all, it would not be the true and right one; for
philosophy must ever be the fruit of one’s own personal reflection, and
invariably spring from an immediate feeling of a want and defect within,
otherwise it can scarcely exist in reality. All teaching, therefore, or
communication of philosophy, has properly no other end and aim than to
furnish a vivid impulse to self-reflection. Beyond this it can only
serve to suggest the limits of a right and lawful exercise of such
meditation, and, by pointing out the road that leads most directly to
this end, to warn against the devious by-ways of error which branch out
from it at every point of its path. Every one who is in earnest in the
pursuit of truth has, moreover, already within himself a principle
[_Anfang_] of faith, hope, and love, in some shape or other, and not
merely a principle, but a very system of them, even though it do not
always manifest itself exactly in a scientific form. If every one who in
any degree lends a sympathizing ear to my present discourses feels
himself in any degree confirmed by them in that principle of a higher
faith and love that is as yet in any degree developed in him--if he
feels himself moved by them to still more lofty aspirations after the
highest end of hope--if what to him is the center of love and life has
been more fully and more clearly evolved by them--if his thoughts have
taken from them a clearer and more distinct order and arrangement, then
will the first wish and principal object of my present labors be
perfectly realized, and attain to their fullest and completest
gratification.

We would, therefore, for our parts, remit to God and the future all
properly unconditional and absolute knowledge. For, irrespectively of
the delusive phantom of a pretended mathematical method and rigor of
demonstration, which is both fundamentally false, and, moreover, totally
inapplicable to the present sphere of inquiry, such an absolute science,
merely as claiming to be positive, trenches ultimately on omniscience.
We therefore prefer modestly to acquiesce in pretensions more suitable
to man’s position in the world. If, therefore, we confine ourselves
within the prescribed limits, and are content with a gradually but
steadily advancing approximation to perfect truth, as it is in God, we
shall soon find that even within these boundaries a legitimate idea of
science may be set up and advanced. And this science, it will quickly
appear, not only contains within it a stable foundation of irrefragable
certainty, sufficient for all the wants and requisitions of life, but
also opens a wide space for the further exercise and development of all
time, thought, and cognition, and the most ample field for all genuine
spiritual hopes and pure wishes of a higher nature. In its free
development it is by no means subject to the narrow limits of earth;
while, as resting on the firm basis of experience, it is little affected
by doubt, which, though plied with all its acuteness and with its
endless refinements to the very height of subtilty, shall never
undermine or essentially injure it.

I said an _idea_ [Idee] of science. I did not employ the term _notion_
[Begriff], as in the case of the consciousness; for the latter, in all
its completeness, is given to us by internal experience and the
observation of our own minds. In the case of the consciousness,
consequently, the only point is to set it forth in a well-ordered and
fully comprehensive term, as completely as it is revealed to us in
reality. But of science there can not be more than one idea. An ideal
standard may be set up to guide us in our attempts to attain to it, and
to indicate the degree, measure, and method of its possible acquisition.
And this idea and standard can only be derived from the highest idea of
all--that of God, who is the eternal truth itself. It is thither that it
must go, as to its first source. Now this idea of science, after the
complete notion of the consciousness which I have already established,
is the second result to which our inquiries have brought us. It is the
second step of progress in our present development of thought.

Now this idea of science, which points to it as possible and actually
attainable, and which also in fact leads us to it, rests on two
assumptions. It implies, in the first place, that man must continually
advance to a fuller understanding of a given truth, and, having the
capacity, is also able to do so, if only he has a real and abiding wish
for it. How, indeed, can it in general be doubted, that we are not
absolutely incapable of understanding any given truth, when the very
fact of its being given implies it in some degree at least, however
limited, and when the very apprehension of the given matters forms a
beginning, it may be a very imperfect one, of understanding? But, in
the second place, the idea of an actually attainable science rests on
the assumption that we are in a condition to recognize as such, and
in its true light, the error which springs up every where in the human
mind, and by so doing to emancipate ourselves, if not from every trace
of its former influence, yet, at least, from its absolute dominion
and tyranny. And since in this field of human errors we are at least
at home, there can be no obstacle to our taking a full and complete
survey of them, and taking the exact measure of their shallowness.
This requisition, as well as the possibility of its accomplishment,
is fundamentally involved in that old Grecian maxim, “Know thyself,”
when interpreted in its more scientific sense. And in truth there is no
ground to doubt its possibility, if only a firm footing--the ποὑ ςὡ of
Archimedes--can be found for us out of ourselves and of the ordinary
state of the human consciousness. And such a stable point is actually
found and provided for us in the revelation of a higher truth than
man’s. That a recognition of error as such is possible, and thereby
the emancipation of the mind from its slavery may be facilitated, will
be best and most clearly evidenced by actual experiment. We must,
then, try to assign to each single faculty of the consciousness, in
its present degraded and distracted state, the essential scientific
error which peculiarly clings to and besets its exercise, or at least
to point out the tendency thereto which is deeply rooted therein. And
such an experiment may be made successfully, if we take up our position
in the high point of view furnished by a consciousness restored again
to unity and harmony in God. Now, from this point of view it is, no
doubt, impossible, as we have already remarked, to assume or concede
the existence of innate ideas--at least, not in the usual and literal
sense. Innate errors, however, may well naturally be assumed to exist
in the first degraded state of the human mind. Not, indeed, that there
rules in them any blind inevitable necessity, but, rather, a false
tendency--an evil habit become a second nature--which is only in
appearance an original imperfection. And such have been often enough
recognized in the illusions of imagination and the narrow limits of the
reason; only the recognition has not been complete and total enough,
and, consequently, not sufficiently explanatory. Indeed, the notion of
scientific error, as innate in the human mind, must be taken exactly
in the same light as the moral weakness and frailty of man in his
present condition--as being, in short, peculiar to the whole race, and
transmitted, as an inheritance, from generation to generation.

Now, to the knowledge of error, as such, is opposed the recognition of
truth--the higher, that is, divinely revealed truth. And this perception
it is that furnishes the stable point of intrinsic certainty to every
species and form of human cognition. But here the question might arise
naturally enough: How can man recognize a truth, which, nevertheless, is
revealed to him from without, making himself thereby, as it were, at
once its master and its judge? How, in other words, can he, as it were,
know again that which is now first given to him, and which previously he
was not in possession of. In this matter the case stands almost exactly
the same as it does with innate ideas, which are not to be understood
literally as involving the hypothesis of a pre-existence of the
soul--and as it does with that eternal memory which, as connected with
the theory of innate ideas, rightly and more correctly interpreted, is
both justifiable and tenable. If man is to be declared totally incapable
of this recognition of divine truth, then must he be first stripped of
all the high prerogatives which the Almighty has bestowed upon him above
the rest of the natural creation. The very last trace and vestige of the
divine image that is in him must be erased and destroyed. Among these
endowments, that which we may well call the dangerous privilege of free
will holds neither the last nor the lowest place. God created man free,
and free he is even in his relation to God. It is left to man’s choice,
whether he will or not acknowledge the Deity above him. But this being
the case, this free and unconstrained acknowledgment, so far as the
choice is rightly made, by no means involves any exaltation of man’s
judgment above the law of God. On the contrary, it is nothing more than
a free and voluntary assent to the divine. However, it is the inward
experience that we have here to consider. For the facts and external
data of mere experimental sciences can only so far belong to our present
consideration, as they bear upon the inner experience of the
consciousness and the knowledge of human nature--as well upon that more
exalted experience (which is indeed contained in the former) of a higher
destination imported and announced to man by God. And this is the case
with history or language. It is exactly in this relation that a
scientific knowledge of either stands to our present subject. But not
only language, but every object also in the whole domain of human
inquiry--in the vast realms of art and nature--belongs thereto, or may
be made a part of it, if only it stands in or admits of being brought
into this relation to the inward and higher experience. Now this
understanding of the truth that is above man, which is ever growing in
clearness and brightness--this perfect recognition of whatever is
erroneous and false--this ever-advancing comprehension of the actual, so
far as the latter lies within its limits, form the three grades or
spheres of science which, even according to this idea of it, may
unquestionably be regarded as possible, and founded also on the actual
and real.

The latter is an important point; as to all else, the different ways,
methods, and directions of thought belong to the outward form, rather
than to the intrinsic essence of science. Essentially, there is but one
law and standard for all ways and modes of thinking. The necessary
thought of the reason, with its strict logical concatenation, no less
than the possible thinking of the scientific imagination, with its
generally symbolical dress, must, if it would not lapse into error, and
become ultimately null and vain, adhere to the actual and real, and
stand and maintain itself on the firm soil of experience. It is only
when the necessary cogitation sets out from reality that it is truly
necessary; and in like manner is it with the possible. If it does not
rest on the firm basis of the actual, it is not really possible and
actually attainable. Without this intrinsic gravity and point of rest,
the mathematical method, with its pretended rigor of demonstration, no
less than the most ingenious but arbitrary hypotheses, are perpetually
oscillating through the wide realms of infinite space--like pure
fictions--not, however, like good fictions based on realities, for such
often possess a deep and profound significance, but like thoroughly
unmeaning and aimless figments, and unsubstantial phantasms. Against the
intrinsic reality of the mind’s experience and its science, which is
built upon this foundation of a recognition and understanding of what is
revealed and imparted to it, of an acknowledgment of what is spurious
and false, and of a comprehension of the actual and real, all the doubts
of skepticism avail little, or, properly speaking, nothing. If, however,
we set out from the unconditional science of reason, holding it and
considering it really to be such, then there is no longer any safeguard
to keep us from falling headlong into the bottomless abyss of endless
doubt. In such a case, the human mind may for a time be lulled into a
calm, which, however, is any thing but a true and perfect serenity.
Between that arbitrary faith which is the mere creation of the reason,
and devised for the express purpose of filling the profound void which
man must feel so long as his heavenward aspirations are unsatisfied, and
the endless doubts of his intellect, there is at best but a temporary
and passing truce: it is no true peace. It is like some “_Concordat_,”
which, effected with the greatest difficulty, and ever on the point of
being dissolved by the mutual jealousy of the contracting parties to it,
does but leave each member to follow his own devices, so long as he
engages to abstain from all hostile interference with the other. In such
a case, a complete and harmonious co-operation of the mind’s hitherto
divided and estranged faculties is not for a moment to be thought of.
That, however, must be sought by a very different path.




LECTURE VIII.


In the domain of art it is an old and established opinion, not only that
a peculiar genius is required for its original creations, but also a
special sense or feeling is indispensable for a correct appreciation and
estimate of the works produced by the former. Indeed, we can hardly call
it an opinion; its validity is so universally acknowledged, that it is
acted upon as a principle. In the same way the Platonic philosophy
assumes for its foundation an enthusiastic aspiration after divine truth
and a higher knowledge of it. Moreover, as it sets out from a
consciousness elevated and expanded by enthusiasm, so it looks to the
same for access and adoption. And this is the source of that affinity
between this species of philosophy and an artistic enthusiasm which is
traceable in all ages and nations, however widely different in the
general character of their minds, among whom the former has in any
degree manifested itself, assuming, every where, if not the shape of
dialogue, yet some other equally beautiful form of exposition. Hence,
too, so far, at least, as this is possible in the domain of science, the
point of view of this philosophy is predominantly artistic. The more,
then, that in modern days, and especially among German writers, the
school form has become prevalent in science generally, and especially in
philosophy, the greater is the merit of those who have striven to give
to philosophy this artistic elegance and structure, or, at least, to
preserve it and restore it to favor. And even if any be disposed to set
less value upon this artistic grace and enthusiasm for the beautiful in
philosophy than, in my opinion, is due to it, they must, at least, admit
that it tends to promote a more liberal and comprehensive culture of the
mind. On this account it is surely to be defended, and deserves our most
favorable judgment. This remark does not apply, exclusively, to our own
German literature and culture, and that devotion to the arts of the
beautiful which is so peculiar to our countrymen; it has a general
reference to all modern nations. A more artistic feeling is a universal
want of the times to counteract the prevailing school form, and the
preponderating mathematical view of the world, or, at least, a
predominantly mathematical cast of mind. Accordingly, Hemsterhuys, who,
in philosophy, adopted a view similar to, if not identical with, the
Platonic, though writing in the French language, which was not his
vernacular tongue, has labored with a masterly hand to give to his style
the exquisite beauty of art. But still, notwithstanding this common
affinity and enthusiasm for the beautiful, a distinction exists, and
must ever remain, between the scientific notion of beauty and the mere
artistic conception of it, and that fanciful view of the world and
things which is derived from and dependent on it. For, according to the
latter, the highest beauty is to the poet and artist nothing less than
the height of truth, as, indeed, it really is of poetic and artistic
truth. But, to the view of science, between the divine and eternal truth
and beauty, even the highest beauty, there is, and ever must remain, a
certain degree of distance, which, if it do not amount to an interval,
is yet, nevertheless, a line of demarkation. Eternal truth is even God
himself. And if, occasionally, in the Platonic philosophy, the Prime
Being is distinguished and designated as the archetype of beauty, this
is but a loose way of speaking, not exactly consistent with scientific
accuracy. For, according to the latter, the excellence of beauty is but
a perfect mirror, or a pure reflection of eternal perfection, but not
eternal perfection itself. Indeed, in order to express its perfect
purity from all admixture, and from every the least stain of the
sensible world, as well as from every mist of earthly delusion that
otherwise might cling to and encircle it, I should prefer to call it the
holy beauty, rather than the archetype of beauty, or even the height of
beauty. For the latter shifts and varies with the subjective tastes of
individuals. One man sees the standard of beauty in an Apollo, another
in some other equally sublime and highly-finished god-form of ancient
statuary.

What, then, is this beauty, according to the pure and original notion of
it, and relatively to reality? For, according to the principle which the
philosophy of life assumes, we must trace every thing back to the real
and the actual--to the actual and the real of nature and of earth, or
else to one that is higher and more spiritual, nay, even Godlike. What
place, then, does beauty here hold? what is its relation to the rest of
creation, or, still more generally, to the whole created universe and
its author? What is it in and by itself, and in truth?

Now, in that sacred language which treats of holy things, and devotes to
them well and carefully-weighed expressions and terms, mention is made
of a wisdom created in the beginning, and before all time. As,
therefore, it is said to be created, it is plain that by it is not
meant, and that we must not confound with it, that uncreated and eternal
wisdom who is elsewhere called the Almighty Word, by whom the whole
system of nature, and all things, were created in their original beauty.
Now this created wisdom, which, consequently, as such, is also a
creature--what else is it than the thought, the image, the expression
and impress of the hidden and internal essence of the Deity--wherein its
inapproachable depth and unfathomable abyss are outwardly projected and
rendered visible? Is it not, in short, the exact mirror and unsullied
reflection of the divine perfections? But, however we may choose to name
and describe it, the creature--even though its creation may have been
before the whole world, and even before time itself--must always be kept
distinct from the uncreated Being of eternity and omnipotence, who,
moreover, called the former into existence. Now, if we were to apply to
this created wisdom the expression of “a soul of God,” which was
formerly employed by a few writers, but which was soon allowed to fall
again into disuse, from a dread of the misapprehensions it might
possibly lead to, it would give, perhaps, a good sense. It might thus
serve to distinguish this, the first of all creatures, in its pure and
original beauty, from a mere soul of the world, or of nature, however
ideally conceived. Only, in that case, care must be taken to keep in
remembrance, that such a mode of speaking can only apply to a creature,
and that of such alone is it allowable so to speak. For--in correctness
of language and in the true meaning of words--a soul, as being, on the
whole, and predominantly, a passive faculty, can not be attributed to
God, in whom all is infinite power and pure activity, and who, as such,
ever worketh and never ceases in His infinite operations.

It is this, the first of all created things, which, with its pure
splendor, lights up in brilliancy whatever in the rest of creation still
retains aught of childlike innocence and blessed purity. It is the inner
charm, the spiritual flower of nature, the hidden germ of that
paradisiacal loveliness which, though veiled in this terrestrial
shroud, still gleams forth occasionally. It is even that sacred beauty
which fills to the full the true artist’s soul, even though he is never
able fully and completely to realize it. It is that for which the
thinker, in his inspired enthusiasm, seeks in vain for words and
expressions. All the forms and terms of language fail to reach its high
excellence. For, in fact, so long as man, holding it to be a pure ideal,
regards it as nothing but a thought or notional relation, he can not but
fail to seize and apprehend this mystery of love in all its living
reality.

And here it is that I would apply the words, already quoted, of a great
thinker. They were used by him in reference to his own system of science
and philosophy; and though in my application they relate to a very
different matter, it is, nevertheless, one which has an intimate bearing
on the first science. Slightly modifying his words, then, I would thus
say: whether the notion of beauty I have here advanced be for the artist
absolutely the right one--_i.e._, whether it be perfectly satisfactory
and sufficient, or whether in its special application to a particular
branch of art, and in the actual execution of any given work, it
requires several intermediate notions and means of transition, and
whether, moreover, several elements equally essential must concur
therein--that I know not, or at least I make no assertion about it. And
indeed, I see clearly enough that even for art and its perfect
realization, something else is wanting besides the pure idea of beauty
alone. This, however, I do know and am quite certain of, that, viz., the
notion of beauty which I have here advanced, and besides which scarcely
another will be found, is the true and right Christian notion, of which
all the statues of heathen gods, all fantasies of nature, all mental
ideas, are but single rays, faint memorials, corporeal images, or mere
scattered and mutilated fragments.

The thought, too, of that blissful state in the infancy of
creation--when sorrow had as yet no existence, and evil, with its many
woes, was not--is a notion not insignificant, but full, rather, of rich
influences for the higher and more spiritual aim of art, and especially
for the deeper and profounder essence of poetry. I have, indeed, already
alluded to this notion; and I revert to it because I feel it is one
which does not deserve to be so totally neglected as it usually is. Now,
the higher poesy was termed, in consideration of that Godlike idea of
eternal hope which predominates in it, the dawn of an uprising morn in
the world of intellectual culture and poetic fancy; but at the same time
I remarked that it was accompanied by a mournful recollection of a great
foretime, long since passed away and departed. Not that this sad
backward looking to a lost infantine happiness of the first times is in
discord with or in opposition to the hopes of the rising dawn. Rather
must it be regarded as in harmony with it. For this feeling is, as it
were, the reflection of that hope--the same light thrown back from yet
another side--even as the lovely hue of the sky at eventide, and the
bright rays of the breaking dawn, make a kindred impression on the
fancy. In this respect we might almost venture to say of poetry and its
inmost essence, that it is but the spiritual echo of the soul--a
sorrowful remembrance of a lost paradise. I do not mean that the latter
and its history, such as it is transmitted to us, or even as it has been
handled by the English poet, is the only fitting or even a particularly
happy subject for poetry. I allude rather to that paradisiacal state of
universal nature throughout the whole globe--creation’s state of
infantine happiness, before it was ruined by revolt from God.

