CHARACTERISTICS

The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the

Physician's Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he

gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual,

political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that

wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be

named _vital_ are at work, herein lies the test of their working right

or working wrong.

In the Body, for example, as all doctors are agreed, the first

condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its function

unconsciously, unheeded; let but any organ announce its separate

existence, were it even boastfully, and for pleasure, not for pain,

then already has one of those unfortunate "false centres of

sensibility" established itself, already is derangement there. The

perfection of bodily wellbeing is, that the collective bodily

activities seem one; and be manifested, moreover, not in themselves,

but in the action they accomplish. If a Dr. Kitchiner boast that his

system is in high order, Dietetic Philosophy may indeed take credit;

but the true Peptician was that Countryman who answered that, "for his

part, he had no system." In fact, unity, agreement is always silent,

or soft-voiced; it is only discord that loudly proclaims itself. So

long as the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour

forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and

unison; Life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial

music and diapason,--which also, like that other music of the spheres,

even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and

without imperfection, might be fabled to escape the ear. Thus too, in

some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term

expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that

we are _whole_.

Few mortals, it is to be feared, are permanently blessed with that

felicity of "having no system;" nevertheless, most of us, looking back

on young years, may remember seasons of a light, aerial translucency

and elasticity and perfect freedom; the body had not yet become the

prison-house of the soul, but was its vehicle and implement, like a

creature of the thought, and altogether pliant to its bidding. We knew

not that we had limbs, we only lifted, hurled and leapt: through eye

and ear, and all avenues of sense, came clear unimpeded tidings from

without, and from within issued clear victorious force; we stood as in

the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in harmony with it all;

unlike Virgil's Husbandmen, "too happy _because_ we did not know our

blessedness." In those days, health and sickness were foreign

traditions that did not concern us; our whole being was as yet One,

the whole man like an incorporated Will. Such, were Rest or

ever-successful Labour the human lot, might our life continue to be: a

pure, perpetual, unregarded music; a beam of perfect white light,

rendering all things visible, but itself unseen, even because it was

of that perfect whiteness, and no irregular obstruction had yet broken

it into colours. The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if

we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of

something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division,

Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. Thus, as was of old

written, the Tree of Knowledge springs from a root of evil, and bears

fruits of good and evil. Had Adam remained in Paradise, there had been

no Anatomy and no Metaphysics.

But, alas, as the Philosopher declares, "Life itself is a disease; a

working incited by suffering;" action from passion! The memory of that

first state of Freedom and paradisaic Unconsciousness has faded away

into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many

things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do

our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at

rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce

jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is

no disregarding. Nevertheless, such is still the wish of Nature on our

behalf; in all vital action, her manifest purpose and effort is, that

we should be unconscious of it, and, like the peptic Countryman, never

know that we "have a system." For indeed vital action everywhere is

emphatically a means, not an end; Life is not given us for the mere

sake of Living, but always with an ulterior external Aim: neither is

it on the process, on the means, but rather on the result, that

Nature, in any of her doings, is wont to entrust us with insight and

volition. Boundless as is the domain of man, it is but a small

fractional proportion of it that he rules with Consciousness and by

Forethought: what he can contrive, nay what he can altogether know and

comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever,

in one sense or other, the vital; it is essentially the mysterious,

and only the surface of it can be understood. But Nature, it might

seem, strives, like a kind mother, to hide from us even this, that she

is a mystery: she will have us rest on her beautiful and awful bosom

as if it were our secure home; on the bottomless boundless Deep,

whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim, she will have

us walk and build, as if the film which supported us there (which any

scratch of a bare bodkin will rend asunder, any sputter of a

pistol-shot instantaneously burn up) were no film, but a solid

rock-foundation. Forever in the neighbourhood of an inevitable Death,

man can forget that he is born to die; of his Life, which, strictly

meditated, contains in it an Immensity and an Eternity, he can

conceive lightly, as of a simple implement wherewith to do day-labour

and earn wages. So cunningly does Nature, the mother of all highest

Art, which only apes her from afar, body forth the Finite from the

Infinite; and guide man safe on his wondrous path, not more by

endowing him with vision, than, at the right place, with blindness!

