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BOOK II
SPECULATIVE

"Philosophy is one of the richest presents that man ever received from heaven, being that which raises the mind into the contemplation of eternal things, and is the science which of all others affords the most agreeable entertainment." – Evelyn.

I
INSTRUMENTALITIES

 
"The age, the present times, are not
To snudge in, and embrace a cot;
Action and blood now get the game,
Disdain treads on the peaceful name:
Who sits at home, too, bears a load
Greater than those that gad abroad."
 

Henry Vaughan.

INSTRUMENTALITIES

i. – tendencies

Our time is revolutionary. It drifts strong and fast into unitarianism and the empire of ideas. All things are undergoing reform and reconstruction; the fellowship of all souls intent on laying broad and deep the foundations of the new institutions. The firm of Globe Brothers & Co., prospers in both hemispheres, every citizen being a partner in the concern. The nations are leagued together on the basis of mutual assistance, finding the old alliances founded on force and fear to be insecure; the people seeing it best to be friends and copartners in conducting the world's affairs; – trade the natural knot tying them by the coarser wants only; world-politics their bond of union and prosperity. No longer playing independent parts safely, they co-operate and conspire for the common welfare, interposing such checks as each individually requires for his security. Ruling is conducted not by legislation nor diplomacy, but by social and commercial inter-communication; every man opening out for himself the sphere suited to his gifts, and taking his thinking and doing into head and hands as a loyal man and citizen. Power is stealing with a speed and momentum unprecedented from the few to the many; is played out on a theatre world-wide, whole populations taking part in affairs; the distance once separating extremes being bridged; middle men with human sympathies and broad common-sense taking the lead and setting the old pretensions aside. A daring realism overleaping the old barriers gives government into the hands of the whole people, rulers being their servants, not masters; presidents and kings the representatives of ideas and paying loyal homage to these crowned heads; the old virtues of reverence for man, fidelity to principle, so venerable and sacred in private stations, seeking reappearance in public life.

If once the great, the wise, were in the minority, and none dreamed of reason becoming popular, reason is fast becoming republicanized; from being the exclusive property of the few is diffusing itself universally as the common possession of the multitude.

 
Imperial thought now holds her powerful sway,
And drives the peoples on their prosperous way.
 

The freshest, best thoughts of the best minds of all times are claimed by the community; itself the awakened critic and prompter of the best; all thirsting for information, – world-wisdom, – and drinking off eagerly the lore of centuries. Knowledge everywhere diffused is accessible to all, rolls with the globe, dashes against the shores of every sea, delves the caverns, climbs the hill-tops with sun and moon, for the common benefit. If Hesiod wrote for his times that

 
"Riches are the soul of feeble men,"
 

our time is fast translating his line practically:

 
Riches are the hand of able men;
 

Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative philanthropies the extremes – every man's needs being taken as drafts drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight:

 
"Stewards of the gods alone
Are we; have nothing of our own
Save what to us the gods commit,
And take away when they see fit."
 

Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the abolition of the death-penalty altogether.

The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks received their Gods from Egypt and Phœnicia, Rome hers from Greece, and we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races.

ii. – method

Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable spaces of which thought is royal ranger, – owner of domains far larger and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the omnipresence, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrumentality lends the outfit and means – facilities ample, unprecedented – new instruments for the new discoveries – new eyes for the new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the old circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative thought, – intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is finely discriminated, a broader synthesis generalized from the materials accumulated in the mind during the centuries, the globe's contents being gathered in from all quarters, the Book of Creation illustrated anew, and posted to date. The new calculus is ours. An organon alike serviceable to metaphysician and naturalist – whereby things answer to thought, facts are resolved into truths, images into ideas, matter into mind, power into personality, man into God; the One soul in all souls revealed as the Creative Spirit pulsating in all breasts, immanent in all atoms, prompting all wills, and personally embosoming all persons in one unbroken synthesis of Being.⁵

"It has hitherto, unhappily, been the misfortune of the mere materialist, in his mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas on the other, to invert this creative order, and thus hang the world's picture as a man with his heels upwards" – a process conducting of necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature's author. Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance, piles his atom atop of atom, cements cell on cell, in constructing his column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape's glorified effigy, as Nature's frontispiece and head – life's atomy with life omitted altogether, man wanting. Contrarywise reads the ideal naturalist the book of lives. Opening at Spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas, he finds their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs, faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its connections and interpendencies appear in series and degrees as he traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man connexus, archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos, – the primeval Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and survivor.⁶

iii. – man

 
"Imago Dei in animo; mundi, in corpore."
 

Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image. His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and treads under foot, the planet he spins.

 
He omnipresent is,
All round himself he lies,
Osiris spread abroad,
Upstaring in all eyes:
Nature his globed thought,
Without him she were not,
Cosmos from chaos were not spoken,
And God bereft of visible token.
 

A theometer – an instrument of instruments – he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental, essential, he generates elements and forces, perpetually replenishing his waste; – the final conflagration a current fact of his existence. Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phœnix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its resolvent emblem.⁷

 
"Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not,
By thy male force is all we have, begot."
 

"This kindles the fire which exists in every thing, is received by every thing. While it sheds a full light, it is itself hidden. Its presence is unknown, unless some material be given to induce the exertion of its power. It is invisible, as well as unquenchable; and it has the faculty of transforming into itself every thing it touches. It renovates every thing by its vital heat, it illumines every thing by its flashing beams; it can neither be confined nor intermingled; it divides and yet is immutable. It always ascends, it is constantly in motion; it moves by its own will and power, and sets in motion every thing around it. It has the power of seizing, but cannot itself be grasped. It needs no aid. It increases silently and breaks forth in majesty upon all. It generates, it is powerful, invisible, and omnipotent. If neglected, its existence might be forgotten, but on friction being applied, it flashes out again like the sword from its scabbard, shines resplendently by its own natural properties, and soars into the air. Many other powers may yet be noticed as belonging to it. For this reason theologians have asserted that all substances being formed of fire, are thus created as nearly as possible in the image of God."

II
MIND

 
"But all the Gods we have are in The Mind,
By whose proportions only we redeem
Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find
The measure of ourselves and of our powers,
And that all happiness remains confined
Within the kingdom of this breast of ours,
Without whose bounds all that we look on lies
In others' jurisdiction, others' powers,
Out of the circuit of our liberties."
 

Daniel.

MIND

i. – ideas

The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its Powers. They fabled these as gods celestial, mundane, infernal, according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal metaphysic has not as yet been surpassed or superseded altogether, as the classic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall. Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow – these distribute mankind into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist, grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.

 
"Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely,
But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."
 

Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following particle of the passing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality which to slower wits seems fixed in space and apart from thought, subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming, not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our thought.

So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of meaning.⁸ Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense. They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark; at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both. Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and originals of words.

 
Thought's winged hand,
Marshals in trope and tone
The ideal band.
Genius alone
Holds fast in eye
The fleeing God —
Brings Beauty nigh —
Senses descry
Footsteps he trod,
Figures he drew,
Shapes old and new,
The fair, the true,
In soul and sod.
 

Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as seen by poet and plowman. It stands for material benefit to the one, immaterial to the other. The artist's point of view is one of uses seen as means of beauty, that being the complement of uses. His faculties handle his organs; the hands, like somnambulists, playing their under parts to ideas; these, again, serving uses still higher. The poet, awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form, being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.

The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker views men as troglodytes – like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights – they in turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents. Nor can thought, from its nature, at once become popular. It is the property and delight of the few fitted by genius and culture for discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth in its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored. Apart by pursuit from the mass of mankind, or at most taking a separate and subordinate part in affairs that engage their sole attention, the thinker seems useless to all save those who can apprehend and avail themselves of his immediate labors; and the less is he known and appreciated as his studies are of lasting importance to his race. Yet time is just, and brings all men to the side of thought as they become familiar with its practical benefits, else the victory were not gained for philosophy, and wisdom justified in him of her chosen children.