A note of these paradisiacal remembrances, a sorrowful _memento_ of this
heavenly innocence and primal beauty of a new-born world, seems like an
inward and animating soul to breathe in--or as a thread of higher and
intenser life, to run through--all the songs and exquisite delineations
of a more than earthly poesy. Not that this ray of light ought or ever
could form by itself the subject-matter of the finished work of any true
poet. His subjects are generally, and indeed must be, somewhat more
corporeal, being drawn for the most part from history and from life.
What I formerly said of divine hope applies here also. Even while the
picture of reality which is set forth is worked out most elaborately,
with accurate observation of all its little and nicest traits, this
purely spiritual and almost unearthly tone ought, nevertheless, to be
present. It must be found there as the inner soul of the whole, however
veiled beneath the outer world that is portrayed in the story. No work,
however, in which this inner thread of life is totally wanting, is or
ever will be in its essence more than simple prose, even though in form
it be verse. Art it may have unquestionably, and wit, a story, and
irony; all in short, that can be wished--any thing but poetry. For,
except where its true notion is either already lost or fast
disappearing, the idea of poetry can not possibly be separated from that
of enthusiasm. The calm, cold poetry of the head, if such can for a
moment deserve the name, is to the true inspired poetry of enthusiasm in
the same relation that the spurious faith of the pure reason stands in
to the living faith of the full feeling which springs out of a profound
personal conviction and love.

Now, the full essence of this enthusiasm, which, according to the
Platonic notion of it, takes in all things in its embrace, is in the
Christian harmonic triad of faith, hope, and love, dissolved, as it
were, into its three time-forms. For though faith has its root in the
present, still, in every case, it looks backward to some past, whether
of an extant or still earlier revelation, which at the same time it
embraces and adopts into itself. And even in that faith which admits the
revelations of history, or that practical faith which, in the ordinary
transactions of life, places its trust in human testimony and the
recorded facts of experimental science (since even out of the domain of
religion faith is inseparably mixed with all that man thinks or
does)--in all these kinds of faith a similar reference to the past might
easily be pointed out. To the future it is that hope directs itself,
while in love there reigns a full and intense feeling of the present.
And even so of God’s everlasting love--this, too, has ever been and
always must be understood as a full, intense, and abiding feeling of a
never-ending present, which, without beginning and without end, goes on
forever in abiding felicity. Besides this subdivision into three
branches or elements, species or forms, there is yet another character
by which these three fundamental Christian feelings are essentially
distinguished from the single and all-embracing one of enthusiasm. To
this distinction I have already alluded, and it consists in this, that
whereas enthusiasm indicates nothing more than a passing state of a more
intense consciousness, the three categories above mentioned contain not
merely a transient but a permanent enhancement of it, or, in other
words, a consciousness which has really become higher and more intense,
and as such, endures in full self-possession and inward enlightenment.
Accordingly, when we are speaking of the relation of faith to knowledge,
this scheme of the fundamental feelings of Christianity seems in the
highest degree appropriate to that philosophy which undertakes to show
the connection between knowledge and faith, and the passage from one to
the other. For it is in truth well calculated to lead to this end, even
more rapidly and more surely than the Platonic fundamental principle of
enthusiasm, notwithstanding the profound and essential affinity which
subsists between these two views of the world and things.

With respect to the relation of faith to knowledge: we must remember
that the positive dogmas of a fixed definite creed belong to theology,
and lie altogether out of the domain of philosophy. For though a truly
learned exegesis of Holy Writ most unquestionably demands a truly
philosophical spirit, it is not philosophy itself. And this applies also
to ecclesiastical tradition, as running parallel to and co-ordinate with
written revelation. This enlarged assumption, however, of a twofold
source for deducing a knowledge of the truths necessary to be believed,
and for their dogmatic interpretation, as touching on a particular
province of history, or as some, perhaps, will rather say, a
controverted point of church authority, must be left to theology to
discuss and decide. It does not fall within the true limits of
philosophy, which properly is concerned only with faith in general, and
the notion thereof relatively to knowledge. And here comes in the
greatest of the distinctions between the philosophy of life (which is
founded both on an external and also an internal and higher experience,
being itself a science of experience) and the philosophy of absolute
reason. The relation between faith and knowledge, as respectively
established by them, is thoroughly and essentially different. According
to that absolute view of the world and things which rests on and springs
from a pure and necessary rational science, faith and knowledge stand in
absolute opposition to each other. The only connection into which they
can possibly enter is that by which faith is called in to the aid of
reason, and in order to supply its deficiencies. When, for instance, the
unconditional science can not by itself attain to fullness and
perfection of knowledge, or, after all its labors, finds itself standing
unsatisfied even within its own domain, then the transition is made
forcibly, and, as it were, by a great and sudden leap into the opposite
and totally different domain of reason, in order to seek there refuge
and protection from itself. And this indeed is the only way still open,
if not to a complete reconciliation between the two, yet, at least, to
a peaceful compromise of the respective claims of knowledge and of
faith. Quite different, however, is the relation between them, as set
forth by the philosophy of life, which takes its position in experience
and the knowledge which is based thereon. For, in the first place, faith
and knowledge are not so rigorously separated, nor so absolutely
distinguished in it as they are in the preceding system. And, secondly,
as regards the order and succession of the two: here, in the wide field
of man’s experience, both inward and outward, in nature and in his own
self, it is faith for the most part that furnishes the beginning and
foundation of knowledge, which, however, as such is incomplete, and
requires further development. We have already remarked, that the
positive dogmas of a particular faith, together with the scientific
investigations appropriate to them, form a special domain of higher
experience. This is a statement which scarcely requires any labored
proof. And we need not dwell on it further than to remind you, that even
here the faith, so far as it is dogmatically propounded, forms the
foundation. In this higher region faith is the first and that which
makes the beginning, while the knowing forms the further development.
Descending into its particular applications, the latter furnishes an
explanation, or, rather, elucidation, of the whole. Still it must all
the while adhere faithfully to the fact of a revelation, and maintain
its authority over the rational principle which otherwise seeks to
depress, and does often actually overbear it. And so is it also with the
first awakening of the consciousness. And even in experimental science,
the order between faith and knowledge is exactly the same. In actual
life, too, every great enterprise begins with and takes its first step
in faith. In faith Columbus, compass in hand, and firmly relying on its
revelations, traversed, in his frail bark, the wide waters of an unknown
ocean. In this faith he discovered a new world, and thereby opened a new
era in the history of science and of man. For all his inquiries, all his
thirst and search after information, all his thinking, guessing, and
supposing, did not as yet amount to a complete knowing--by such means he
could not succeed in working out a full conviction, either for himself
or for others. It was the given fact, the unquestionable proof of actual
experience, that first exalted his bold conception into true and perfect
certainty. In a greater or less degree this is the course by which all
the great discoveries in science have been made; passing by a slow but
still advancing process of thought from faith up to knowledge. And the
same character of faith is stamped on every great and decisive act,
every important event in the history of individuals or of nations. And
if, in contrast with these grander phenomena, an instance be required
from the first and almost unnoticeable beginnings of consciousness, I
would refer to the first time that, with manifest purpose, the infant
seeks and finds for itself its mother’s breast. But perhaps the force of
this illustration may be questioned, as being drawn from what might be
called a mere gratification of an animal want. I shall therefore take
one which borders closely indeed on the former, but which does not
appear to be so immediately connected, not to say identical, with
instinct. We will take, then, the second moment of consciousness--that
at which the child regards its mother for the first time, full,
apparently of reflection, and, certainly of attention and meaning, as it
were with a wish to say something, if it had the power to talk. And this
eye, upturned for the first time, full of love and meaning, what is it
but the first look of faith? And though even this opening dawn of
consciousness involves a certain distinction and recognition, it is
still very far from the certainty of knowledge. And is not the former
instance highly appropriate and well fitted to illustrate the relation
in which man stands to God? For that paternal heart, which, as the
living pulse of omnipotence, beats sensibly in the boundless
universe--is it not also, as it were, the full maternal fountain at
which the immortal spirit imbibes its first milk, and indeed all its
nourishment for eternity? In short, at the vivid point of experience,
the first--the still delicate and innocent--beginnings of feeling are
very often in close contact with the full maturity of the most
enlightened knowledge, expanded and elevated to the height of its
Infinite source.

At this point, then, of living experience, faith and knowledge are not
so sharply separated from, or so unconditionally opposed to, each other
as is commonly thought. The relation of faith to knowledge is that
nearly of the beginning to the consummation. Such, too, is the case with
experience and revelation, as the data of all scientific knowledge.
These two also stand in close dependence on each other. Their mutual
relation is something similar to that of the external manifestation to
the inward energy--of the visible body to its animating principle, or
to that inward spark of light which the body serves as an organ and
vehicle, or as an outward garb and veil. In history, and in every
science that in any way deserves to be called historical, the spirit or
mind has been long and generally acknowledged to be the first and only
thing that gives to the whole its true worth. And in the domain of
physical science, which of all branches of mere empirical knowledge is
the most comprehensive and most extensive, the case is precisely
similar. The externally given phenomenon of the fact or natural object
that is under consideration, forms only the outward investiture and is
to be regarded as the mode of manifestation--the visible form--of the
inner life, and law which rules within it. And man’s chief object in
investigating the former is, if possible, to pierce its shroud, and to
seize and to discover the inward law of life, as all that is most
essential, and as the germ of existence, which is wrapped up and hidden
in the outward and sensible veil. Many of the special branches of
physical inquiry, such as botany and mineralogy, can only be considered
as preparatory labors, which are to furnish the materials and apparatus
for future science to act upon, and not really as sciences. When all the
facts of mineralogy shall have been brought under one great and
universal law--when the isolated results of anatomical research and
observation can be reduced to one common physiological idea--when
chemistry, by its exclusive analysis, and decomposition of matter into
its ultimate elements, shall be able to discern, in the different gases
and other imponderable agents, the various forms of the invisible
principle of things--when a higher range of physical research shall
penetrate the grand primal phenomena of the electric shock, of magnetic
attraction, and the prismatic decomposition of light, and its artistic
imitation for scientific purposes, then only shall we be able to remove
the last veil which shrouds the mysteries of nature.

For the whole effort of natural science is indefatigably directed to
reaching to that hidden center of life through external existence, of
whose inner light and splendor the whole corporeal mass of the sensible
world is but the broken and multiplied reflection, and empirical science
but the chemical precipitate, the gross material residuum of its pure
and spiritual truth. It is to this that all the results of science point
and tend; every investigation in the domain of natural history, which
in any degree pretends to be philosophical, likewise leads to this
conclusion. Assuming, then, the existence of a God as the Creator of the
world, what else can nature be than a revelation of God and divine
love--a visible manifestation thereof in outward and material matter?
And how, if otherwise conceived of, can it ever be understood or
comprehended? Supposing also (what at the first we may very well allow)
that even from this point of view much remains obscure, enigmatical, and
unintelligible to us--still these incomprehensible, or, rather,
uncomprehended, matters are merely a few individual instances. The
whole, nevertheless, will, on this hypothesis, be found full of deep
significancy, and satisfactory, not only to the feelings, but even to
the inquiring and questioning intellect. But, according to the opposite
view of the universe, though many, or, let us say, very many individual
facts in nature may be acutely explained and scientifically understood;
still the whole, if it be not looked upon as a revelation from God, but
a peculiar self-existent entity, remains forever an enigmatical mass of
indissoluble complications. Stripped by this hypothesis of its higher
design of leading man onward to the divine, it becomes, for him at
least, perfectly unmeaning. But when, on the contrary, the universal
system of nature is regarded as the unfolding and visible revelation of
the hidden majesty of the Creator, then, together with that other one
which is written and contained in the divine law and sacred records, it
forms one consistent whole. Holy Writ and nature, according to this
view, appear two mutually explanatory and supplemental halves of that
book of God which is written on the inside and the out. The inner voice
of conscience also has often, and indeed from the very earliest times,
been represented as a revelation, though of a different kind; and the
moral feeling and its peculiar law have been supposed to be frequently
opposed to, or at least wholly independent of, nature and the natural
law. But even this internal revelation is also double, like the external
one of Holy Writ and of nature. For in its negative prohibitions, in its
gentle or terrible, but ever-distinct warnings, as well as in its
positive requisitions, it is quite distinct from its other form as a
feeling of devotion and of mental prayer, or of an illimitable
aspiration after God and divine things. And it is by no means allowable
to confound or mix up these two distinct forms. For the one is
universal, however variable in its degrees of intensity; whereas the
other manifesto itself rather by way of exception as an individual
vocation, or, if the term be preferred, as a peculiar genius for piety,
and a special sensibility for holy thoughts and feelings.

Now this fourfold divine revelation, embracing the two external branches
of Scripture and of nature, and the two inner ones of conscience and
devotion, has its seat in the four faculties of the lower order which
have so repeatedly been brought before our consideration. For the memory
is the organ of its written and oral transmission and perpetuation--nay,
of writing and language generally, according to the intimate connection
which subsists between them. And in the next place, the external senses,
with which we may also associate an immediate intuition into the depths
and mysteries of nature, are the organs for perceiving and understanding
the sensible phenomena. Lastly, there is conscience, and, on the other
side, a longing after God and divine things, as the highest and most
enhanced degree of human pursuit--of the profoundest aspiration of man’s
soul, and the purest desire of his spirit. For it is even here, in these
subordinate faculties, where the deep decline and gross degeneracy of
the human mind in its present state most strikingly displays itself,
that a susceptibility for improvement is first excited. Here springs the
earliest impulse to return to the higher state from which we have
fallen. Here the divine seed of resuscitation soonest expands itself,
revivifying and restoring to its pristine worth and dignity the morbid
and lifeless consciousness. The internal revelation, however, of
devotion and prayer must be regarded as clearly distinct from, and as
lying altogether out of, the domain of philosophy, even as the learned
exposition of Scripture, and a scientific study thereof, forms a
peculiar branch of intellectual pursuit. But though philosophy must not
be mixed up with it, yet on the other hand it must not lapse into, or
inseparably identify itself with, a pure mysticism of devotional
feelings, or, if the term be preferred, a theory of prayer, and a mere
contemplative meditation on the Deity and divine things. And the reason
is obvious: devotion, with its mystical feelings, must necessarily and
absolutely attach itself to the positive data of a fixed dogmatic faith.
For in such alone can it find, not only a definite form and a
maturely-developed external shape, but also an inner assurance for
itself as well as a safeguard against the possible errors of
fanaticism.

And here, however, it must not be forgotten that the intrinsic essence
of divine longing, as well as of all other holy feelings, can never be
or seem alien and repugnant to the philosophy of life, which indeed
takes its rise out of this very center of a high and holy love. On the
contrary, it must always be intimately associated with and amicably
disposed toward it. The philosophy of life, therefore, even while it
carefully guards against falling into a mere exposition and commentary
of Scripture, may freely borrow from the old Scriptural language its
awful spiritual phrases and its vividly forcible expressions. It would,
in fact, be an overstrained pedantry, and an excessive affectation of
scientific purism, were it to wish to avoid it. Still it is necessary to
draw a precise line of demarkation between religion and philosophy, and
carefully to observe their limits. And in the same manner, philosophy
will abstain from an undue encroachment on the province of natural
history, or on the domain of ethics where the internal revelation of
conscience furnishes the basis of all moral legislation. At least it
will keep from so doing as long as it is anxious to preserve its true
dignity as a philosophy of life, and of thought and science in general,
and fears to degrade itself by becoming nothing more than a special
branch and application, either as mere morals or natural philosophy.
This, however, does not preclude from it the liberty of occasionally
entering even deeply into them, or of taking a general survey of their
results, or borrowing largely from their facts, as pregnant instances,
remarkable phenomena and similes, in order to make this remote region
illustrate its own sphere, though properly they do not belong to it.
Philosophy has enough to do with what really forms the subject-matter
and contents of its own province, without seeking to enlarge it by any
extraneous addition.

Now, to these four forms or sources of a higher revelation, both
internal and external, a fifth remains to be added. It constitutes, as
it were, their common bond of union--the center at which, converging and
coming into contact, they exercise a mutual influence, and, adjusting
and accommodating themselves to one another, combine in living union and
perfect harmony. This we would designate by the general name of a
revelation of eternal love. But a revelation of eternal love in man, and
not merely such a one as we might, with good reason, pronounce nature
and the whole creation to be. And even when we say _in man_, we do not
merely mean thereby such as is revealed in his instinctive emotions of
devotion and religion, but that, rather, which speaks out in man’s most
universal feeling, and in his profoundest and intensest consciousness.
But if love itself is nothing but the pure idea, the inmost spirit and
essential energy of all true life, and especially of that which is
highest and most exalted, then must this revelation of love be
pre-eminently the subject-matter of the philosophy of life. For it is
even the rich and intrinsic center of the other four sacred sources of
divine revelation, and out of it all higher life, thought, faith, and
science, flows into the soul of every man that has any susceptibility
for such exalted excellence. This remark, moreover, implicitly
determines the relation which both faith and enthusiasm (according to
the Platonic notion of it) hold in general to science, and also to
revelation and love, though, indeed, with respect to the latter, it is
only inchoately and in outline that it is so fixed.

But, in order fully to work out and complete the idea of science,
according to all those external relations which we have already laid
down, it will be necessary to examine the several elements of this idea
in their internal coherence, and also, by means of contrast with a
complete evolution of the system of inborn error, to set them in the
fullest and clearest light.