Under all her works, chiefly under her noblest work, Life, lies a

basis of Darkness, which she benignantly conceals; in Life too, the

roots and inward circulations which stretch down fearfully to the

regions of Death and Night, shall not hint of their existence, and

only the fair stem with its leaves and flowers, shone on by the fair

sun, shall disclose itself, and joyfully grow.

However, without venturing into the abstruse, or too eagerly asking

Why and How, in things where our answer must needs prove, in great

part, an echo of the question, let us be content to remark farther, in

the merely historical way, how that Aphorism of the bodily Physician

holds good in quite other departments. Of the Soul, with her

activities, we shall find it no less true than of the Body: nay, cry

the Spiritualists, is not that very division of the unity, Man, into a

dualism of Soul and Body, itself the symptom of disease; as, perhaps,

your frightful theory of Materialism, of his being but a Body, and

therefore, at least, once more a unity, may be the paroxysm which was

critical, and the beginning of cure! But omitting this, we observe,

with confidence enough, that the truly strong mind, view it as

Intellect, as Morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind

acquainted with its strength; that here as before the sign of health

is Unconsciousness. In our inward, as in our outward world, what is

mechanical lies open to us: not what is dynamical and has vitality. Of

our Thinking, we might say, it is but the mere upper surface that we

shape into articulate Thoughts;--underneath the region of argument and

conscious discourse, lies the region of meditation; here, in its quiet

mysterious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; here, if aught is

to be created, and not merely manufactured and communicated, must the

work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but trivial; Creation is

great, and cannot be understood. Thus if the Debater and Demonstrator,

whom we may rank as the lowest of true thinkers, knows what he has

done, and how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest,

knows not; must speak of Inspiration, and in one or the other dialect,

call his work the gift of a divinity.

But on the whole, "genius is ever a secret to itself;" of this old

truth we have, on all sides, daily evidence. The Shakspeare takes no

airs for writing _Hamlet_ and the _Tempest_, understands not that it

is anything surprising: Milton, again, is more conscious of his

faculty, which accordingly is an inferior one. On the other hand, what

cackling and strutting must we not often hear and see, when, in some

shape of academical prolusion, maiden speech, review article, this or

the other well-fledged goose has produced its goose-egg, of quite

measurable value, were it the pink of its whole kind; and wonders why

all mortals do not wonder!

Foolish enough, too, was the College Tutor's surprise at Walter

Shandy: how, though unread in Aristotle, he could nevertheless argue;

and not knowing the name of any dialectic tool, handled them all to

perfection. Is it the skilfullest anatomist that cuts the best figure

at Sadler's Wells? Or does the boxer hit better for knowing that he

has a _flexor longus_ and a _flexor brevis_? But indeed, as in the

higher case of the Poet, so here in that of the Speaker and Inquirer,

the true force is an unconscious one. The healthy Understanding, we

should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; for

the end of Understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to know

and believe. Of logic, and its limits, and uses and abuses, there were

much to be said and examined; one fact, however, which chiefly

concerns us here, has long been familiar: that the man of logic and

the man of insight; the Reasoner and the Discoverer, or even Knower,

are quite separable,--indeed, for most part, quite separate

characters. In practical matters, for example, has it not become

almost proverbial that the man of logic cannot prosper? This is he

whom business-people call Systematic and Theoriser and Word-monger;