Ideas alone supplement nature and complement mind. Our senses neither satisfy our sensibility nor intellect. The mind's objects are mind itself; imagination the mind's eye, memory the ear, ideas of the one imaging the other, and the mind thus rounding its history. And hence the pleasurable perspective experienced in surveying our personality from obverse sides in the landscape of existence – culture, in its inclusive sense, making the tour of our gifts, and acquainting us with ourselves and the world we live in. All men gain a residence in the senses and the family of natural things; few come into possession of their better inheritance and home in the mind – the Palace of Power and Personality. Sons of earth rather by preference, and chiefly emulous for their little while of its occupancy, its honors, emoluments, they here pitch their tents, here plant fast their hopes, and roll through life they know not whither.

ii. – the gifts

Instinct is the fountain of Personal power, and mother of the Gifts. With instinct there may be an embryo, but sense must be superinduced to constitute an animal – memory, moral sentiment, reason, imagination, personality, to constitute the man. The mind is the man, not the outward shape: all is in the Will. The animal may mount to fancy in the grade of gifts; but reason, imagination, conscience, choice – the mediating, creative, ruling powers – the personality – belong to man alone. But not to all men, save in essence and possibility. Man properly traverses the hierarchy of Powers – spiritual, intellectual, moral, natural, animal – their full possession and interplay enabling him to hold free colloquy with all, giving the whole mind voice in the dialogue. Thus:

In accordance with this gradation of gifts, man and animals may be classified as to their measures of intelligence respectively; instinct being taken as the initial gift and prompter of the rest in their order of genesis, growth and adaptability: man alone, when fully unfolded in harmony, being capable of ranging throughout the entire scale.⁹

Thus:

Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man, the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in personality.

 
Pure mind alone is face,
Brute matter surface all;
As souls immersed in space,
Ideal rise, or idol fall.
 

iii. – person

The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity, triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind makes upon the senses, – these inclining always to idolatry, – is it surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force, law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality, free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.¹⁰

 
"Make us a god," said man:
Power first the voice obeyed,
And soon a monstrous form
Its worshippers dismayed;
Uncouth and huge, by nations rude adored,
With savage rites and sacrifice abhorred.
 
 
"Make us a god," said man:
Art next the voice obeyed,
Lovely, serene, and grand,
Uprose the Athenian maid:
The perfect statue, Greece with wreathed brows,
Adores in festal rites and lyric vows.
 
 
"Make us a god," said man:
Religion followed art,
And answered, "Look within;
Find God in thine own heart —
His noblest image there, and holiest shrine,
Silent revere – and be thyself divine."
 

iv. – choice

 
Heaven hell's pit copes:
Nor fathoms any sin's abyss, or clambers out,
Save by the steps his choice hath delved.
 

The gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the man into their Personal likeness. Descending below himself he debases and disfigures this image; as by choice he leaps upwards, so by choice he lapses downwards. Yet, while free to choose, he sinks himself never beneath himself absolutely, his beneath subsisting by his election only. His choices free or fetter, elevate or debase, deify or demonize his humanity. Superior to all forces is the Spirit within, doing or defying his determinations, ever holding him fast to the consequences. Obeying its dictates or disobeying, frees or binds. It has golden chains for the good, for others iron. Love is its soft, yet mighty curb; freedom its easy yoke; fate its fetter.

 
Nor man in evil willingly doth rest,
Nor God in good unwillingly is blest.
 

There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape the consequences of his election. The deed decides. Nor is the Conscience appeased till sooner or later our deserts are pronounced – The welcome "well done," or the dread "depart."

 
"'Tis vain to flee till gentle mercy show
Her better eye. The further off we go
The swing of justice deals the mightier blow."
 

Only the repenting consciousness of freedom abused restores the lost holiness, redeems from the guilty lapse – the sin that in separating us from the One, revealed the fearful Doubleness within, opening the yawning pit down which we stumbled, to become the prey of the undying worm.

 
"Meek love alone doth wash our ills away."
 

And with love enough, knowledge were useless. It comes in defect of love. Exhaustless in its sources, love supersedes knowledge, being the proper intellect of spirit and spring of intuition – God being very God, because his love absorbs all knowledge and contains his Godhead. Knowing without loving is decease from love, and lapse from pure intellect into sense. Knowledge is not enough. The more knowledge, the deeper the depths left unsounded, the more exacting our faith in the certainty of knowing. Our faith feels after its objects, if haply by groping in the darkness of our ignorance we may fathom its depths, and find ourselves in Him who is ever seeking us. "Although no man knoweth the spirit of a man save The Spirit within him, yet is there something in him that not even man's spirit knoweth."

 
"WHO placed thee here, did something then infuse
Which now can tell thee news."