We have already declared and enumerated the several elements and
degrees, or species and constituents which, together, make up scientific
knowledge. First of all, there is the understanding and explaining, the
discerning and distinguishing. In the second place comes the living
cogitation or complete comprehension of the actual, which forms the true
center of scientific knowledge, if not its very self; and, lastly, that
which is closely connected therewith, the immediate perception and
recognition of truth, and an inward feeling of certainty. All these,
however, are more or less falsified and led astray by the principal of
those scientific errors which are innate in man’s mind--which sometimes
secretly undermine, and, at last, totally subvert and destroy them.
First of all, the living thought is often converted into a dead
cogitation, being carried away from its natural direction toward the
actual, and misled to an unsubstantial pursuit of empty abstractions.
The total confusion of ideas which this leads to is fatal to all
distinctness and precision of understanding, and renders it impossible
to have a clear discernment and correct judgment of things. And then, in
this bottomless abyss, the firm foundation of actual truth and inward
certainty sinks and is swallowed up.

Every one, indeed, of the four fundamental faculties of the human mind
contains, in itself, a faulty disposition and pernicious germ of a
special and precise form of scientific error, which establishes and
fully develops itself in its appropriate domain, and which, when
circumstances are favorable, is matured and shaped into a system of
falsehood. It is chiefly in the visible consequences of its further
development, and, also, by the intrinsic inconsistencies in which it is
involved by the unfounded assumption from which it sets out at the very
first, that each of these abortions of unsubstantial and empty
cogitation is most easily detected. And, in fact, in the history of the
human mind and philosophy, and even of science generally, the essential
characters of these leading phases of scientific aberration are only too
distinctly legible to him who contemplates that great intellectual
picture with an eye unblinded by prejudice.

The error most peculiar to the reason, and which, in its domain, springs
up almost indigenously, is one that has already been frequently
mentioned--viz., the phantom, of the unconditional, or the delusion of
absolute necessity. Now, all the data on which man’s knowledge must be
based have a triple source; they are presented to him from within, from
above, and from without. But the reason, which is the faculty of the
logical connection of ideas, and of the logical necessity which rules in
that connection, often quits this safe and solid ground of reality, as
presented to it in triple experience, whether of revelation and history,
or of natural science, and resting entirely on itself, tries to build
exclusively on its own foundation. Whenever, therefore, it attempts this
impossibility, it invariably copies the mathematical method of
demonstration. And so there immediately springs up the false semblance
of a necessary knowledge. As the faculty of logical thinking, the reason
is at the same time a power of endless progressive development. To
invent, however, to create and to produce, is absolutely beyond its
capacity; and it forfeits its own rights, whenever, abandoning the
pursuits most appropriate, and assigned to it by nature, it usurps the
prerogatives of an inventive and productive faculty, and thereby gives
birth to the abortions of false metaphysical systems.

When, however, the firm basis and sure principle of some real and actual
fact is once given, then the further scientific development, derivation,
and wider deduction from this first foundation may be carried
illimitably onward. There exists no cause at all why we should wish to
set bounds to its advance. For were we to do so, we should perhaps
afterward discover that they had been drawn either too narrowly or too
prematurely; as, indeed, has already been too often done in many a
branch of mathematical science. And, even because it is exactly in
mathematics that the illimitable procedure of scientific development
manifests itself most signally and most brilliantly, and is at the same
time not inconsistent with the greatest rigor of form and certainty, if
only it originally sets out from a stable principle of actual reality,
this science will furnish, perhaps, the most appropriate and pertinent
illustration. And, indeed, the more so, as the prejudice still subsists
in men’s minds, that the first foundation of mathematical science is an
original invention of the reason--a pure product of the internal
intuitions of the intellect, and that this science stands quite apart
from all other so-called sciences of experience. But in its first
development and acquisition, this is very far from being the case. If we
could only observe in others, or could in our own case recall to mind
how long it is before a child can actually count three, or clearly
separate from itself the external objects it perceives, or learns to
distinguish between any two objects, or between them and itself, we
shall be forced to admit that the first basis of enumeration has an
empirical origin, and that it is on such, consequently, that all
mathematical science is built up and founded. Geometrical lines and
figures are properly nothing more than numbers, or the fundamental
arithmetical notions fixed in space and invested with a corporeal shape,
and thereby become visible. It is, however, not unusual to regard the
first principles of geometry--such as the point, the right line, the
square, and the triangle, out of which all else is compounded--as
independent of experience, and existing absolutely in and by themselves.
But, in truth, these primary facts of geometry are, without exception,
first furnished by experience. And even if, for the purposes of science,
they are advanced in a degree of abstract purity and of notional
completeness, which they do not possess in the external world of
sensible things, where they are always combined with more or less of
gross admixture or of imperfection, this is only what is the case, in
exactly the same degree, with the first principles of all other
experimental sciences.

Astronomy is one of the highest applications of mathematical science,
which in it is carried to its highest limits of development. But here,
too, the latter has grown together and in common with natural science.
The complicated and elaborate calculations, the approximate hypotheses
of mathematical astronomy, are intimately interwoven and mixed up with
manifold sidereal facts and observations. Properly, therefore, and
rightly understood, mathematical science forms no exception to the
general principle that all knowledge is based upon experience, derived
from inward, outward, or, it may be, higher perceptions. Consequently,
it is not so much in kind as in degree that it is distinguished from
other experimental sciences. We must not, however, forget that in very
many cases of the application of mathematics to real life and natural
history, it is not so much a material science as rather a mere organ and
instrument for the advancement and further elaboration of the particular
sciences to which it is applied. Viewed relatively to a higher physical
science, mathematics do but form the mere outline and articulation of
the whole structure of the inner skeleton of the whole body of nature;
or, rather, it is the hidden key and rule of speech of the marvelous
language of revelation, and of that otherwise hidden existence which is
here brought to the light, and which we call nature--its inner grammar,
in short, and higher symbolism.

In order to guard against this abuse of reason, to which every thinker
must feel himself but too liable, and which is universally acknowledged
to be possible, it has been thought sufficient to distinguish the
perversion from the right application of it within its natural and due
limits. With this view it has been maintained that the knowledge and
certainty which are conceded to and are within the reach of man are
restricted to the sensible world; while, on the other hand, in the
suprasensible domain, all judgment is denied to reason, and absolutely
all knowledge to man. But this position is very far from being
justifiable. For if, as we maintain, all knowledge is really imparted,
or, in other words, a gift or revelation, its measure and limits can
not be determined by way of anticipation, nor do they in truth depend at
all upon man. Such limits rest entirely with Him from whom all has
proceeded, and who communicates or has communicated to His creatures
severally whatever it is His will to communicate or impart to them, or
absolutely to enjoin upon them. But this revelation and communication,
on which all religion and science ultimately rests, being once given and
received, reason need not by any means be excluded from the
suprasensible domain. On the contrary, it may in a certain degree
lawfully co-operate in the effectually working of it, and, to a certain
extent and under certain limits, may even judge of it. Indeed, when the
first foundation of actual reality is once given and established, and
moreover acknowledged as such, then the use and employment of reason is
no less legitimate here than it is in the domain of the sensible world,
or in a special science of experience directed and confined to
terrestrial things. What is meant hereby, and how it is to be
understood, will best appear from what I am now about to add. Though
theology, as little as religion itself, can draw exclusively from or
rest entirely on reason--for this would be fatal to its very idea--still
it is not only allowable, but even highly desirable, that theology, in
its practical application and method, should be thoroughly rational. By
this means alone will it be able to preclude not only a pernicious
confusion of ideas and the mistakes of fanatical enthusiasm, but also
all unprofitable disputes and the absurd bitterness of animosity. And
thus, under the prevailing influence of reason, the spirit of love and
concord will outlive all the violent attacks and deep wounds of
controversial ardor.

In its application, therefore, and external form, all science is, or,
rather, to speak generally, ought to be, rational; even though it can
not derive its subject-matter from reason, nor in any way depend upon it
in this respect. For whenever she attempts to produce the latter out of
herself, she invariably gives birth to the metaphysical phantom of
absolute entity and of absolute knowledge, or that false illusion of
reason which sets up an identical dualism and intrinsic unity of
necessary being and necessary thought, as the two inseparably connected
forms or species of the one eternal essence which, superior to and
higher than both, contains in itself the primary ground of all existence
and of all consciousness. Before this illusion, the idea of a personal
Deity naturally falls to the ground. It is all too low and too mean for
the lofty conceptions of this imaginary phantom of reason. Nowhere, I
would observe by the way, has this illusory system, which is utterly
fatal to the truth, been carried out with such rigor of consequence, or
set forth with such masterly powers of exposition, as in the works of
Spinosa. In this view of the world and things, however, we have two
forms of a necessary thought, running, indeed, continually parallel to
each other, but never becoming perfectly coincident. Accordingly, no
system of it has ever been able to attain to a general recognition and
reception. For, notwithstanding that perfect unintelligibility is
essential to this view, being deeply inwoven in its whole system, and
running through its most delicate threads, and reaching to its inmost
corners, each new master of mathematical certainty in this method of
negation and systematic nullity seeks the cause of the obscurity in some
intellectual defect of his immediate predecessor in the exposition of
it. Accordingly, he feels himself called upon to make some slightly
changed turn and arrangement of the thoughts, and so to come forward as
the inventor and founder of an entirely new fabric of truth; whereas, in
truth, his new form and method are fundamentally the very same delusion
of a mere rational semblance of logical necessity that formed the
foundation of the old and condemned systems. However greatly the outward
garb of language and phraseology may have varied in the course of
centuries, still the error itself has remained identical and free from
change.

And even if the necessary connection of these two worlds of objective
existence and subjective consciousness, which run parallel with each
other, should be conceived of, somewhat after the idea of Leibnitz, as a
pre-established harmony, having, as such, its origin in a personal God,
still, by this apparent recognition of the sovereign hand of omnipotence
ruling and guiding the whole creation, it is only in the external form
that it is relieved from the objection of dualism. For, fundamentally,
this theory resolves itself into the mechanism of an intrinsically blind
necessity, by means of which the two clocks, as it were, set originally
together by the Supreme Artist, run on forever and agree, while
otherwise they have no sort of connection or contact. Such a theory
evidently furnishes no true solution of the difficulty, and leads to no
satisfactory result. Quite different from this is the true inner unity,
which, however, is no mere sameness--the true living harmony, which,
however, is no pre-established one--between the external sensible world
of nature and the inner conceptional world of the consciousness, as
contemplated from the position of life, and of a philosophy which takes
its source and foundation from life itself. According to this view,
every thing in the outward reality of corporeal existence is truly and
properly animated, ensouled, and even living. Or, at least, life is the
source from which both the external object of material existence and the
inner thought, life, or consciousness, alike take their rise--in this
one common notion of life, that which exists and that which is conscious
meet together and are fused into one. The whole of the supposed
contrariety falls at once to the ground; and nothing remains but a
certain difference of degree, steps of transition, and fluctuation from
one state to another, similar to that between life and death, sleeping
and waking. What we call existence is merely the visible appearance of a
thought, it is the external expression, the corporeal shape of an inner
life. No doubt this inner and hidden life of nature, when contrasted
with the perfectly clear and free consciousness of man, or still more,
when compared with a higher and superior being, appears perfectly
unconscious. But, in truth, it ought not to be considered as being
always and entirely such; at least, it was not so originally. We ought
rather to explain it as a life and consciousness which have fallen into
a state of slumber, dreaminess, or trance; and even if we must suppose
it to be stiff and rigid with actual death, still it is not with that
death which is eternal and everlasting. This, however, implies at the
same time that we may look upon it as being in a commencing state of
reawakening, though, indeed, it be very far as yet from being fully
awake. And, in truth, in man’s most perfectly developed consciousness,
do we not trace such or a similar reciprocation between sleeping and
waking, dreaming and thinking, memory and oblivion--between the full,
clear day of understanding, comprehension, and discernment, and that
night of error and darkness that can not be dispersed, which conflicting
opinions, with their passions and complications, cast over the human
mind? In truth, no absolute line of demarkation, no impassable barrier,
subsists. On the contrary, there are numberless points of contact and
steps of transition easy enough to trace from the state of a living and
wakeful consciousness into that of sleep, or of an apparently total
rigidity and numbness. Strictly and accurately speaking, however, there
is, according to this view of life, no such thing as death; there is
only a fluctuation and variation of life through its several transitory
forms. Still we must not forget that, relatively to the present state of
things, all of these forms can not be regarded as transitory. In nature,
death has no existence, _i.e._, death is neither essential nor from the
beginning. It was brought in afterward, and incidentally, into creation.
And indeed, for man especially, the immortality of the soul forms not
only an article of the creed of a higher hope, but it is also a visible
fact of nature, an indisputable truth of history, that every where
plainly and loudly announces itself. This hypothesis of a real vitality,
inherent in all the forms of existence, which we may very properly term
the only hypothesis of feeling which the living truth admits of, was, in
ancient times, the general creed of nature, enforced by the universal
feeling of mankind, and originally held by all the nations of the earth.
It is only in modern times that the one-sided sagacity of an elaborate
and artificial science has drawn this strong line of demarkation between
thought and entity, and thereby lead to a total deadening of both. No
sooner, therefore, had existence and consciousness been torn from their
common root of life, and thereby forced asunder from each other, than,
with a view of filling up the great gap between them, the deceptive
rationalism of an irrefragable chain of destiny, and a necessary
predetermination of all things, took the place which life had formerly
held, but from which it had been forcibly expelled.




LECTURE IX.


Among the widely-diversified forms and ever new applications under which
the rational system of absolute knowledge and necessary connection is
wont to exhibit itself, from time to time, some are occasionally found
in which the first foundation is not established in that mathematical
form and that rigor of demonstration which marks all the subsequent
steps of the systematic edifice. In a few systems, at least, reason, as
the faculty of the subjective Ego, is expressly assumed to be an
intrinsic fact of the consciousness. And this is done, apparently, in
the very same way that in the philosophy which sets out from life
itself, the theory of the consciousness, or the development of the
notion thereof, commences with some such fact of the inward cogitation,
as a first principle given and established by internal experience. But
the question, whether in any rationalistic system this assumption be
really meant--in which case the whole system would be to be regarded as
purely a science of experience--or is only apparent, being adopted for
some secondary object, will be quickly determined as the development of
the entire system proceeds. A few characteristic remarks, both simple
and easy to be understood, will soon enable us to decide. If, as regards
the form, with a pretended mathematical form of demonstration, it
immediately introduces the old ontological confusion of unintelligible
abstractions, we may assume it as highly probable, nay, set it down as
certain, that, in spite of its different form and bearing, it is
essentially the same invariable error of identical thought and
unconditional being that is set forth in such a system. But the token by
which such scientific fatalism most surely and infallibly reveals
itself, is the subject-matter of the system. We can have no doubt of its
presence wherever the present state of life and consciousness, which is
merely accidental, and by no means its original one, is proved, or,
rather, by a pretended demonstration, is set forth as its necessary
condition.

On the contrary, that incessant alternation between life and death, such
as the latter exists at present in nature, and which, in all its
various forms, coming and going like night and day, sleeping and waking,
ebb and flood, affects not the individual only but the whole human race,
must, according to truth, be ever regarded as a perpetually changing
event, assuming manifold different shapes, and being variously modified
by the influence of human freedom. And not even for the purposes of
science is it allowable to see, in what is but a transitory state of the
present constitution of things, an eternal and immutable law; nor in its
application to the individual cases of actual life, to assume a
necessary predetermination resulting from some indissoluble chain of
destiny.

Moreover, this illusory phantom of the unconditional--that peculiar
error of the reason whenever it is unduly applied and left wholly to
itself--and the semblance of rationality which arises thereout in a
predetermined and indissoluble enchainment of all events and phenomena,
is not confined to the domain of science and its inner world of thought.
In poetry, under the notion of destiny, it holds a prominent and
remarkable position. In the tragedy of the ancients especially, it comes
before us in peculiar splendor and majesty, as the blind fate of an iron
necessity. Since, then, this notion, though in itself and originally
nothing but a mere delusion, has yet, through an almost universal belief
in its reality, acquired and exercised for centuries a fearful power
over the minds of men, it can not, of course, be omitted or refused a
place in a truly artistic view and portraiture of life. This view of the
general constitution of things, thoroughly and deeply tragic as it is,
must ever remain intrinsically and essentially heathen. But even the
most perfect creations of tragic art stand a full degree below, or, at
least, hold a somewhat subordinate position to, the epic songs and lays
of the oldest foretime. For this rich and copious stream of primal and
eternal recollections is the source from which every other form of poesy
branches off and derives its inspired waters; the living play of its
billows, as they sweep along with full and undivided flood, bears with
them all the magic treasures of fancy; and like the world-encircling
ocean, with its ever-changing undulations, it flows around all the ages
and epochs of nature and humanity. The epos, in short, is poesy itself.
In it pre-eminently the very essence of poetry is present, and there,
also, are its truest manifestations. Every other form of poetic art
constitutes but a special kind, and, as compared with this pure
original, is, so to speak, a mixed or applied poetry. For in the same
way that music is an art of longing, while the arts of figure are the
channels in which the highest enthusiasm for visible beauty expresses
itself; so poesy is the bright reflection of the world as it is mirrored
on the ever-flowing love-stream of eternal recollection. But enthusiasm
invariably attaches itself to something positive. On this account it is
that the plastic arts are intrinsically of two kinds essentially
different in character. While a heathen beauty predominates in the
statuary and buildings of ancient times, a spirit of Christian
inspiration is no less decidedly and visibly apparent in modern painting
and architecture. And, in some degree, this remark applies, to dramatic
poetry; for, in its inner spirit and character, encroaching, as it were,
into the domain of the plastic art, it forms a peculiar species of mixed
poetry. But in epic poetry, in the same way that all streams flow into
and commingle in the ocean, all contrasts are softened off and
dissolved, and, in a true and genuine epic poem, the ancient mythology
must not impress us as heathen--or, at least, this character must not
there be so decidedly apparent as it is in Grecian tragedy. Every age
that enjoys a high civilization, and a rare degree of intellectual
enlightenment, even though it has not lost all relish for noble and
original poetry, applies itself, first and preferably, to those mixed
forms which allow the freest development of art, and in which it
frequently attains to the height of excellence. When, however, during
the reign of the cold poetry of the head, the tragic view of the world
and things manifests itself no longer in the grand style of free
invention, but interweaves and works itself up with some artificial and
elaborate picture of prosaic reality, the impression it leaves is doubly
painful, conveying but the closing reflections of a destructive
skepticism. And in the place of that genuine poetical truth which marked
the deep and pregnant feelings of ancient poesy, of which scarce a trace
is here to be found, we have, on the whole, nothing but the scientific
illusion of some empty notion in the deep but bitter feeling of
universal negation.