his _vital_ intellectual force lies dormant or extinct, his whole

force is mechanical, conscious: of such a one it is foreseen that,

when once confronted with the infinite complexities of the real world,

his little compact theorem of the world will be found wanting; that

unless he can throw it overboard, and become a new creature, he will

necessarily founder. Nay, in mere Speculation itself, the most

ineffectual of all characters, generally speaking, is your dialectic

man-at-arms; were he armed cap-a-pie in syllogistic mail of proof, and

perfect master of logic-fence, how little does it avail him! Consider

the old Schoolmen, and their pilgrimage towards Truth: the

faithfullest endeavour, incessant unwearied motion, often great

natural vigour; only no progress: nothing but antic feats of one limb

poised against the other; there they balanced, somersetted and made

postures; at best gyrated swiftly, with some pleasure, like Spinning

Dervishes, and ended where they began. So is it, so will it always be,

with all System-makers and builders of logical card-castles; of which

class a certain remnant must, in every age, as they do in our own,

survive and build. Logic is good, but it is not the best. The

Irrefragable Doctor, with his chains of induction, his corollaries,

dilemmas and other cunning logical diagrams and apparatus, will cast

you a beautiful horoscope, and speak reasonable things; nevertheless

your stolen jewel, which you wanted him to find you, is not

forthcoming. Often by some winged word, winged as the thunderbolt is,

of a Luther, a Napoleon, a Goethe, shall we see the difficulty split

asunder, and its secret laid bare; while the Irrefragable, with all

his logical tools, hews at it, and hovers round it, and finds it on

all hands too hard for him.

Again, in the difference between Oratory and Rhetoric, as indeed

everywhere in that superiority of what is called the Natural over the

Artificial, we find a similar illustration. The Orator persuades and

carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that

he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him: the one is in a

state of healthy unconsciousness, as if he "had no system;" the other,

in virtue of regimen and dietetic punctuality, feels at best that "his

system is in high order." So stands it, in short, with all the forms

of Intellect, whether as directed to the finding of truth, or to the

fit imparting thereof: to Poetry, to Eloquence, to depth of Insight,

which is the basis of both these; always the characteristic of right

performance is a certain spontaneity, an unconsciousness; "the healthy

know not of their health, but only the sick." So that the old precept

of the critic, as crabbed as it looked to his ambitious disciple,

might contain in it a most fundamental truth, applicable to us all,

and in much else than Literature: "Whenever you have written any

sentence that looks particularly excellent, be sure to blot it out."

In like manner, under milder phraseology, and with a meaning purposely

much wider, a living Thinker has taught us: "Of the Wrong we are

always conscious, of the Right never."

But if such is the law with regard to Speculation and the Intellectual

power of man, much more is it with regard to Conduct, and the power,

manifested chiefly therein, which we name Moral. "Let not thy left

hand know what thy right hand doeth:" whisper not to thy own heart,

How worthy is this action; for then it is already becoming worthless.

The good man is he who _works_ continually in welldoing; to whom

welldoing is as his natural existence, awakening no astonishment,

requiring no commentary; but there, like a thing of course, and as if

it could not but be so. Self-contemplation, on the other hand, is

infallibly the symptom of disease, be it or be it not the sign of

cure. An unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in

repenting and anxiety; or, still worse, that inflates itself into

dropsical boastfulness and vain-glory: either way, there is a

self-seeking; an unprofitable looking behind us to measure the way we

have made: whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward,

and make more way. If in any sphere of man's life, then in the Moral

sphere, as the inmost and most vital of all, it is good that there be

wholeness; that there be unconsciousness, which is the evidence of

this. Let the free, reasonable Will, which dwells in us, as in our

Holy of Holies, be indeed free, and obeyed like a Divinity, as is its

right and its effort: the perfect obedience will be the silent one.

Such perhaps were the sense of that maxim, enunciating, as is usual,

but the half of a truth: To say that we have a clear conscience, is to

utter a solecism; had we never sinned, we should have had no

conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated

by songs of triumph.

This, true enough, is an ideal, impossible state of being; yet ever

the goal towards which our actual state of being strives; which it is

the more perfect the nearer it can approach. Nor, in our actual world,

where Labour must often prove _in_effectual, and thus in all senses

Light alternate with Darkness, and the nature of an ideal Morality be

much modified, is the case, thus far, materially different. It is a

fact which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is

acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate

acquaintance with. Above all, the public acknowledgment of such

acquaintance, indicating that it has reached quite an intimate

footing, bodes ill. Already, to the popular judgment, he who talks

much about Virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspect; it is

shrewdly guessed that where there is a great preaching, there will be

little almsgiving. Or again, on a wider scale, we can remark that ages

of Heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy; Virtue, when it can be

