Does the present age, do passing events, present this character? I
direct my attention at once to the most prominent object in this vast
structure.
It is true that the consideration of opinion is fallen; caprice is
unnerved, and, although still armed with power, receives no longer any
respect. Man has awakened from his long lethargy and self-deception, and
he demands with impressive unanimity to be restored to his imperishable
rights. But he does not only demand them; he rises on all sides to seize
force what, in his opinion, has been unjustly wrested from him. The
edifice of the natural state is tottering, its foundations shake, and a
_physical_ possibility seems at length granted to place law on the
throne, to honor man at length as an end, and to make true freedom the
basis of political union. Vain hope! The _moral_ possibility is wanting,
and the generous occasion finds an unsusceptible rule.
Man paints himself in his actions, and what is the form depicted in the
drama of the present time? On the one hand, he is seen running wild, on
the other, in a state of lethargy; the two extremest stages of human
degeneracy, and both seen in one and the same period.
In the lower larger masses, coarse, lawless impulses come to view,
breaking loose when the bonds of civil order are burst asunder, and
hastening with unbridled fury to satisfy their savage instinct.
Objective humanity may have had cause to complain of the state; yet
subjective man must honor its institutions. Ought he to be blamed
because he lost sight of the dignity of human nature, so long as he was
concerned in preserving his existence? Can we blame him that he
proceeded to separate by the force of gravity, to fasten by the force of
cohesion, at a time when there could be no thought of building or
raising up? The extinction of the state contains its justification.
Society set free, instead of hastening upward into organic life,
collapses into its elements.
On the other hand, the civilized classes give us the still more
repulsive sight of lethargy, and of a depravity of character which is
the more revolting because it roots in culture. I forget who of the
older or more recent philosophers makes the remark, that what is more
noble is the more revolting in its destruction. The remark applies with
truth to the world of morals. The child of nature, when he breaks loose,
becomes a madman; but the art scholar, when he breaks loose, becomes a
debased character. The enlightenment of the understanding, on which the
more refined classes pride themselves with some ground, shows on the
whole so little of an ennobling influence on the mind that it seems
rather to confirm corruption by its maxims. We deny nature on her
legitimate field and feel her tyranny in the moral sphere, and while
resisting her impressions, we receive our principles from her. While the
affected decency of our manners does not even grant to nature a
pardonable influence in the initial stage, our materialistic system of
morals allows her the casting vote in the last and essential stage.
Egotism has founded its system in the very bosom of a refined society,
and without developing even a sociable character, we feel all the
contagions and miseries of society. We subject our free judgment to its
despotic opinions, our feelings to its bizarre customs, and our will to
its seductions. We only maintain our caprice against her holy rights.
The man of the world has his heart contracted by a proud
self-complacency, while that of the man of nature often beats in
sympathy; and every man seeks for nothing more than to save his wretched
property from the general destruction, as it were from some great
conflagration. It is conceived that the only way to find a shelter
against the aberrations of sentiment is by completely foregoing its
indulgence, and mockery, which is often a useful chastener of mysticism,
slanders in the same breath the noblest aspirations. Culture, far from
giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the
fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear
of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the
maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.
Thus the spirit of the time is seen to waver between perversion and
savagism, between what is unnatural and mere nature, between
superstition and moral unbelief, and it is often nothing but the
equilibrium of evils that sets bounds to it.