In the whole series of the essential errors of science--of which some
one form or other is peculiar to each of the four great faculties of the
mind, and which, though not as an inevitable and irremediable limitation
of it, yet still, as a defective tendency and an hereditary germ of
deviation, is there indigenous and domesticated--among all these
various forms of error, the deceptive phantom of the unconditional, the
seeming identity of necessary being and absolute thinking and knowing,
has been shown to belong especially to the reason whenever, quitting the
right road, it refuses to confine its operations within their due
limits. In consequence, however, of that close concatenation and mutual
influence which pervades all the different forms and species of man’s
intellectual development, I deemed it any thing but superfluous to call
your attention to the fact, that this system of necessity, or, in other
words, this scientific fatalism, plays a very essential part in the
poetical view of things, and to notice the shapes it there assumes. And
just as this delusion of the reason, which has given rise to so many
false systems (which, however, are but one, since they do but repeat, in
different forms, one and the same error of the absolute), has had a
powerful effect even on poetry, having exercised a great and decided
influence on the internal constitution of the tragic drama, so, in a
similar manner, there is a peculiar species of scientific error which
owes its origin to the faculty of imagination. Now, as might well be
expected, wherever this inventive and productive faculty directs itself
exclusively to the side of prosaic reality and to palpable corporeal
phenomena, this error, and the erroneous scientific system to which it
gives rise, have, above all others, a dry, meager, and grossly material
character. Those lovely illusions of a fancy innocently sporting with
emblems and figures, which most immediately occur to our mind while
speaking of an error peculiar to that province of the imagination,
although purely scientific--I am alluding to the fabulous world and
imaginary deities of ancient mythology--these furnish but little, if
any, obstacle in the way of science and of the acquisition of physical
truth. Considered, therefore, in this light alone, they would scarcely
demand a place in our present disquisitions. For, for us, the whole of
them possesses only a certain poetical truth--or, at most, perhaps, a
deeper and most penetrating search may discover in them a symbolical
signification, which is, undoubtedly, full of deep meaning, and
therefore is, in so far, also true. But the case was very different with
the ancients themselves. And, on this account, when heathenism was the
prevailing faith, a lively opposition was raised against them. A stern
law of morals and philosophy, with indiscriminating censure, would have
swept away the whole of the national mythology. Right and just as this
censure may appear to us, so far as it was directed against the
arbitrary fictions, or grossly sensual features of these fables, still
it is impossible to concur with it totally and entirely. Occasionally,
the point of view is taken too narrowly and too exclusively. Moreover,
it is undeniable, that these ancient objectors did not sufficiently
recognize the symbolical meaning of their own mythology. And, in fact,
they were far from being in a position to take a survey of the whole
cycle of legends among different nations, and so to trace the historical
connection of them all; and even if, in some single points, they
understood and gave due weight to this symbolical significancy,
occasionally making use of it themselves, it was only as a mere
intellectual amusement, or with the narrow object of illustrating some
occasional ethical discussion of limited interest.

But a far wider and more extensive view of antiquity lies before our
eyes, and history in its comprehensive survey now takes in almost the
whole of the ancient world. Modern inquiry, therefore, with its vast
erudition, its patient observation and quickness of apprehension, has
succeeded in establishing more completely than heretofore the general
truth of this symbolical basis of ancient mythology. And by this means
it has been able to trace the inner threads of a higher truth which lay
concealed within those fictions, and were the source of their vitality;
for it was from such a beginning of truth they originally set out,
however widely in their subsequent course and growth they may have
deviated therefrom. Indeed, if it is allowable, on the ground that the
true religion must, from the very first, have been one and the same, to
give the name of Christianity to the simple religion of the first men
and great saints of the primeval world, then may we well venture to
assert that a vein of Christianity and of the knowledge of the true God
runs through and ever and anon manifests itself on the very surface of
heathenism and in its several mysteries. And, in truth, it would be any
thing but an unprofitable task to trace, through this variety of
symbolical expressions, the sinuous and intricate course of the human
mind in its manifold development, as it pursued every direction, and
took up the most opposite positions in order to view and contemplate the
truth. However, this Christianity of the primeval world, even where it
kept itself free and pure from all admixture of fiction and distortion,
can only be regarded as a Christianity in anticipation. Or, perhaps, we
may look upon it as an ascending progression (though not uniformly
advancing, but marked with many an apparent check and recession, or even
many a void interval of expectation), up to the last term of
consummation in the visible and actual manifestation; just as, on the
other hand, Christianity, since that epoch, may appear to the historical
inquirer in a descending series, if not in its definite form and shape
or intellectual development, yet certainly in the inward moral
sentiment, and the power of a living faith.

It is now a matter pretty generally admitted, and which is, moreover,
daily gaining a wider concurrence, that in these fables, which, at the
first glance, appear the mere sportive creations of fancy, there is even
contained many a beautiful hieroglyphic of nature and of natural truth.
A brief allusion to the fact, therefore, will suffice for our general
view, which calls upon us to notice it just so far only as is necessary
to make our survey of the human mind and its development complete.

Now, if it should be demanded of us psychologically to treat of and to
discuss at length all the delusions of the fancy, we should, indeed,
open for ourselves a wide field of labor. It would rival that of the
ancients in their treatises on the possible fallacies of logic, and the
illegitimate forms of its syllogisms, with the different rules for
avoiding and detecting them. But in truth, the psychological illusions
of the fancy in actual life are no less numerous nor less diversified in
their manifestation than the differences of individual characters, which
are incalculable. And as to those logical errors, on the other hand,
which relate solely to the form of argumentation, the consideration of
them will be most profitably attached to those branches of science which
concern the particular province of life in which they severally occur.
However useful for the purposes of practice a detailed analysis and
dissection of them may be, it, nevertheless, lies wholly without the
limits of our present speculations. By scientific errors, which, as
arising from a natural disposition and exciting cause in the fundamental
faculties of the human consciousness, deserve to be called innate, must
be understood none but such essentially false views of the whole
constitution of things, or such scientific systems as result from some
one-sided tendency or perverted application of the principal powers of
man’s mind. We are not, therefore, concerned at present with the poetic
fancy and the psychological delusions of this faculty. It can only be
with an imagination that has exclusively given itself up to a scientific
direction that we can have to do in discussing the question, What false
system, and what error in science generally, or in physical science
especially, can have proceeded from a perverted use of this faculty of
fancy? This, it appears to me, can be no other than the well-known
materialism--the atomistic view of nature, and, what is so closely
connected with it, that atomistic thinking whose deadening character is
far more dangerous and fatal to philosophy than that much-decried
“system of nature,”[74] which, for the most part, has outlived its day,
and, in its former shape, at least, is obsolete and out of fashion. This
atomistic view of nature can not, for one moment, be regarded as or
explained by an error of the reason. For the reason seeks every where
for an absolute unity. But these imaginary atoms, out of which all is
composed and compounded, are infinite in multiplicity. Among them there
is nothing like unity. All there is ever dissolving itself, and falling
asunder into an innumerable multitude of separate individuals. Neither
can it be termed an error of the understanding; for the latter does not
merely and universally, or every where and principally, employ itself
with such anatomical dissections and mutilations. It labors rather
before all things to understand, to comprehend the whole, to seize the
inner meaning, to fathom the true significance, and to gain a knowledge
of the very essence, in its true spirit and meaning. But all this, as it
implies a living principle, is also applicable to such alone. Where
there is neither life nor spirit, there is nothing to understand. These
simple, minute corpuscles of nature, or these indivisible particles of
the universe, as the foundation and principle of the collective world of
nature and of sense, would form an inexplicable and unintelligible
aggregate. But, in fact, the dissection and anatomy of the visible
objects of matter has never yet succeeded in reaching these infinitely
minute primal particles of existence. On the contrary, the chemical
analysis of bodies terminates in certain living elements of a wholly
volatile nature, which defy and elude all such gross and material
manipulations. The whole hypothesis, therefore, must be held to be
perfectly arbitrary; it is altogether an unfounded fiction. It is, no
doubt, highly unpoetical, and any thing but fanciful; nay, rather, it is
fatal both to life and fancy, but a fiction it nevertheless is. And on
this account its origin must be ascribed to the imagination. It was,
therefore, in this sense, and relatively to this fact, that I formerly
asserted that when once the imagination--that is, the scientific
imagination--applied itself to palpable corporeal phenomena, then the
error that it would give rise to would be a dry and meager production of
a grossly material nature. I might almost call it an imagination of
death, inasmuch as the whole of it is founded on the dreary hypothesis
that all is dead and lifeless, and, as such, contrasts so directly with
that ancient and once universally diffused creed of nature which we so
lately spoke of as teaching that in the visible universe, and even in
the external and corporeal world, notwithstanding its appearance of
death, every thing is animated, living, and ensouled. Further to combat,
or totally to refute, the atomistic theory, would be inconsistent with
our present object; that, too, is a duty which belongs rather to what is
properly natural philosophy. Moreover, it would be a superfluous task;
for a truly living philosophy of nature, based on a very different
position, and taking far higher views, has long since and almost every
where taken the place of this hypothesis, which, as it kills the spirit,
so it dishonors nature. One historical fact connected with the theory
is, however, deserving our notice. Leibnitz, we know, opposed to these
atoms of Epicurus, as the constituents of all things, his own monads, as
so many living and ensouled unities. While, however, by this expedient,
this great thinker, and in his way, truly exalted spirit, retained the
same idea of universal and atomistic decomposition, he did but reveal in
it, as in so many other instances, that feature of his character which
enabled him, by a sort of half rejection of, half connivance at, error,
to put it aside with the skill of a diplomatist, rather than to get rid
of it altogether.

But in science there is another erroneous tendency, which is still more
deeply rooted, and which is far more pernicious and dangerous to true
living philosophy than these ancient atoms and all these false,
materializing systems of nature, which in some degree carry with them
their own refutation, and that is an atomistic mode of thinking, which
has its natural source in the present defective and disorganized state
of man’s cognitive faculty. True physical anatomy is a most valuable
science, and has already led to most important results. In this respect
its merits can not be rated too high, so long as it does not dream of
detecting with its scalpel the long-departed principle of life, but
contents itself with endeavoring to point out and decipher in the dead
husk, the still remaining traces of its general constitution, or of
certain morbid states of the life that once lived and moved within it.
But the dead and barren anatomy of thought leads not to any similarly
pregnant results. Beneath its dissecting hand, the life that is still
present is extinguished forever; and from the history of every science,
instances innumerable may be adduced to prove that before this baneful
spirit of analysis all high and noble truth disappears.

There are, then, two principal sources of philosophical error. On the
one hand comes the illusory phantom of unconditional entity and of
identical thought, with all that follows therefrom in the most
diversified forms either of scientific fatalism, or a poetical
pantheism, or some false or perverted tragic view of the world and
things. On the other stands the atomistic theory, with its kindred
errors of a materialistic cast of thought, and the atomistic thinking
itself, and the dead analysis of general notions, with that imagination
of death so deeply rooted in the human mind on which they all rest. And
these two delusions form that curse of mental blindness which from the
very first has invariably rested on such usurped absolutism and
omnipotence of reason when it sets itself up as supreme. Or they are,
perhaps, the now hereditary diseased symptoms of mental poverty and
numbness which mark and distinguish the faculty of thought whenever it
is caught and tied with the fetters of materialism.

The above are errors of a general kind, whether faults of objective
thinking or perverted directions of thought, on which the personal
character exercises little influence. It has, however, a far greater
effect on those forms and species of scientific error which have their
seat in the human will and understanding; for in the latter all become
more or less individual, and in them character, sentiment, passion, and
the free resolve, exercise the greatest influence. Consequently it is
extremely difficult in the case of those errors which flow from a
common, or, at least, kindred source, and which are so intimately
interwoven together, to separate and determine what portion belongs to
the mere cognitive faculty, and what to that which wills, works, and
acts. However, I shall venture to speak simply and plainly of the
prejudice of egoism, as having its root principally in the will, even
though it often springs up quite involuntarily. Its existence extends
widely over the pursuits and thoughts of man, and is even apparent in
the spiritual domain, where the pure pursuit of the highest truth is not
altogether free from it. It is very seldom, however, that this error
shapes itself into a decidedly and completely idealistic view of the
world, and a similar perfect system of science. For such a view finds on
all sides so much opposition, and becomes itself so involved with
difficulties, that it never can be carried out into a universally
consistent system. At any rate, such a system is very seldom of long
duration. It is so decidedly in opposition to man’s inmost feelings,
that when it is first propounded, its startling strangeness often gives
rise to the doubt whether it be really to be understood literally, and
were ever meant seriously. It frequently happens, therefore, that the
first author and founder of such a system of egoism makes in his second
revision of it many and essential modifications; or, rather, he may be
more correctly said to take quite a different position, and to give a
wholly new turn to his ideas. Of this many an example might, if this
were the appropriate place, be easily adduced from the history of the
human mind in general, while our own times furnish some striking and
remarkable instances of it. A lengthy analysis and refutation of a real
and decided system of idealism would, therefore, be scarcely necessary,
inasmuch as, properly, it furnishes its own refutation; at any rate, it
would not fall within the scope of our present disquisition, whose
principal object is to give a full exposition of the inner and higher
life. For this purpose, all that was required was to notice this
scientific aberration as a peculiar and remarkable form in the whole
system of human errors, and with this view to sketch, in a few prominent
features, its general character.

What I have said of the system of idealism, I would not, however, by any
means wish to be applied to idealistic doubt. For this, like doubt in
general, may perhaps form a salutary and highly beneficial crisis, out
of which a well-established and enlightened system of knowledge is to
arise. Indeed, I am disposed to believe, however paradoxical it may
seem (and perhaps it is a profound inward feeling of its paradoxical
character that carries with it my conviction), that this idealistic
doubt is more likely to lead to a welcome change in the prevailing views
of science, than that doubt which assails life itself, and which, as
directing itself against the freedom of the will, I would call a moral
skepticism; for the latter is diffused very widely indeed, and without
any scientific pretension, as the mere fatalism of ordinary reflection.

What, however, we are principally concerned with at present, is the
prejudice accruing to the cause of science from the fundamental errors
which cling to the human mind in its present form. Now in this respect
the evil influence of the prejudice of egoism is perhaps the most
extensive of all. Even when it does not manifest itself openly in its
most extreme and revolting form, it secretly insinuates itself into all
men’s thoughts and actions, and pervades more or less every region of
truth. Indeed, we may say, or, rather, must confess, that even in the
most able, pure, and perfect expositions of well-established
truths--whatever may be the form they take, whether scientific,
historical, artistic, or rhetorical, or perhaps be designed for the
practical illustration and guidance of life--a certain subjective bone
and coloring is more or less perceptible. Over all human compositions
and not merely art and poetry (where, though not absolutely and
universally, yet still to a certain degree it is allowable), a peculiar
light is thrown from the personal Me of the author, as reflected through
the immediate sphere of his associates and the circle of ideas in which
his mind has been accustomed to revolve. Against such an influence,
whether proceeding from ourselves or others, we can not be too
diligently on our guard. In all our judgments and conclusions we ought
carefully to put it aside. And this is the only true and legitimate
abstraction which holds good both for science and for life. But thus to
abstract our own Me and subjective peculiarities is a duty which is far
from being commonly observed, and is, in truth, extremely difficult,
even with the greatest honesty of purpose, perfectly to accomplish.

As we have so often spoken of an unintelligible medley of barren
abstractions as so many empty forms of thought, this truer notion of
abstraction may well be allowed a brief passing consideration. It seems
not improbable that in an older form of science, and a more religious
way of thinking, this notion did possess this higher and more correct
signification. At least, it is evident that if we would meditate upon
God and divine things, and give up ourselves fully and entirely to these
contemplations, we must first forget the whole outer world and withdraw
our thoughts from it, and at the same time rise above ourselves and go
out of ourselves and our own narrow and finite _Me_. Almost all the
notions of science possessed originally a grand and exalted import. It
was only in course of time that, deteriorated by common usage, they sunk
into empty formulas of error. In life, indeed, the subjective prejudices
of man, under the influence of a will carried away and narrowed by them,
has had so wide a range of action as to be co-extensive with the whole
field of human action. The willfulness of children forms the principle
obstacle that education has to deal with; and the inflexible obstinacy
and passionateness of party spirit is the ruling power in public life,
the cause of most of its catastrophes, and the source of its greatest
perils. In short, were we to attempt to extend our survey to all the
prejudices which spring out of narrow subjective views, and the great
and extensive authority which long-cherished opinions exercise both over
the inner man and the outer world, the chapter devoted to them in a
system or manual of a practical knowledge of humanity would be as long
as that which should enumerate the false syllogisms and all the
violations that were possible, either in thought or practice, of the
logical form of right reasoning, or even as that other which should
comprise all the psychological delusions of the fancy. We must,
therefore, confine ourselves to a brief, but still complete sketch. And
to insure such completeness there is one remark to be made, which is far
from unimportant, or at least not superfluous. And that refers first of
all to the relation which subsists between the aberrations of the
understanding and those of the will, and in the next place to that
between the fancy and the reason, and to the contrariety usually arising
from an undue predominance of either of these two faculties.
Understanding and will stand in a very close connection together, their
reciprocal influence being very considerable. In many an error, or at
least in many a perverse and erroneous direction of thought and opinion,
we are scarcely able to decide whether the will and sentiments, or the
understanding and special modes of thinking, have the greater part. How
difficult, for instance, is it to determine this point in the case of
the predominant spirit of contradiction, whether it reveal itself as a
reaction, having indeed an external exciting cause, but still thoroughly
passionate, or appear in the shape of a mere delight in opposition, such
as is found in many, and often highly distinguished individuals. For
both these motives have great influence, not only in life but also in
the domain of science, developing themselves therein as a fruitful
source of error.