philosophised of, has become aware of itself, is sickly and beginning

to decline. A spontaneous habitual all-pervading spirit of Chivalrous

Valour shrinks together, and perks itself up into shrivelled Points of

Honour; humane Courtesy and Nobleness of mind dwindle into punctilious

Politeness, "avoiding meats;" "paying tithe of mint and anise,

neglecting the weightier matters of the law." Goodness, which was a

rule to itself, must now appeal to Precept, and seek strength from

Sanctions; the Freewill no longer reigns unquestioned and by divine

right, but like a mere earthly sovereign, by expediency, by Rewards

and Punishments: or rather, let us say, the Freewill, so far as may

be, has abdicated and withdrawn into the dark, and a spectral

nightmare of a Necessity usurps its throne; for now that mysterious

Self-impulse of the whole man, heaven-inspired, and in all senses

partaking of the Infinite, being captiously questioned in a finite

dialect, and answering, as it needs must, by silence,--is conceived as

non-extant, and only the outward Mechanism of it remains acknowledged:

of Volition, except as the synonym of Desire, we hear nothing; of

"Motives," without any Mover, more than enough.

So too, when the generous Affections have become well-nigh paralytic,

we have the reign of Sentimentality. The greatness, the

profitableness, at any rate the extremely ornamental nature of

high feeling, and the luxury of doing good; charity, love,

self-forgetfulness, devotedness and all manner of godlike

magnanimity,--are everywhere insisted on, and pressingly inculcated in

speech and writing, in prose and verse; Socinian Preachers proclaim

"Benevolence" to all the four winds, and have TRUTH engraved on their

watch-seals: unhappily with little or no effect. Were the limbs in

right walking order, why so much demonstrating of motion? The

barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist. Granting even that he

were sincere, and did not wilfully deceive us, or without first

deceiving himself, what good is in him? Does he not lie there as a

perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian

impotence? His is emphatically a Virtue that has become, through every

fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick, and feels as if it were

made of glass, and durst not touch or be touched: in the shape of

work, it can do nothing; at the utmost, by incessant nursing and

caudling, keeps itself alive. As the last stage of all, when Virtue,

properly so called, has ceased to be practised, and become extinct,

and a mere remembrance, we have the era of Sophists, descanting of its

existence, proving it, denying it, mechanically "accounting" for

it;--as dissectors and demonstrators cannot operate till once the body

be dead.

Thus is true Moral genius, like true Intellectual, which indeed is but

a lower phasis thereof, "ever a secret to itself." The healthy moral

nature loves Goodness, and without wonder wholly lives in it: the

unhealthy makes love to it, and would fain get to live in it; or,

finding such courtship fruitless, turns round, and not without

contempt abandons it. These curious relations of the Voluntary and

Conscious to the Involuntary and Unconscious, and the small proportion

which, in all departments of our life, the former bears to the

latter,--might lead us into deep questions of Psychology and

Physiology: such, however, belong not to our present object. Enough,

if the fact itself become apparent, that Nature so meant it with us;

that in this wise we are made. We may now say, that view man's

individual Existence under what aspect we will, under the highest

spiritual, as under the merely animal aspect, everywhere the grand

vital energy, while in its sound state, is an unseen unconscious one;

or, in the words of our old Aphorism, "the healthy know not of their

health, but only the sick."

* * * * *

To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual man and

his actions or interests, and view him in combination with his

fellows. It is in Society that man first feels what he is; first

becomes what he can be. In Society an altogether new set of spiritual

activities are evolved in him, and the old immeasurably quickened and

strengthened. Society is the genial element wherein his nature first

lives and grows; the solitary man were but a small portion of himself,

and must continue forever folded in, stunted and only half alive.

"Already," says a deep Thinker, with more meaning than will disclose

itself at once, "my opinion, my conviction, gains _infinitely_ in

strength and sureness, the moment a second mind has adopted it." Such,

even in its simplest form, is association; so wondrous the communion

of soul with soul as directed to the mere act of Knowing! In other

higher acts, the wonder is still more manifest; as in that portion of

our being which we name the Moral: for properly, indeed, all communion

is of a moral sort, whereof such intellectual communion (in the act of

knowing) is itself an example. But with regard to Morals strictly so

called, it is in Society, we might almost say, that Morality begins;

here at least it takes an altogether new form, and on every side, as

in living growth, expands itself. The Duties of Man to himself, to

what is Highest in himself, make but the First Table of the Law: to

the First Table is now superadded a Second, with the Duties of Man to

his Neighbour; whereby also the significance of the First now assumes

its true importance. Man has joined himself with man; soul acts and

reacts on soul; a mystic miraculous unfathomable Union establishes

itself; Life, in all its elements, has become intensated, consecrated.