As to doubt: it is even that state, or that tendency of the mind
[_geist_] peculiar to the understanding, which though in itself not
absolutely culpable or faulty, is certainly erroneous, and one which in
its extreme manifestation becomes a negative error of the very worst and
most pernicious kind in science. I have already several times mentioned,
in passing, and by way of anticipation, that doubt appears to form one
of the most characteristic and peculiar of man’s fundamental properties.
As sleep forms for man, as compared with the pure and ever-wakeful
spirits, an essential and peculiar state of his organic life in the
body, and as that eternal hope which is innate in the human soul is
acknowledged to be its higher stamp and Godlike signature, just so and
in a similar way must doubt be regarded as the inborn character of the
human mind, or at least as one of its most indelible features. And
indeed this struggle of doubt and hope (which even after the full
attainment of internal certainty and peace, still survives in a degree,
showing itself when we come to the special points of practical
application, and in truth will never wholly cease in this lower world),
this conflict between hope and doubt holds no less important nor less
extensive a place in the inner spiritual world than the reciprocation of
sleeping and waking does in the external and organic, maintaining the
due equilibrium of the bodily powers and their healthy state. Now, doubt
takes its rise pre-eminently and originally in the understanding. The
latter is its appropriate place in the whole human consciousness, though
from thence it quickly spreads over its whole sphere and extends to its
utmost limits. The delusion so peculiar to the reason, of an absolute
unity or identity and necessity, leads rather to a false and perfectly
imaginary science, which for the most part aims at possessing or dreams
of having attained to a mathematical certainty. And though the intrinsic
contradiction and inconsistency which reigns in this absolute view of
the world and things, notwithstanding the denial of all contrariety with
which it sets out, and which, apparently at least, it does get rid of at
the beginning, is well calculated to provoke and occasion doubt; still
it is not the seat where doubt is originally engendered and first takes
its rise. The act of understanding, on the contrary, supposes an
antecedent state of its absence. The object or thought which is now
understood for the first time, must have already existed as a given
matter, standing before us as a problem for our previous ignorance up to
the time that we succeeded in solving it. In truth, the act of
understanding is nothing more than the passing from ignorance into
intelligence. And this passage is not always effected at one step, but
for the most part by slow degrees, and often very slowly and gradually
indeed. Now, doubt, as the intermediate state between the original
ignorance and the inward yearning after certainty, forms the crisis of
this passage or transition. Primarily, therefore, and as stripped of all
perverted applications and unlimited extension, it is not in its essence
an impediment to knowledge, but rather an indispensable aid and useful
instrument for the attainment and perfection of sciences. Wonder,
according to the sense in which it is employed in some passages of the
Platonic philosophy, as the inner amazement of the spirit, or the
astonished rapture of the soul at the happy discovery--the first opening
out of the truth--wonder, we might say, is the mother of knowledge,
which bears in its womb and gives to the light the first germ of it; but
doubt is the father, by whom the internal basis, and also the external
form of science, is and can alone be perfected. And inasmuch as science,
although relatively and for any precise and given form it may appear
complete, yet in itself, and generally, and with regard both to its
eternal diffusion and intrinsic advance, can never reach to full
perfection in this lower world; therefore doubt can never properly cease
altogether. But still, if doubt is to remain a wholesome co-operative
power of knowledge, one requisition and demand, and one only, must be
made upon it. It must never question the hope and the end of truth
itself, and must not give up that inward search after knowledge, of
which it is really designed to serve as the organ. In the form of a
universal skepticism, however, it falls into a tone of unconditional
decision, which involves an assumption of complete certainty, and,
consequently, of a perfect, though negative knowledge, totally
inconsistent with its true character. It thereby undermines its own
foundation.

Absolute doubt, therefore, alone constitutes scientific error. As such
it must invariably be looked upon whenever, rising to the height of
despair, it pronounces science to be unattainable. It is such unlimited
extension that constitutes a fault or error. But even in this respect it
is extremely difficult to determine for individuals, nations, and eras,
this utmost limit, beyond which doubt becomes culpable. It is a shifting
line of demarkation, according as the perplexity of infinite doubt,
remaining nothing more than a passive state of internal conflict, is not
raised into an abiding principle and unchangeable maxim of life.
Besides, it is extremely difficult to determine, as a general law, how
far doubt can and may go before hope is entirely lost. Nay, it is not
easy to say whether, even in this pernicious extravagance, it may not
transform itself into good, and bring about a salutary crisis of
transition, and, being set free from its own exaggerations, discover the
true road to the goal of truth, and to a thorough understanding of it.
It is only when absolute doubt, in its full energy, is set up purposely
and forever as the final conclusion of all thought and reflection, as
the supreme science itself, being developed with cool, calm
self-possession, and applied to all things without exception, that this
spirit of absolute negation becomes totally erroneous. In this case,
indeed, it is irredeemably bad; as the hostile antagonist of all that is
good and precious, it overturns truth itself together with science.

And who, then, is the author of all evil in man himself, and in all his
thoughts, knowledge, and volitions, as well as in all the rest of
creation? It is the dark spirit of negation who so well knows how to
veil himself in the false light of apparently brightest clearness. And
since we have reached up to the height, or, rather, down to the depths,
of this primary source of all error, it may perhaps be necessary to add
a further remark or two on this prime author of untruth, with a view of
guarding against the misconceptions that otherwise might arise only too
naturally. In Holy Writ he is called the Spirit and the Prince of this
world. In ancient times, this description has been greatly
misunderstood. It was taken to mean that he is properly the demiurge and
subordinate creator of this sensible world, in which there are so many
traces of fearful dissension, profound corruption, and disorder. The
intrinsic state of nature in its present condition appeared to many
thinkers so inexpressibly miserable and so full of deadly evil, that
they could not bring themselves to ascribe its origination to the true
God. But even though nature be in fact ever so heavily laden with woes
and intrinsically miserable--(and indeed it is spoken of in the Book of
Truth as the creature “groaning and travailing in pain”)--though the
world were even far more fearfully rent with disorder and corruption,
and chained and fettered to a shape stranger to goodness and truth than
seems at the first glance to be the case, still there would be no ground
for adopting the oriental view of two principles. And indeed the wonder
is how it could ever have found adherents; since this world, already
sufficiently distracted, is thereby but involved in still deeper
dissension, and actually rent into two distinct parts, so that it
becomes no longer possible to think or conceive of such a thing as
truth, or to hope for any veritable and satisfactory scheme of
knowledge. This strange religious error, into which the primal world of
Asia, with its deep and profound emotions, fell, is so remote and
foreign to the more moderate, not to say colder, sentiments of the West,
that it is extremely difficult to set it forth and understand it in all
its actual awfulness. It would, therefore, be as idle as it would be
inappropriate for me to enter further into this false, but ancient
system of dualism. Still there is one remark which essentially belongs
to our present subject, and is also closely connected with what has gone
before. The first author of untruth, we have seen, can not for a moment
be regarded as the true demiurge and creator of the world, as the
oriental view would represent him. Nevertheless, inasmuch as evil,
universally and individually, in great and in little, is a deceptive
image and imitation of good, this spirit of everlasting negation has
unquestionably a world of his own, which is his production, and in a
certain degree called forth and created by him. And that is the null and
seeing world of void naught, which, however, through a fatal delusion
and belief in its reality, and through its opposition to the good as
well as the true, has become a _real_ naught, and must be considered as
such. The actual world of the beneficent Creator was created out of
nothing, since, besides Himself, all is nothing but a mirror of His
perfection, a mere reflection of His infinite power and glory. But
though it was made out of nothing, it was yet created for something, or,
rather, for very much, even for an ever-advancing approximation to, and
a finally complete identity with, its Maker. This good and noble
something, as the supreme end of the true creation, is, however, opposed
by the naught of the dark world of shadows, which has now become real,
and, consequently, evil. Thus created, however, or at least shaped and
produced out of something, it exists for nothing, even for that naught
which constitutes the proper world, the field of action and vital
atmosphere of the evil principle. In the case of an individual whose
delusions have been carried to the height of passion, and whose soul is
torn and distracted by a perfect despair of all truth, it is sometimes
said that he has hell itself in his heart; such a mode of speaking (as
is usually the case with such images and metaphors, which we use without
associating with them any very clear or definite ideas), is perfectly
and in sober earnestness quite true. In a metaphysical sense even, it is
perfectly precise and correct.

If this absolute doubt, which is so often set up for the supreme
principle of all thought and knowledge, were always to show and exhibit
itself such as it really is, and in its inmost nature, and if what it
ultimately leads to, and from what source it originally springs, were
fully known, then would this skeptical view of things, with its wild
exaggerations, which go beyond all the analogy of human nature, prove
far less baneful than it does at present. In general it would less
easily gain assent and make a far weaker impression. But inasmuch as
this fatally pernicious and most absurd paradox does not stand out here
so sharply and clearly as it does in the genuine idealistic theory, but
is mostly veiled and hidden beneath the manifold beauties of an
exquisite skill of exposition, which very often drops the rigor of
scientific form, it consequently numbers far more adherents than could
have been believed to be possible. Indeed, they are almost as numerous
as the admirers of a poetical pantheism, with which it contrives
occasionally to form a half compact and seemingly identifies itself. And
this fact alone furnishes a sufficient reason why we should not pass it
over altogether unnoticed in these Lectures. However, it must be borne
in mind that all our objections and exceptions are directed exclusively
against an absolute skepticism, as exercising by its perverted
application and undue extension, a fatally destructive influence on
science and on life.

The true doubt, which keeps within its proper limits and on the road to
its appointed goal of a constantly advancing but never perfect
knowledge, deserves to be regarded as an ever active and co-operative
power for the development of truth and science. It must therefore be
confessed that the appointed guardians of the publicly acknowledged
truth (which, as such, ought to possess universal authority, both in the
state and the spiritual domain) do not always exhibit the greatest
wisdom and discretion. Too often do they violently suppress every
movement of doubt without distinction, and allow no opening to it in any
shape. For by this course they do but exaggerate the spiritual and
intellectual evil that already exists. At least this purely negative
method can never totally eradicate it.

We have now, then, completely depicted, in their leading features at
least, the principal errors to which science is exposed. And if we have
enabled you to regard them as errors both in their origin and their
subsequent character, we must at the same time, by means of the
contrast, have thrown additional light and distinctness on the idea of
science, not only as regards its different elements and constituents,
but also the whole periphery and center of internal certainty. If, now,
it should be required of us to give a common characteristic of all the
fundamental errors which, potentially at least, exist in the human
consciousness--if it be wished that we should comprise under one general
designation the false phantom of absolute unity and necessity in
science--the imaginary fiction of death brought into nature by a dead
and atomistic mode of thinking--the prejudices of the Ego or Me, and the
spirit of eternal negation, which is utterly fatal to truth--then, for
this purpose, nothing else would remain but an empty formula or
unsubstantial notion, viz., the dead absolute. At least this would be
thoroughly appropriate to convey that intrinsic indifference of all
forms of scientific untruth.

Opposed thereto, and forming the center of a true and valid knowledge,
is that source of eternal love within the feeling to which we have
already so often alluded, designating it by either similar or somewhat
different expressions. To defend and securely to settle this living
center of all higher truth and true science against the attacks of
absolute skepticism, was even the task which we proposed to ourselves
from the outset. It was however far from our intention, while
discharging this duty, wholly to put doubt itself under a ban. On the
contrary, we look upon the latter as an essential means of improvement,
and as an almost indispensable organ of development in a living
progression of knowledge.

Now in these definite limits, both for the exclusion of absolute
skepticism and for the recognition and correct application at all times
of a genuine and salutary doubt, we have, we think, found a satisfactory
answer to the great question of truth and of the possibility of man’s
attaining to a knowledge of it. And if so, we have at the same time
shown completely that doubt forms a decisive crisis in the human mind,
and thereby happily solved the problem which at an earlier period we
propounded with regard to it. And moreover, as was then declared to be
necessary, the instinctive feeling of truth within the very center of
love has been raised to and established in the dignity of an intelligent
feeling or a solid judgment of inward certainty, and of an immediate
perception thereof. And this immediate perception of inward certainty
must serve as the transition from the first developed notion of the
consciousness to our now more enlightened idea of science, and also form
the connecting link between them. Before, however, we can close our
present development with this notion of judgment or intelligent feeling
of inward certainty, one question remains to be answered, or perhaps one
remark to be added. And this relates to truth itself, as the inmost
center of such an immediate perception, while the question that occurs
is, what is it, _per se_, to know, and what is it that in the act of
knowing really takes place in the human mind?

Now it has been long admitted that true knowing consists in this: that a
man discerns things, not merely as they outwardly appear, but as they
are really and truly in themselves. But this true intrinsic essence of
things is seized or understood by him only who perceives them such as
they proceeded from the Deity, have their being in Him, and such as they
stand before His omniscient eye and are seen by him. What, then, is true
knowledge, if such be possible for man? Now, supposing the existence of
a living God--and how, without this universal primary and imperishable
hypothesis, could there be either talk or question about truth or
knowledge in general?--this supposition then involves the idea of an
omnipresent Deity, in whom all existing things “live and move, and have
their being,” even though He does not visibly appear, and is hidden to
the outward eye of sense. Truly to know, therefore, would be, if we may
so express it, to feel and draw out the latent presence of God in
objects, and thereby to seize and perceive their true intrinsic essence.
Now, if it is necessary to distinguish the several grades of development
of this spiritual or intellectual feeling which draws out the inner
truth of things, its first step must be described as a perception,
which, however, is both from without and remote. The second would be a
_sensation_, _i.e._, the full certain _finding_ the truth in one’s
self.[75] As to the last step of consummation, that would amount to an
intellectual intuition, even though, by reason of human finiteness, it
must ever remain indirect. Still it would not, on that account, be less
profoundly searching and penetrating, while, in it, that of which we
have now first become certain comes forth externally perfect, and admits
of being imparted to others. And unquestionably for that philosophy
which pretends to open and unveil a true and right understanding of the
inner and higher life, after the first grade, which took for its basis
the full and complete notion of the consciousness; and after the second,
in which the idea of science is unfolded, this intuition of truth forms
the third degree, and also the final close and completion, of the whole.
In order, however, to understand how such an intuitive knowledge is
possible, we must bear in mind that it is not we who raise ourselves to
the divine idea; but that, on the contrary, it is it that takes hold of
our minds, being imparted to and working within us.

The deadly attacks of skepticism may, no doubt, be directed successfully
enough against an unconditional science of reason, where its action or
reaction, which brings out the intrinsic contradiction of such a system,
is both salutary and desirable, in order to destroy the false semblance
of a spurious necessity. All its blows, however, glance off from a real
and solid experience, and soon cease entirely. And just so, also, the
limit of an assumed or credited impossibility, which is too hastily and
too nearly set up, is quickly overstepped by facts themselves. Very
often, before now, has it happened, in experimental science, that what
man once not merely questioned, but actually declared to be incredible,
nay, even impossible, has unexpectedly proved, afterward, to be an
actual fact, and gained general credence as undeniably certain. How much
is there not in nature that deserves to be called marvelous, and borders
close upon the miraculous, and which makes, at least, some such
impression on our minds and understandings as they have been hitherto
developed? To one, indeed, who takes his stand on revelation, it becomes
extremely difficult to draw a strict line of demarkation, and to raise
an impassable boundary between that which is called natural and that
which is termed supernatural, in the usual sense of these words. And, if
all higher truth is imparted, and can not but be such, who will presume
to set a limit or a measure here? Who will set bounds to the Author of
revelation which He shall not pass? If, then, even in philosophy, all
science and truth is really a revelation, and if it were recognized and
understood in this light, then should we be able to put this matter to
the test of experience, provided, only, that we be careful to draw from
the right source, and to treat philosophy really and truly as a science
of an experience higher than any internal or external one.

But man must not expect, even according to this point of view, to
penetrate at once into the fullness of the divine mysteries, and
arbitrarily to play with and mold them at his pleasure. The development
of truth in the human mind always proceeds slowly, and step by step.
Even when the whole beginning and sure foundation is already found, or,
rather, given, the inner evolution and external application of true
science unfolds itself with extreme tardiness. At each point of progress
much still remains to be overcome, much to be improved, and even to be
thought upon once more, and reconsidered over and over again. Often,
too, at the very last moment, an unexpected obstacle presents itself, or
some new procrastination of a conscientious doubt or care. To show that
all this is to be expected, even according to the theory which makes
science to be a divine communication, and that all higher knowledge is
and must be such, I have a remark or two more to add. And here I shall
not follow the same course that I took in my exposition of the possible
forms of error, tracing the origin of each to some predisposing cause in
the several faculties of the mind. It will suffice to take for granted
the keenest susceptibility in the truth-loving soul, the greatest
activity and energy of the spirit in its search after and cognition of
science, and a perfectly pure will co-existing and having a common
foundation in a purified, newly-invigorated, and enhanced state of the
human consciousness.

Very often, even in the noblest minds, a lively, open sense and profound
sensibility of the soul for the higher truth is found associated with a
secret dread and profound apprehension before it. At this, however, we
need not to feel surprised. It is not so much a lasting illusion, as
rather a slight partition-wall between the first new impression and our
habitual self; for each fresh influence of higher truth draws us
noticeably away from our usual circle of ideas, and often painfully
eradicates some favorite notion and cherished opinion. This fact, then,
will serve to explain this slight feeling of resistance which precedes a
complete adhesion and identification, and as such requires to be treated
with the utmost delicacy and tenderness. Or let us take the case of a
great mind in possession of a higher and comprehensive knowledge, and
most assuredly he could never have attained to it without many a bold
venture in living thought; for without boldness nothing good or
beautiful, much less great, is ever reached or attainable. And this is
true also of language, for the bold thought demands a correspondent
boldness of expression. Where, then, is such a one to look for the
limits and the standard of a legitimate venture--the guide and safeguard
against temerity--when his boldness of speculation springs really from a
profound love of truth, and a pure enthusiasm for science? The risk of
error and mistake, and even a sense of solemn accountability, meets him
on all sides, and fills him with anxiety and reserve. The hypothesis has
been deemed allowable, at least it has been advanced, invented by way of
simile, of a man being intrusted with and holding in his hand the full
truth--or, rather, let me say all truth in heaven and in earth--since,
if we suppose science to be imparted and a gift, there can be no limits
set or predetermined to its extent. Now, it has been asserted that such
a person would be seized with hesitation, fear, and doubt, whether he
ought to open his hand all at once, or only half open it at first, or
whether he ought not even to keep it a long time closed. But to turn
away from this fiction, which, in reality, transcends altogether the
measure of human capacity, then, as regards the necessary gradation and
salutary slowness that marks, and even the hesitation that must take
place in all human learning and development, and even in philosophy, no
less than in the internal region of the consciousness, what rule or
guide has man? For such a standard nothing, apparently, remains to us
but to assume the notion of a logical conscience as a quality in the
true thinker necessary to preserve him from every false step, either
within or without. That there is such a logical conscience, wholly
independent of all moral relation, is perfectly obvious. By it we must
understand not only a careful measuring and weighing of all thoughts,
but even of every word and expression; and we have chosen this term as
well fitted to enforce the great importance of this sensibility in
matters of scientific truth, and to indicate the place in the
consciousness where it properly has its seat, and the principle from
which it must take its rise. The genius-gifted boldness of a great
thinker would be little likely to convey confidence, if it were not at
the same time associated and harmoniously united with the essential
element of a cautious and gradual procedure. In its essential features,
though in a somewhat different form and relation, the Greeks, in their
philosophy, were acquainted with and possessed this notion of a logical
conscience; for, in some measure, it is even implied in this very word
philosophy, which was intended to indicate, and intrinsically means, an
unselfish and pure pursuit of truth. But the fact becomes still more
evident by the contrast with, or, rather, by the notion of, the sophist,
as opposed to that of the philosopher. By the former they understood a
common and vulgar traffic with wisdom, or even an interested and wholly
unconscientious abuse of scientific truth to personal interest, or the
gratification of selfish humors and passions, and even of vain glory.
All this the Greeks regarded as absolutely worthless and despicable. And
much is it to be wished that we, in our days, remembered a little
better, and strove to imitate this stern morality of the old Athenians
in their notion of the high dignity of truth, and of the respect due to
this sanctuary of science, which, at the distance that they were allowed
to approach to it, they reverently worshiped and honored.




LECTURE X.


The apprehending of a real object in thought, unquestionably involves an
act of knowing, so long, at least, as it is no empty thought, but has a
real subject-matter. It is a piece of knowledge, even though it may be
as yet very incomplete, both as regards its external connection with
others and its inward development, and though it be highly defective
also in form and expression. It is, moreover, possible that
subsequently, by an incorrect analysis or other erroneous treatment of
it, its usefulness may be destroyed, itself dissolved into naught, and
stripped of true vital significance. And thus by our own fault, the
thought, which originally possessed a true and real object, is reduced
into a mere wordy formula, conveying actually no meaning at all. In
order, then, to indicate the real distinction between the two, and at
the same time to guard against all possible misconception, we would
define as follows the intrinsic essence of knowledge: to know is the
living thought of something real. The general indefinite term, thought,
which we have here employed, is the right one and the most appropriate
in this place, for it comprises every kind of perceiving and
understanding, of judging and comprehending, of cognition and
recognition, and serves to indicate the several elements and relations
or differing degrees of knowledge, and of that intuitive inward
certainty which is combined and associated with it. It would be far less
accurate to say that knowledge is the correct thought, instead of the
_living_ thought of a real object; although, indeed, the former is
involved in and inseparable from the latter. When a thought which in any
degree apprehends or comprehends a real object, is said to be incorrect,
this is as much as to say that it comprises much that is not found in
the object itself, and consequently does not coincide with it. But that
which is not contained in the object itself is, so far as it is
concerned, unreal and does not belong to it. And all such is necessarily
excluded from the notion of the thought of a real object, since
otherwise it would be a thinking of what is unreal. The expression, too,
of an incorrect thinking of what is real, would, no doubt, point to and
indicate the same fact in every case where such thinking is a thoroughly
defective and incomplete knowing, if, for instance, much that is
essential and is really found in the particular object were not
comprised in the thought or were wanting in it. This expression,
consequently, is perfectly applicable, and indeed appropriate, when we
wish to speak of a complete and perfect knowledge, and to distinguish it
from one that is faulty and defective. But such knowledge slowly and
gradually develops itself; the notion of knowing in general must precede
that of perfect knowledge. The living thought of a real object, however
imperfect and incomplete it may be, contains, nevertheless, the first
beginning and germ of a knowing. It is only out of a dead thought that a
true knowing can never arise; properly, indeed, when it is but a mere
formula, it is not even a true thinking. Knowledge, therefore, in
general is the living thought of some real object; but perfect and
complete knowledge is the full and correct development of this thought,
by means of which it becomes perfectly defined, both outwardly and
inwardly. But a real object is invariably the first foundation and
beginning, from which all knowledge springs up, and to which all thought
must be immediately directed and also closely attach itself.

In an older form of philosophy, the supreme, or--as it was called, not
very appropriately, if all its various relations be considered--necessary
Being, was usually declared to be that of which the reality was at once
given in its possibility, so that the proof of its actual existence
would immediately follow from the mere idea of its perfection. This,
however, is but one of the many forms of expression for the absolute
unity of being and knowledge. We have already expressed ourselves
sufficiently at large on the general topic, and we have only adduced
this particular instance to serve as a passage to our exposition of
another view, in the hope of throwing out the latter more distinctly
and definitely by means of the contrast.

In that method of philosophy which takes its rise in no dead and
abstract thinking, but rather in life itself and the living thought,
reality, together with the immediate feeling of whatever is thus real
and actual in the inward perception, as well as in external experience,
and also in the revelation from above, forms the first beginning out of
which all is developed. This is the fixed, stable point to which all
that follows attaches itself. The necessary, which comes first after
this reality, is simply the inner essential and complete connection of
this first data. But the possible, which is not any mere arbitrary
conception and chimerical invention, but something truly, and we might
almost say _really_ possible, forms the conclusion, as that which by a
natural development results from the two former--the initiatory fact and
its intrinsic essentiality. This simple series or natural progression in
living thought forms and constitutes in the next place the different
degrees of understanding, and even the internal grades of certainty and
clearness in a continuously advancing development. The foundation of the
whole is formed by the feeling of a reality, the perception of a fact,
existing somewhere within the limits of that triple experience which
takes in an inner and an outer and also a higher world. Now, the first
step in this progressive intellectual development is formed by the
notion or general term, which, as I formerly explained it, is a thought
or conception that is mathematically determined and precisely limited,
both inwardly and outwardly, according to the three dimensions of
number, measure, and weight. In it all the several elements which, taken
together, form the original thought or conception of the real object,
are first of all duly separated and arranged, and then again united as
organic members into a regular whole, or, after the manner of geometry,
brought into a _construction_. But this act of comprising into a general
notion [_Begreifen_] is by no means a perfect explanation of the matter.
It is not, as it were, an analysis carried out fully and completely, so
that nothing still remains to be explained. For even according to the
ordinary usage of speech, we may very easily form and have a notion of
any system, whether purely ideal or experimental, philosophical or
unphilosophical, or belonging to any other domain of science, and even
of a work of art, at the same time that we are forced to admit that
there is much in it that we do not understand, or which appears to us
inexplicable and unintelligible. This comprehending, which externally
consists in the correct marking out of the whole circumference of an
object, and inwardly, in the clear division and arrangement of its
several organic members, is not the complete act of understanding; it is
only its first step. As such, however, it may afterward attain to an
internal confirmation, and become thereby the second degree in the
approach to completeness of understanding. And this it does as soon as a
cognition of the error which may either possibly rise up in, about, or
together with itself, or is actually combined with it, is attained, and
when, consequently, a clearer recognition of the opposing truth advances
the mere feeling of a something real into an intelligent feeling or
judgment of inward certainty. And this is the very essence of knowing.
The third step in the further development or enhancement of the first
living thought, or of its progressive approach toward completeness of
understanding, is formed by the idea. The idea is distinct from the
notion, even in its form. Unlike the latter, it does not set forth all
that, under the given conditions, necessarily and essentially belongs
together. In other words, it does not give the full and complete extent
of the reality which was taken up by the original feeling and
perception. It rather propounds the thought of a possibility, which, in
a certain and definite view or direction, appears attainable. For
instance, in our present development of the inner and higher life, the
notion of the consciousness was followed by the idea of science, and the
question how far it is possible and within the reach of man. Even in
ordinary language this distinction is observed. How often do we hear it
observed, that this or that scheme is a mere idea, signifying that it is
a thought whose object is a something possible, but of which the reality
or realization appears at the time highly problematical. On the other
hand, by the term notion, strictly taken, it is usual to understand a
thought which has for its subject-matter something relatively true at
least, since, otherwise there would be nothing that we could have a
notion of or comprehend. And simply on this account it is not possible
that the idea should contain a perfectly definite and organically
articulated construction of its object. For, in fact, an idea is merely
the indication, the standard, and the rule of the possible. It is simply
designed to show what is to be, and in what way it can be, attained, and
perhaps, also, in what law of progression its attainment will be
actually realized.

However, a truly scientific and scientifically useful idea is before all
things closely and essentially dependent on the foundation of an inward
certainty, or a feeling and conviction that the object which forms its
problem, or the problem which is its object, is really and actually
attainable. Consequently, it intimately depends on the intelligent
feeling or judgment as to this inward certainty and truth in
knowledge.




ANALYTICAL INDEX.


A

Absolute knowledge, false character of, 60.
  power considered, 175.

Abstraction, not the true method of philosophy, 354.

Æther of the nerves, 76.

Age, the early Christian, 148.
  the middle, 149, 246.
  that of the restoration of letters, 150.
  anti-Christian spirit of the present, 151.
  a struggle for truth the conflict of the present, 158.
  the spirit of the present a spirit of untruth, 159.
  different ages of the history of the world, 163.
  characteristics of the present, 164, 457.
  the middle contained all the elements of the Christian state, 182.
  rationalism to be feared in the present, 227.
  spirit of the present, 409.

Alphabet, the psychological, 452.

Angels, the neutral, 136.

Animals, soul of, 121.

Antediluvian--see _World_.

Architecture, its alliance to sculpture, 260.

Ariana, the, 246.

Aristotle, his system, 243.

Aristotelian schoolmen, 247.

Art, symbolical nature and constitution of life with reference to it, 256.

Art, all symbolical, 257.
  religious origin of, 265
  a feeling of the infinite, 415.
  a universal language, 421.
  evil influences of, 455.
  hope the soul of, 456.
  present state of, 458.
  spurious, 461.

Astronomy, modern, 84.
  seven the traditionary number of the planets, 85.
  Pythagorean system of, 85.

Atheism, produced by French philosophy, 18.
  tendency of modern science to, 155.

Atlantis, legend of, 83.

Authority, God the source of, 168.

Avarice, its character, 34.
  apart from industry, 35.


B

Beauty, 506.
  source of in fiction, 510.

Bible--see _Scriptures_.

Body, the spiritual, 74.

Byron, his Cain, 21, 410.


C

Cause, final, doctrine of, 125.

Creation intelligible, 127.

Chemical analysis, modern, results of, 88.

China, its state of separation, 181.

Christianity, revelation of, 146.
  first eight Christian centuries, 148.
  the middle ages, 149.
  anti-Christian spirit of this era, 151.
  universal peace, 184.
  its dispensation, struggle between light and darkness in, 207.
  its science and philosophy, 245.
  the Gnostics and Arians, 246.
  the middle ages--the Aristotelian schoolmen, 247.
  disputations of the schoolmen, 248.
  of the eighteenth century, 249.
  without an altar, 268.
  the Christian state an hereditary monarchy, 282.
  the true guardian of liberty, 287.
  its jurisprudence, 296.
  spread among the Mohammedans, 297.
  its priests not hereditary, 308.
  its justice the basis of European peace, 311.
  confederation of its states, 312.

Church, its collision with the state, 299, 304.
  separation of, 306.

Communion, the highest symbol of faith, 267.

Compass, the invention of, 83.

Candillac, his philosophy, 17.

Conscience, its relationship to reason, 54.
  imperfection of, 435.

Consistency the criterion of truth, 252.

Creation, final cause of, intelligible, 127.


D

Death, final emancipation of nature from, 93.
  destruction of, 340.

Deluge, the, how to be considered, 218.

Despotism, 290.
  the natural result of anarchy, 291.

Dialogue the natural form of philosophy, 68.
  the true form assumed by all living thought, 381.

Discernment the link between faith and science, 195.

Divine--see _God_.

Doubt, a necessary condition of man’s mind, 426.
  essential to man, 526.
  the passage from ignorance to knowledge, 527.
  absolute, a source of error, 530.
  true, and limited, indispensable to advance of knowledge, 531.

Dreams, their character, 29.


E

Earth, man’s affinity to, 81.

Education, its symbolical character, 262.
  philosophy the crown of, 348.

English, the Reformation among, 299.
  their constitution, 303.
  Church and State. 304.

Enthusiasm springs from love, 37.
  the origin of patriotism, 38.
  its longing for the eternal and divine, 38, 421, 479.

Epicureans, the, 244.

Error, rapid growth of, 60.
  four sources of, 105.
  intermediate conflict of, with truth, 153.
  religious, two forms of, 176.
  twofold spirit of truth and error, 206.
  struggle between, 207.
  reason and fancy the ultimate sources of, 221.
  understanding and will co-operating
  causes in its formation and diffusion, 223.
  truth not established by its refutation, 229.
  controversy with, begets it, 314.
  knowledge of, 489.
  co-ordinate with knowledge, 506.
  two sources of, in philosophy, 522.
  subjective, 523.
  absolute doubt a source of, 530.

Eternal punishments, 133.
  the unquenchable fire, 134.

Eternity, 401.
  not reconcilable with time, 405.
  of the world, 406.

Europe, peace of, based on Christian justice, 311.

Evil, moral, a result of man’s freedom, 130.
  physical, a means of purification, 131.
  influence of, in nature, 338.


F

Faith, man’s, not sufficiently childlike, 112.
  can restore unity to the mind, 113.
  its dissension between faith and science, 193.
  discernment the link between them, 196.
  reconcilable with science, 199.
  choice between that and infidelity, 210.
  not a negative limitation of reason, 214.
  its identity with supreme science, 216.
  the soul’s firmament, 218.
  communion its highest symbol, 267.
  genuine and spurious, 453.
  true and false faith, 476.
  universal, 486.
  in relation to time, 498.
  its relation to knowledge, 499.
  knowledge impossible without it, 500.

Fall, the, physical consequences of, 92.
  discord of the mind one of its consequences, 98.

Falsehood to be fought with its own weapons, 156.
  trifling with oaths, 159.
  the present spirit of the age, 159.

Fancy, man’s distinctive property, 25.
  a division of the soul apart from reason, 30.
  its influence on the sense, 31.
  on the passions, 32.
  its influence on the nobler feelings, 35.
  on love and marriage, 37.
  on enthusiasm, 37.
  on all man’s emotions, 40.
  the poetical, 40.
  its powers, 75.
  fancy and reason the ultimate sources of error, 221.
  seldom harmonizes with reason, 361.
  not attributable to God, 370.

Feeling, the center of consciousness, 473.
  its spurious and genuine manifestations, 474.
  a source of revelation, 518.

Fichte, his philosophy, 19.

Final causes, doctrine of, 125.
  of creation intelligible, 127.

Freedom, man’s, 128.
  moral evil a result of it, 130.
  created spirits without it, 134.
  of philosophy, 186.

French, their modern philosophy, 17.
  its atheism, 18.
  its fatal results, 18.
  their advancement in physical science, 22.


G

Generation, spontaneous, creatures of, 122.

Genius, worship of, 455.

Geology, analogy of philology to, 388.
  must maintain the union of soul and spirit, 443.

Germans, their philosophy, 19.
  Kant, 19.
  Jacobi, Fichte, 19.
  Schelling, 20.
  Hegel, 21.
  its superiority to the French, 22.
  its old Christian empire, 288.
  its customary law, 294.
  confederation of states, 308, 312.

Gnostics, the, 246.

God, his attributes, 55.
  figurative language as applied to Him, 56.
  His divine nature unappreciated by reason, 57.
  the understanding the only proper organ for acquiring
   a knowledge of Him, 58.
  limitation of His justice and mercy, 60.
  knowledge of Him a science of experience, 61.
  His revelation to man, 65.
  knowledge of, illimitable, 73.
  condescension of the divine essence, 108.
  self-denial bringing us near Him, 109.
  the author and preserver of nature’s laws, 117.
  His divine nature not subject to necessity, 129.
  His divine wisdom manifested in the realm of truth, 141.
  His divine order in the history of the world and relations of States, 162.
  the source of justice and authority, 168.
  kings His vicegerents, 169.
  priests, 171.
  His temporal judgments on the world, 178.
  the Greeks His second chosen people, 180.
  His being not a matter of reasoning, 190.
  can alone bring about the theory of science, 334.
  restoration of His image in man, 337.
  the mind’s consummation in Him, 366.
  understanding may be predicated of Him, 371.
  can not be said to have a soul, 372.
  the idea of, the only idea, 445.
  unintelligible without love, 446.

Greeks, their philosophers, different cosmogonies of, 8.
  a second chosen people of God, 180.
  rise and decline of their philosophy, 239.
  their logic, 254.


H

Heathenism a corruption of a purer Gentilism, 234.

Hegel, his philosophy, 21.

Hieroglyphics, illustrated symbolism of life, 270.

Hindoos, their trinity, character of, 202.
  their logic, 254.

History, a prelude of the final judgment, 172.
  a rehearsal of the first temptation, 173.
  ancient, its results, 291.

Honor apart from pride, 35.

Hope, the vital flame of faith and love, 114, 420.
  universal, 486.
  in relation to time, 498.


I

Idealism, 511, 523.

Ideas, innate, 79.
  of death, 79.

Identity, system of, 511.

Idolatry of science, 216.
  of rationalism, 221.