The lightning-spark of Thought, generated, or say rather

heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, awakens its express likeness in

another mind, in a thousand other minds, and all blaze up together in

combined fire; reverberated from mind to mind, fed also with fresh

fuel in each, it acquires incalculable new light as Thought,

incalculable new heat as converted into Action. By and by, a common

store of Thought can accumulate, and be transmitted as an everlasting

possession: Literature, whether as preserved in the memory of Bards,

in Runes and Hieroglyphs engraved on stone, or in Books of written or

printed paper, comes into existence, and begins to play its wondrous

part. Polities are formed; the weak submitting to the strong; with a

willing loyalty, giving obedience that he may receive guidance: or say

rather, in honour of our nature, the ignorant submitting to the wise;

for so it is in all even the rudest communities, man never yields

himself wholly to brute Force, but always to moral Greatness; thus the

universal title of respect, from the Oriental _Sheik_, from the

_Sachem_ of the Red Indians, down to our English _Sir_, implies only

that he whom we mean to honour is our _senior_. Last, as the crown and

all-supporting keystone of the fabric, Religion arises. The devout

meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a

transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty,

continuance, when it is shared-in by his brother men. "Where two or

three are gathered together" in the name of the Highest, then first

does the Highest, as it is written, "appear among them to bless them;"

then first does an Altar and act of united Worship open a way from

Earth to Heaven; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob's-ladder, the

heavenly Messengers will travel, with glad tidings and unspeakable

gifts for men. Such is Society, the vital articulation of many

individuals into a new collective individual: greatly the most

important of man's attainments on this earth; that in which, and by

virtue of which, all his other attainments and attempts find their

arena, and have their value. Considered well, Society is the standing

wonder of our existence; a true region of the Supernatural; as it

were, a second all-embracing Life, wherein our first individual Life

becomes doubly and trebly alive, and whatever of Infinitude was in us

bodies itself forth, and becomes visible and active.

To figure Society as endowed with life is scarcely a metaphor; but

rather the statement of a fact by such imperfect methods as language

affords. Look at it closely, that mystic Union, Nature's highest work

with man, wherein man's volition plays an indispensable yet so

subordinate a part, and the small Mechanical grows so mysteriously and

indissolubly out of the infinite Dynamical, like Body out of

Spirit,--is truly enough vital, what we can call vital, and bears the

distinguishing character of life. In the same style also, we can say

that Society has its periods of sickness and vigour, of youth,

manhood, decrepitude, dissolution and new-birth; in one or other of

which stages we may, in all times, and all places where men inhabit,

discern it; and do ourselves, in this time and place, whether as

cooperating or as contending, as healthy members or as diseased ones,

to our joy and sorrow, form part of it. The question, What is the

actual condition of Society? has in these days unhappily become

important enough. No one of us is unconcerned in that question; but

for the majority of thinking men a true answer to it, such is the

state of matters, appears almost as the one thing needful. Meanwhile,

as the true answer, that is to say, the complete and fundamental

answer and settlement, often as it has been demanded, is nowhere

forthcoming, and indeed by its nature is impossible, any honest

approximation towards such is not without value. The feeblest light,

or even so much as a more precise recognition of the darkness, which

is the first step to attainment of light, will be welcome.

This once understood, let it not seem idle if we remark that here too

our old Aphorism holds; that again in the Body Politic, as in the

animal body, the sign of right performance is Unconsciousness. Such

indeed is virtually the meaning of that phrase, "artificial state of

society," as contrasted with the natural state, and indicating

something so inferior to it. For, in all vital things, men distinguish

an Artificial and a Natural; founding on some dim perception or

sentiment of the very truth we here insist on: the artificial is the

conscious, mechanical; the natural is the unconscious, dynamical.