Incarnation, the principle of new life, 272.

Indians, their affinity to the Teutons, 307.

Industry apart from avarice, 35.

Infidelity, choice between, and faith, 210.
  its identity with superstition, 211.

Infinite, the, poetry a feeling of, 414.
  art, a feeling of, 415.
  effects of a perverted sense of, 416.
  influence of pure longing for, 418.

Innocence, remembrances of primeval, 496.

Instincts, divided from the senses, 31.
  become passions, 32.
  their pernicious character, 33.
  their nobler character, 35.
  the external, 429.

Intuition, intellectual, theory of, 253.

Irony, 380.


J

Jacobi, his philosophy, 19.

Jews, the prophetic people, 146.
  their present state, 181.
  their dispensation, struggle between light and darkness in, 217.
  their theocracy--see _Theocracy_.
  their monarchy, 325.

John, St., Gospel of, 204.

Judges, the ministers of the Jewish theocracy, 324.

Judgment, the faculty of, 166.
  final, history a prelude of, 172.
  the last, 177.
  God’s temporal judgments, 178.
  phenomena of, 438.
  essentially a feeling, 439.

Judicial, the, the highest function of kings, 275.
  constitute all prerogatives of supreme power, 278.
  the throne and scepter its symbols, 279.

Jurisprudence, Christian, 295.

Justice, divine, limited, 61.
  God the source of, 168.
  Christian, the basis of European peace, 311, 316.


K

Kant, his philosophy, 19.

Kings, the vicegerents of God, 169, 280.
  their power, 273.
  sanctity of, 274.
  the judicial, the highest function of, 275.

Knowledge, true, slow progress of, 59.
  absolute, false character of, 60.
  of God, a science of experience, 61.
  or divine things, illimitable, 73.
  pursuit of, must have a real basis, 491.
  relation of faith to, 499.
  impossible without faith, 500.
  true, 532.
  must start from a real object, 538.
  its second step a generalization, 539.
  its third step an idea, 540.


L

Language, how produced, 49.
  the joint produce of tool and spirit, 378.
  origin of, 383.
  the original, now lost, 386.
  original unity of, probable, 387.
  primary and secondary, 389.
  English, Persian, and French, 390.
  perfect in its origin, 391.
  classification of, 393.
  the picture of consciousness, 395.
  the common memory of mankind, 397.
  elements of, 448.
  ten, the true number of elementary sounds, 449.
  vowels, consonants, and aspirates, 451.
  the psychological alphabet, 452.

Life, its symbolical nature and constitution
  with reference to art and man’s moral relations, 256.
  symbolical equation of, 269.
  its symbolisms illustrated by hieroglyphics, 270.
  new, incarnation, the principle of, 272.
  philosophy conversant with it, 350.
  the final object of physical research, 502.
  the unity of being and thought, 512.
  see also _Philosophy_.

Logic of the Greeks and Hindoos, 254.
  utility of a higher one, 254.
  true, a grammar, 465.

Love, the foundation of happiness and moral welfare, 36.
  marriage, 36.
  the origin of enthusiasm, patriotism, &c., 37.
  its connection with marriage, 41.
  difference between genuine and spurious, 42.
  the means of reuniting the reason and fancy, 362.
  universal, 486.
  in relation to time, 498.


M

Magnetism, phenomena of, 83.

Mohammedan empire, 180.
  change in their position, 182.
  compared with the Roman, 297.
  spread of Christian ideas in, 297.

Man, compared with spiritual beings, 24.
  fancy his distinctive property, 25.
  his triple nature, 26.
  his fourfold consciousness, 27.
  physiology of, 76.
  his affinity to the earth, 81.
  concurrence of his will in faith, 109.
  his faith not sufficiently childlike, 112.
  his longing after the eternal and sublime, 113.
  his freedom, 128.
  moral evil a result of his freedom, 130.
  physical evil a means of purification, 131.
  eternal punishment of, 132.
  doctrine of his pre-existence, 137.
  nature considered relatively to him, 139.
  his gradual development, 141.
  his general sense for truth, 144.
  philosophy of life a science of, 187.
  his nature symbolical, 263.
  restoration of the divine image in, 337.
  compared with brutes, 360.
  with angels, 360, 368.
  ascription of his faculties to God, 369.
  his free will, 373.
  manifested in doubt, 375.
  the created word, 425.
  doubt a necessary condition of his mind, 426.
  partial development of his faculties, 433.
  his knowledge, 481.
  can it be perfect? 484.
  limits to his speculation, 535.

Marriage, the foundation of human and political society, 36.
  the world’s judgment of it, 42.
  difference between genuine and spurious love, 42.
  its three conditions, 43.
  reciprocal influence, 44.

Materialism has its rise in imagination, 519.

Mathematics, formulæ of, inappropriate to
  philosophy, 14.
  that of nature, 81.
  use of, in philosophy, 345.
  principles of empirical, 508.

Medicine, a basis of the science of nature, 78.

Memory, a faculty of the soul, 51, 398.
  essential to rationality, 52.
  imperfections of, 434.

Mercy, divine, limited, 61.

Method, right use of, in philosophy. 13, 186.

Middle age--see _Age_.

Mind, the, intrinsic discord of, 96.
  a consequence of the fall, 98.
  restoration of unity, 99.
  originally simple, 102.
  its essence in pure spirits, 104.
  unity of, only to be restored by faith, 114.
  struggle between light and darkness in, 209.
  the principle of supreme science, 215.
  restoration of perfection to it, 335.
  a prey to discord. 356.
  the, fourfold discord of, 359.
  its consummation in God, 366.
  inherent discord of, 376.
  its yearnings after unity, 377.
  doubt a necessary condition of, 426.
  feeling the center of unity in, 436.

Miracles, possibility of, 117.

Monarchy, hereditary, the true Christian polity, 286.
  mixed, 289.

Moses fought falsehood with its own weapons, 156.
  founder of the Jewish theocracy, 321.

Music the representation of ideas, 257.

Mysteries in nature, 126.

Mythology, the subjective the principle of, 219.
  its pantheism, 220.
  ancient, 517.
  vestiges in it of divine truth, 518.


N

Nature, science of, based on medicine, 78.
  possibility of attaining it, 79.
  innate ideal of its true mathematics, 80.
  man’s affinity to the earth, 81.
  magnetism, 83.
  the compass, 83.
  legend of Atlantis, 83.
  modern astronomy, 84.
  seven the traditionary number of the planets, 85.
  Pythagorean system of astronomy, 85.
  results of modern chemical analysis, 87.
  nature, a system of living forces, 88.
  sleep an essential law of, 89.
  intelligible to the spiritual only, 90.
  physical consequences of the fall, 92.
  final emancipation of from death, 93.
  its divine order, 115.
  a living reproductive power, 116.
  God the author and preserver of its laws, 117.
  miracles, the Deluge, 118.
  no blind necessary force, 119.
  a Theodicée, or justification of God’s ways in the
   world--its perplexities, 120.
  the soul of animals, 121.
  creatures of spontaneous generation, 122.
  influence of the evil spirits, 124.
  doctrine of final cause, 125.
  the preadamite world a paradise for angels, 125.
  mysteries in, 126.
  final cause of creation intelligible, 127.
  divine nature not subject to necessity, 129.
  created spirits without freedom, 134.
  immortal spirits with animal forms, 135.
  nature considered relatively to man, 139.
  best described by symbols, 140.
  influence of evil in, 338.
  originally created immortal, 340.
  perfection of, 340.

Nerves, æther of, 76.

Numbers, Pythagorean theory of, 462.


P

Painting, the true spiritual art, 259.

Pantheism, mythological and scientific, 220.
  as fatal to truth as rationalism, 226.

Parental power, 273.
  sanctity of, 273.

Passions, arise from the higher instincts, 32.
  the pernicious, 33.
  the nobler, 35.

Patriotism springs from enthusiasm and love, 40.

Peace, Christian, universal, 183.

Philology, its analogy to geology, 388.

Philosophy, its dreamy character, 7.
  unfeasibility of Plato’s ideal, 8.
  cosmogonies of the Ionian school, 8.
  objects and limits, 9.
  form and method of true philosophy, 10.
  that of the schools unintelligible, 11.
  distinction between that of life and that of the schools, 11.
  intelligibility of the former, 12.
  right use of method, 13.
  mathematical formulæ inappropriate, 14.
  unity of its thoughts, 15.
  modern French systems, 17.
  modern German, 19.
  French physical science, 22.
  natural German philosophy superior to the French, 22.
  the false starting-point contrasted with the true center, 22.
  dialogue its natural form, 68.
  improperly confined to a school, 69.
  that of life can not be a mere science of reason, 185.
  free to use any form or method, 186.
  that of life a science of man, 187.
  differs from theology, 188.
  the relation of truth and science to it, 232.
  of the Greeks, rise and decline of, 234.
  Ionian schools not materialistic, 240.
  religious tendency of Pythagorean and Plato, 240.
  the Sophists--Aristotle, 243.
  the Stoics and Epicureans, 244.
  of the Christians--see _Christianity_.
  of life, its symbolical nature and constitution, 256.
  true method of, 343.
  use of scholastic or mathematical forms, 345.
  use and abuse of system, 346.
  the crown of education, 348.
  conversant with life, 350.
  deals chiefly with facts, 428.
  from natural science, 467.
  method of multiform, 470.
  its true method conversational, 472.
  two sources of error in, 522.

Physiology of man, 76.

Planets, seven the traditionary number, 85.

Plato, his ideal unfeasible, 8.

trinity of, 202.
  religious tendency of, 240.

Poetry embraces music, poetry, and architecture, 261.
  a feeling of the infinite, 414.
  spurious, 461.
  philosophical, 516.

Power, absolute, considered, 175.

Preadamite world, a paradise for angels, 125.

Pre-existence, doctrine of, 137.

Prerogative, all of supreme power judicial, 278.

Pride, its character, 33.

Priests, the vicegerents of God, 171.
  their power, 273.
  sanctity of, 274.
  Christian, not hereditary, 307.

Principle, doctrine of a good and evil, 528.

Prophets, the, kept alive the Jewish theocracy, 326.

Public opinion, 165.

Punishments, eternal, 133.

Pythagoreans, their system of astronomy, 85.
  their religious tendency, 240.
  their noble political views, 242.
  their theory of numbers, 462.


R

Rationalism, idolatry of, 221.
  as fatal to truth as pantheism, 226.
  more to be feared at present, 227.
  danger of, 454.

Reason, a division of the soul apart from fancy, 29.
  its essence, 50.
  relationship of the faculties of the soul to it, 50.
  its power and value, 53.
  derivation of the German name, 54.
  distinction between, and understanding, 55.
  not properly attributable to God, 63.
  faith not a negative limitation of, 214.
  reason and fancy the ultimate sources of error, 221.
  seldom harmonizes with fancy, 361.
  not attributable to God, 370.
  discursive, not creative, 507.
  use and abuse of, 509.

Reformation, the English, 299.

Religion, its symbolism, 264.
  in its essence symbolical, 266.

Religious error, two forms of, 176.

Representative governments, 280.

Republics, their liability to adverse changes, 284.
  disadvantages of their polity, 285.

Revelation, power to understand it the gift of God, 61.
  its fourfold character, 65.
  of Scripture, 65.
  an ante-Mosaic revelation, 66.
  the soul its receptive organ, 68.
  its first step preparatory, 143.
  gradual, 144.
  that of Christianity, 147.
  unwritten to the antediluvian world, 235.
  both old and new in its doctrine, 323.
  sources of, manifold, 503.

Roman Empire, law of, 293.
  compared with the Mohammedan, 297.


S

Skepticism, the author of it, 528.

Scepter, the, a judicial symbol, 279.

Schelling, his philosophy, 20.

Schools, philosophy of, unintelligible, 11.
  their compared with that of life, 11.
  philosophy improperly confined to them, 69.
  disputations of the schoolmen, 248.

Science, physical, no system of, in the Bible, 71.
  its imperfect character, 73.
  of nature, medicine a basis of, 78.
  modern, its atheistical tendency, 155.
  dissension between science and faith, 193.
  discernment the link between, and faith, 195.
  reconcilable with faith, 198.
  supreme, the mind the principle of, 215.
  idolatry of, 216.
  its identity with faith, 217.
  its pantheism, 220.
  its relation to life, 232.
  that of Christianity--see _Christianity_.
  a great power for good, 315.
  free development of, 317.
  a real power for good, 319.
  theocracy of, 329.
  illustrations of, 330.
  to be brought about only by God, 333.
  the idea of, 488.

Scripture not the original revelation, 66.
  contains no system of physical science, 71.
  considered as the sword of the Spirit, 230.

Sculpture, its symbolical character, 257.
  its alliance to architecture, 260.

Self, sacrifice of, brings us near to God, 109.
  how far necessary, 110.

Senses, their triple character, 31, 431.
  influence of fancy on, 31.
  the external, 430.
  higher sensuality, its character, 33.
  developments of, 432.

Sleep an essential law of nature, 89.

Soul, the thinking, the center of thought, 23.
  the center of moral life, 28.
  its unconscious conceptions, 29.
  divided between the abstracting and classifying
   reason and the inventive fancy, 29.
  its four principal branches, 30.
  the loving, the center of moral life, 41.
  its share in knowledge, 48.
  furnishes the cognitive mind with language, 48.
  its faculties in relationship to the reason, 50.
  the receptive organ of revelation, 68.
  considered in relation to nature, 70.
  considered in relation to God, 95.
  of animals, 121.
  its migration among the stars, 138.
  the principle of faith, 213.
  faith its firmament, 217.
  the mutual dependence of it with thought, 365.
  its identity with spirit, 367.
  its union with the spirit, 442.
  the idea of God must maintain it, 443.
  see _Mind_.

Speech the outward projection of thought, 379.
  varied by moral diversities, 392.

Spinosa, system of, 481.
  its influence, 484.

Spirits besides those of men, 24.
  the higher, incorporeal, 25.
  contain the essence of mind, 103.

Spirits, influence of evil, on nature, 124.
  created, without freedom, 134.
  immortal ones with animal forms, 135.
  Scriptures the sword of the Spirit, 230.
  see _Soul_.

Stars, migration of the soul among, 138.

State, the, its collision with the Church, 299, 304.
  separation of, 306.

Stoics, the, 244.

Subjective, the, the principle of mythology, 218.

Superstition, its identity with infidelity, 211.

Symbols, nature best described by, 140.
  characterize all art, 257.
  characterize education, 262.
  characterizes man’s nature, 263.
  those of religion, 264.
  their equation of life, 269.
  those of the judicial, 279.

System, use and abuse of, 346.
  consistency of idea, the essence of, 347.


T

Talmud, trinity of, 204.

Teutons, their affinity to the Indians, 307.

Theocracy, the true idea of, 320.
  the Jewish, 321.
  Moses, as founder of, 321.
  revelation both old and new in its doctrine, 323.
  the Judges, as ministers of, 324.
  kept alive by the Prophets, 326.
  false notions of, 327.
  exists in overruling Providence, 327.
  that of science, 329.
  illustrations of, from Greek, Roman, Medieval, and Hindoo literature, 331.
  illustrations of, from Old and New Testament and Christian literature, 332.
  only to be brought about by God, 333.

Theodicée, its perplexities, 120.

Theology, difference of philosophy of life from, 188.
  natural, 192.
  in method must be rational, 510.

Thought, the mutual dependence of it with feeling, 365.
  speech its outward projection, 379.
  an inward speech or dialogue, 380.
  dialogue the true form assumed by, 381.
  innate ideas and forms of, 399.
  pure, its character, 461.

Throne, the, a judicial symbol, 279.

Time, 401.
  its twofold character, 403.
  not excluded from the idea of God, 404.
  not irreconcilable with eternity, 405.

Trinity, the, of God, 197.
  of the Hindoos, 202.
  of the Platonists, 202.
  of the Talmud, 204.

Truth, man’s general sense for, 144.
  final manifestation of, 152.
  intermediate conflict of, with error, 153.
  falsehood to be fought with its own weapons, 156.
  a struggle for truth the conflict of the age, 158.
  untruth the spirit of the age, 159.
  call for union among the friends of, 160.
  final triumph of, 161.
  patience essential to the pursuit of, 199.
  the twofold spirit of truth and error, 206.
  struggle between, and error, 207.
  pantheism and rationalism alike fatal to it, 226.
  not established by refutation of error, 229.
  right method of propagating it, 229.
  its relation to life, 232.
  consistency the criterion of, 252.
  progress of, 467.
  knowledge of possible, 490.
  development of, slow and gradual, 534.


U

Understanding, the, considered apart from reason, 55.
  the only proper organ for acquiring a knowledge of God, 57.
  a co-operating cause in the formation and diffusion of error, 223.
  may be predicated of God, 371.

Unity, means of restoration to, 193.
  yearnings of the mind after, 377.


W

Westphalia, peace of, a master-stroke of policy, 183

Will, its concurrence in faith a co-operating cause in
   the formation and diffusion of error, 223.
  freedom of, 373.
  in man and angels, 374.
  manifested in doubt, 375.

Wisdom, created, 495.

Wit, origin and forms of, 447.

Women, the soul pre-eminent in their mental constitution, 46.

World, the preadamite, a paradise for angels, 125.
  antediluvian, mental state of, 233.
  unwritten revelations to it, 235.
  conceptions of the antediluvian inadequate, 236.


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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Shakspeare. Hamlet, Act I., Scene V.

    “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
     Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Schlegel seems to have read _our_, which is the reading of the folio of
1623.--_Trans._

[2] The νοὑς of Anaxagoras. A brief, but characteristic
sketch of these earlier philosophemes is given in Thirlwall’s History
of Greece, vol ii. See, also, Ritter’s History of Philosophy, vol.
i--_Trans_.

[3] Schlegel is here alluding to Condillac and his theory of
transformed sensations.--_Trans._

[4] Kant. For a full and systematic view or modern German philosophy,
see Michelet’s Geschichte d. letzten Systeme d. Phil. in Deutschland,
Berlin, 1837-8. Some able and ingenious essays on its errors and
abuses are to be found in Fred. Ancillon’s Essais de Philosophie, de
Politique, et de Littérature.--_Trans._

[5] Jacobi, in his Glauben’s-Philosophie.--_Trans._

[6] Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre.--_Trans._

[7] Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie.--_Trans._

[8] Schlegel is alluding to those systems which suppose a primary and
original essence, which, by its successive spontaneous developments,
produce every thing else out of itself. This absolute original of all
things was by Schelling, after Spinosa, called _natura naturans_,
while, by a phraseology which happily indicates the identity of the
self-developing subject and its objective developments, the totality of
the objects derived from it are termed _natura naturata_.--_Trans._

[9] Hegel. For a view of his philosophy, see the Article Hegel, in the
Penny Cyclopædia, and Morel’s Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the
Nineteenth Century, vol. ii., p. 131.--_Trans._

[10] Schlegel is speaking of Byron, and his Cain, a Mystery.--_Trans._

[11]

    “Dein Wissen theilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern;
     Die Kunst, o Mensch, hast du allein.”
           SCHILLER’S _Kunstlehre.--Trans._


[12] That by geist, spirit, and not mind merely, is here meant, will be
doubted by no one who considers the scriptural basis of these Lectures.
Schlegel seems to have had in view 1 Thess., v., 23. In the German
_geist_ stands both for mind and spirit, which, however, in English
are equivalent neither in use nor meaning. Whenever, therefore, the
translator is compelled by the English idiom to translate _geist_ and
its derivatives by mind and its cognates, and it is essential to keep
in view the identity of the matter by the sameness of expression, he
will indicate it by adding the German original in a bracket.

[13] St. John, iii., 8.--_Trans._

[14] Leibnitz.--_Trans._

[15] It is clear from what follows, that Schlegel used the term Fancy
in a wide and general sense, which embraces, first, its original use
in ancient philosophy, as the faculty of conception (φαντασια), which
reproduces the images of objects whether present or absent; secondly,
imagination, which is essential to all authors; and thirdly, fancy, in
a narrow sense--or the poetic fancy. It is in this wide sense that the
translator employs it after Milton who uses it, as more extensive than
imagination, when he says of fancy,

            “Of all the external things
    Which the five watchful senses represent,
    She forms imaginations, aery shapes.”
             _Par. Lost, Book V._

Indeed the whole of the speech of Raphael in this fifth book contains
a striking affinity of thought and idea with Schlegel. We have
there man’s triple constituents, body, soul, and spirit--reason and
fancy in the soul, of which reason is the being or essence--while
discursive reason is appropriated to man, but intuitive reason is made
the prerogative of the “purest spirits”--“the pure intelligential
substances.”--_Trans._

[16] In the original _zugetheilte_, said of a matter assigned for
investigation to a particular judge, or of the judge appointed to
examine and report upon it.--_Trans._

[17] Vernunft, from Vernehmen.

[18] The Rosetta stone, which led to the hieroglyphical discoveries of
Young and of Champollion.--_Trans._

[19] “God is _a loving Spirit_,” page 57.--_Trans._

[20] Schlegel is here alluding to, and adapting to the purpose of his
illustration, Acts, v., 15, 16.--_Trans_.

[21] 2 Peter, iii., 8.

[22] These words were uttered scarcely twenty years ago, and now beyond
Uranus, another planet, whose “vibrations have been long felt upon
paper,” is added to the heavenly choir. On the other hand, if Sir Wm.
Hamilton’s hopes are realized, will not the discovery of the center
around which the solar system revolves establish another point of
resemblance between modern astronomy and the Pythagorean system with
its central fire; and, also, as Schlegel subsequently implies, that the
former has yet further advances to make?--_Trans._

[23] Or the central fire, according to Boeckh, around which the whole
planetary heavens revolve, and which is also the source of light, which
being collected by the visible sun, is transmitted to the earth. By
the αντἱχθν or counter-earth, whose revolution is
parallel and concentric with that of the earth, Boeckh understands
that half of the terrestrial globe which, as turned away from the sun,
is in darkness. Sea August. Boeckh “de Platonico systemate cœlestium
globorum, et de vere indole astronomiæ Philolaicæ,” or his “Philolaus,”
pp. 114-136, and Ideler “Ueber d. Verhaltniss d. Copernicus zum
Alterthum,” in the Museum d. Alterthumswissenschaft, Bd. ii., St. ii.,
§ 405, &c.--_Trans._

[24] Romans, viii., 20.

[25] Schlegel is alluding to such principles as the “_Cogito ergo sum_”
of Des Cartes, and especially to the cognate axiom of Fichte: “Das ich
setzt sich selbst.” “The Me posits or affirms itself.”--_Trans._

[26] Hegel.

[27] Daniel, ix., 23. In our authorized translation it stands
“greatly beloved,” but in the Hebrew it is as given in the margin,
“a man of desires;” in the Septuagint, ἁνἡρ ἑτιθυμἱων.--_Trans._

[28] 1 Cor., xiii., 13.

[29] Theodicée, or justification of the ways of God in the world. The
word originated with Leibnitz, who, in his “Essai de Theodicée sur la
bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine du mal,” published
in 1710, maintained that the existence of moral evil has its origin
in the free will of the creature, while metaphysical evil is nothing
but the limitation which is involved in the essence of finite beings,
and that out of this both physical and moral evil naturally flow. But
these finite beings are designed to attain to the utmost felicity they
are capable of enjoying, which each, as a part, contributes to the
perfection of the whole, which, of the many worlds that were possible,
is the very best. On this account it has been called the theory of
Optimism.--_Trans._

[30] Does not this appearance of a common character among brutes of the
same species arise rather from the imperfection of our observation? Is
not every sheep an individual to the shepherd?--_Trans._

[31] Schlegel appears to have believed in the theory of equivocal
generation. But microscopic research and experiments forbid us
any longer to believe that fermentative or putrefactive matter
spontaneously gives birth to living creatures. Such matters do but
furnish the necessary circumstances for hatching the germs or ova which
are present in such immense numbers in the atmosphere. The doctrine of
equivocal or spontaneous generation seems conclusively refuted by the
experiment of Schulze, detailed in volume 23 of Jameson’s Journal. “I
filled a glass flask half full with distilled water, in which I had
mixed various vegetable and animal substances. I then closed it with
a good cork, through which I passed two glass tubes, bent at right
angles, the whole being air-tight. It was next placed in a sand-bath
and heated until the water boiled violently, and thus all parts had
reached a temperature of 212° Fahrenheit. While the watery vapor was
escaping by the glass tubes, I fastened at each end an apparatus which
chemists employ for collecting carbonic acid; that to the left was
filled with sulphuric acid, and the other with a solution of potash.
By means of the boiling heat, every thing living and all the germs in
the flask or in the tubes were destroyed, and all access was cut off
by the sulphuric acid on the one side, and by the potash on the other.
I placed this easily-moved apparatus before my window, where it was
exposed to the action of light, and also, as I performed my experiments
in the summer, to that of heat. At the same time I placed near it an
open vessel with the same substances that had been introduced into the
flask, and also after having subjected them to a boiling temperature.
In order now to renew the air constantly within the flask, I sucked
with my mouth, several times a-day, the open end of the apparatus
filled with solution of potash; by which process, the air entered my
mouth from the flask, through the caustic liquid, and the atmospheric
air from without entered the flask through the sulphuric acid. The air
was, of course, not altered in its composition by passing through the
sulphuric acid into the flask; but if sufficient time was allowed for
the passage, all the portions of living matter, or of matter capable of
becoming animated, were taken up by the sulphuric acid and destroyed.
From the 28th of May until the early part of August, I continued
uninterruptedly the renewal of the air in the flask, without being
able, by the aid of a microscope, to perceive any living animal or
vegetable substance, although, during the whole of the time, I made
my observations almost daily on the edge of the liquid; and when at
last I separated the different parts of the apparatus, I could not
find in the whole liquid the slightest trace of Infusoria, Confervæ,
or of Mold. But all the three presented themselves in a few days after
I left the flask open. And the open vessel too, which I placed near
the apparatus, contained on the following day, Vibriones and Monades,
to which were soon added larger Polygastric Infusoria, and afterward,
Rotatoria.”--_Trans._

[32] Although, in the case of the entozoa, the induction is not very
large, still, of some of them it is an established fact that they are
generated from ova, and it is therefore a fair presumption that such
is the general law, and that these parasitical beings are, in every
case, hatched from ova, which are every where present, but remain
undeveloped until they meet with the necessary nutriment and heat for
their development.--_Trans._

[33] Isaiah, lxv., 17.

[34] In this and the following paragraph it is necessary to bear in
mind that Schlegel, as a member of the Roman Catholic Church, held the
doctrine of a purgatory, which the catechism of the Council of Trent
describes as a fire, “in which the souls of the _pious_ are tortured
for a certain time, and expiated, that they may be qualified to enter
that eternal country into which nothing enters that is unclean.”
“Purgatorius ignis, quo piorum animæ ad definitum tempus cruciatæ
expiantur, ut eis in æternam patriam ingressus patere possit, in quam
nihil coinquinatum ingreditur.”--_Cat. Conc. Trid._, pars i., art. v.,
c. 5.--_Trans._

[35] Eph., vi., 12; Col., ii., 15, &c.

[36] Dell’ Inferno, Canto III.

    “............ quel cattivo coro
      Degli angeli che non furon rebelli,
      Nè fur fedeli a Dio, ma per ae foro.
    Cacciarli i Ciel, per non esser men belli;
      Nè lo profundo Inferno gli riceve,
      Ch’ alcuna gloria i rel avrebber d’ elli.”

Thus rendered by Carey:--

    “............. with that ill-band
    Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved
    Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
    Were only. From his bounds Heaven drove them,
    Not to impair his luster; nor the depth
    Of Hell receives them, lest th’ accursed tribe
    Should glory thence with exultation vain.”--Trans.


[37] Gal., iii., 24.

[38] The Gnostics and the Manichees.--_Trans._

[39] The Arians, with all the other rationalizing sects of Noëtus, Paul
of Samosata, Sabellius, and the like.--_Trans._

[40] The schism of the East and West--of the Greek and Roman
churches--produced by the illegal interference of the bishops of Rome,
in the diocese of the Patriarch of Constantinople.--_Trans._

[41] Luke xxii., 38.

[42] Rev., xiv., 6.

[43] 1 Kings, iii., 16.

[44] The Apocalypse or Revelations of St. John the Divine.--_Trans._

[45] Matt., xxiii., 13.

[46] Acts, vii., 22.

[47] Schlegel is apparently alluding to the triumph of Mohammedism in
Asia and Africa, and the almost total extinction of Christianity in
those quarters of the world.--_Trans._

[48] “Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.”

SCHILLER’S _Ode to Resignation_.


[49] The following passage forcibly expresses Schlegel’s thoughts on
this point:--“Les individus de l’espèce humaine s’échappent quelquefois
aux suites de leurs actions, qui dans la règle doivent être regardées
comme les justes châtimens des infractions faites à la loi de Dieu. Les
nations ne sauraient s’y soustraire; car leur existence se prolonge et
se projette dans un espace immense, où les lois eternelles trouvent
leur sanction et leur entier accomplissement. C’est là que la terrible
Némésis se déploie tout entière, et exerce sur le crime sa bienfaisante
réaction; c’est sur la longue route que décrivent les nations que, dans
sa marche lente, silencieuse, mais sûre, elle punit la licence par le
despotisme, et le despotisme par l’insurrection, où par la dégénération
des peuples; c’est là que l’égoisme et immoralité des peuples, la
lâcheté et la faiblesse des souverains et la servilité amènent
des résultats aussi terribles qu’inévitables. On peut dire d’eux:
‘_Habuerent vitia opatium exemplorum_.’”--ANCILLON. _Essais de
Philosophe, de Politique, et de la Littérature_, tom. ii.--_Trans._

[50] Voltaire.

[51] In the book of Job we have a picture of this earlier and purer
religion of nature, as professed by this Idumæan Gentile, while, in his
vindication of himself, we read a testimony to the existence of the
beginnings of idolatry in the worship of the host of heaven. xxxi.,
5.--_Trans._

[52] This statement does not necessarily imply the Romish doctrine of
transubstantiation. It is fully met in an unobjectionable sense by the
Catholic tenet of the real presence.--_Trans._

[53] Schlegel is apparently referring to the Constituent Assembly of
the French Revolution.--_Trans._

[54] 2 Sam., xxiv., 14.

[55] John, viii., 36.

[56] In this and the following sentence Schlegel is alluding to Holland
and Poland.--_Trans._

[57] The Kaiser was in theory the temporal lord of the whole earth;
according to the words of the Sachsen-Spiegel, “Zwei swert liess Got
in ertriche zu beschirmene dy Christenheit, dem Pabste das geistliche,
den Keiser das werltliche.” “Two swords has God left to the world to
protect Christianity; (having given) to the Pope the spiritual, and the
temporal to the Emperor.” The claim of the Empire to universal dominion
was indicated by the sword pointing to the four points of the heavens,
while as the “Holy Empire” it was its duty to exterminate not only
the Heathens and the Moslems, but also the false Christians, as the
members of the Greek Church were regarded by the West. In the medieval
constitution of the Empire, a symbolical character prevails throughout.
Seven were its shields: of these the first was borne by the Emperor;
the second by the spiritual Electors; the third by the temporal
Princes; the fourth and fifth by the Counts and Knights of the Empire;
the sixth by their vassals; and the seventh by the free burghers and
peasants. Seven, also, was the original number of the Hereditary
Electors of the Empire. Three spiritual Princes, the Archbishops of
Mayence, Cologne, and Treves, as chancellors, respectively of the
Empire, of Burgundy, and of Italy. Four temporal Electors: the Prince
Palatine of the Rhine, who, as grand-carver, carried the imperial
apple at the coronation; the Duke of Saxony Wittemberg, who, as
marshal, carried the sword; the Margrave of Brandenburg, who, as
grand-chamberlain, bore the scepter; and the King of Bohemia, who, as
cupbearer, presented the cup. The election of the Emperor was held at
Frankfort-on-the-Maine; the coronation at Aix; and the new Emperor held
his first diet at Nuremberg.--_Trans._

[58] 2 Tim., iv., 7.

[59] The words in the bracket are not in the original. As a loyal
priest of a true branch of that Church which is built on the foundation
of the Apostles, the translator could not help to give currency to such
a misrepresentation of it. Henry VIII. can stand on his own merits, or,
rather, demerits. It seems, however, to be what Schlegel would call
an historical retribution, that the universal supremacy claimed by
the bishops of Rome, as it was confirmed by a Phocas, should be first
shaken by a Henry VIII.--_Trans._

[60] Pius VII.

[61] _Cshatriyas._ (See “Philosophy of History,” p. 146.)

[62] See Philosophy of Life, p. 25.

[63] See quotation from the “Die Kunstlehre” of Schiller, “Philosophy
of Life,” p. 25.

[64] Alexander von Humboldt.

[65] The passages thus indicated were marked by Schlegel himself for
revision.

[66] Shakspeare. Hamlet, Act i., Scene v.

[67] Philosophy of Life, p. 113.

[68] St. James, c. ii., v. 5.

[69] In the original the three terms are--Gewissen, Wissen, and
Gewissheit.

[70] The three primary vowels, according to Bopp and Grimm, are _a_,
_i_, _u_, _e_ and _o_ being dipthongal compounds of _ai_ and _ao_
respectively. The former appears from a comparison between the Greek
σφαιρα, Latin _sphæra_, and our _sphere_; or, again,
from Μουσαι, Musæ, pronounced by us Musā; or from the
Ionic form ης, of dat. plur. αις. To prove that _au_ gives _o_, it will
be sufficient from many instances to give one:--the Latin _pauci_,
in the Spanish and Italian dialects of the Romance is _poco_.

The simple alphabet of ten elementary sounds may stand thus:--

  Three vowels        a, i, u.
  Three consonants    p, t, k, or b, d, g in the mediate form, given as by
    Schlegel.
  Three liquids       l, n, r.
  Sibilant            s.--_Trans._


[71] On the Hebrew alphabet, see Latham’s “The English Language,” p.
184.--_Trans._

[72]

    “Die Zeit hat Glauben nicht, noch Liebe;
     Wo wäre dann die Hoffnung die ihr bleibe?”


[73] The philosophy of Schelling professed to be a system of identity,
and had for its basis the principle of the sameness of subject and
object.--See Philosophy of Life, note, p. 20.--_Trans._

[74] Schlegel is here again alluding to the philosophy of
Schelling.--_Trans._

[75] Our language can not give the etymological connection of the
thoughts in this sentence. The original is: Die zweyte wäre dann
ein _Empfinden_, nämlich das volle gewisse _In_ sich _finden_ einer
Wahrehit.

       *       *       *       *       *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

these rerespects=> these respects {pg 12}

genuiue longing=> genuine longing {pg 39}

however often and painsfully=> however often and painfully {pg 80}

the the whole human race=> the whole human race {pg 116}

there will over remain=> there will ever remain {pg 118}

the world out of _eunui_=> the world out of _ennui_ {pg 128}

pride and siffneckedness=> pride and stiffneckedness {pg 207}

that can can extricate=> that can extricate {pg 227}

numbered=> numberbered {pg 244}

betwen the imperial and the=> between the imperial and the {pg 279}

from beginnind to end; into a gespotism=> from beginning to end; into a
despotism {pg 298}

extremly=> extremely {pg 298}

mamely=> namely {pg 323}

characteristies=> characteristics {pg 323}

some higher impluse=> some higher impulse {pg 328}

external realtions=> external relations {pg 345}

passed though the first=> passed through the first {pg 350}

confusion of lanage=> confusion of language {pg 355}

necessarrily=> necessarily {pg 367}

explaning=> explaining {pg 385}

Sancrit=> Sanscrit {pg 389}

adopted thoughout Asia=> adopted throughout Asia {pg 390}

considered perfecly deaf=> considered perfectly deaf {pg 435}

die ihr blebe=> die ihr bleibe {pg 457 note}

scienitfic imagination=> scientific imagination {pg 491}

deficiences=> deficiencies {pg 499}

if the term be perferred=> if the term be prerferred {pg 504}

materialzing system=> materializing system {pg 521}

patience esssential to the pursuit of, 199.=> patience essential to the
pursuit of, 199. {pg 549}