Thus, as we have an artificial Poetry, and prize only the natural; so

likewise we have an artificial Morality, an artificial Wisdom, an

artificial Society. The artificial Society is precisely one that knows

its own structure, its own internal functions; not in watching, not in

knowing which, but in working outwardly to the fulfilment of its aim,

does the wellbeing of a Society consist. Every Society, every Polity,

has a spiritual principle; is the embodiment, tentative and more or

less complete, of an Idea: all its tendencies of endeavour,

specialties of custom, its laws, politics and whole procedure (as the

glance of some Montesquieu, across innumerable superficial

entanglements, can partly decipher), are prescribed by an Idea, and

flow naturally from it, as movements from the living source of motion.

This Idea, be it of devotion to a man or class of men, to a creed, to

an institution, or even, as in more ancient times, to a piece of land,

is ever a true Loyalty; has in it something of a religious, paramount,

quite infinite character; it is properly the Soul of the State, its

Life; mysterious as other forms of Life, and like these working

secretly, and in a depth beyond that of consciousness.

Accordingly, it is not in the vigorous ages of a Roman Republic that

Treatises of the Commonwealth are written: while the Decii are rushing

with devoted bodies on the enemies of Rome, what need of preaching

Patriotism? The virtue of Patriotism has already sunk from its

pristine all-transcendant condition, before it has received a name. So

long as the Commonwealth continues rightly athletic, it cares not to

dabble in anatomy. Why teach obedience to the Sovereign; why so much

as admire it, or separately recognise it, while a divine idea of

Obedience perennially inspires all men? Loyalty, like Patriotism, of

which it is a form, was not praised till it had begun to decline; the

_Preux Chevaliers_ first became rightly admirable, when "dying for

their king" had ceased to be a habit with chevaliers. For if the

mystic significance of the State, let this be what it may, dwells

vitally in every heart, encircles every life as with a second higher

life, how should it stand self-questioning? It must rush outward, and

express itself by works. Besides, if perfect, it is there as by

necessity, and does not excite inquiry: it is also by nature infinite,

has no limits; therefore can be circumscribed by no conditions and

definitions; cannot be reasoned of; except _musically_, or in the

language of Poetry, cannot yet so much as be spoken of.

In those days, Society was what we name healthy, sound at heart. Not

indeed without suffering enough; not without perplexities, difficulty

on every side: for such is the appointment of man; his highest and

sole blessedness is, that he toil, and know what to toil at: not in

ease, but in united victorious labour, which is at once evil and the

victory over evil, does his Freedom lie. Nay, often, looking no deeper

than such superficial perplexities of the early Time, historians have

taught us that it was all one mass of contradiction and disease; and

in the antique Republic, or feudal Monarchy, have seen only the

confused chaotic quarry, not the robust labourer, or the stately

edifice he was building of it. If Society, in such ages, had its

difficulty, it had also its strength: if sorrowful masses of rubbish

so encumbered it, the tough sinews to hurl them aside, with

indomitable heart, were not wanting. Society went along without

complaint; did not stop to scrutinise itself, to say, How well I

perform, or, Alas, how ill! Men did not yet feel themselves to be "the

envy of surrounding nations;" and were enviable on that very account.

Society was what we can call _whole_, in both senses of the word. The

individual man was in himself a whole, or complete union; and could

combine with his fellows as the living member of a greater whole. For

all men, through their life, were animated by one great Idea; thus all

efforts pointed one way, everywhere there was _wholeness_. Opinion and

Action had not yet become disunited; but the former could still

produce the latter, or attempt to produce it; as the stamp does its

impression while the wax is not hardened. Thought, and the voice of

thought were also a unison; thus, instead of Speculation, we had

Poetry; Literature, in its rude utterance, was as yet a heroic Song,

perhaps too a devotional Anthem. Religion was everywhere; Philosophy

lay hid under it, peacefully included in it. Herein, as in the

life-centre of all, lay the true health and oneness. Only at a later

era must Religion split itself into Philosophies; and thereby, the

vital union of Thought being lost, disunion and mutual collision in

all provinces of Speech and Action more and more prevail. For if the

Poet, or Priest, or by whatever title the inspired thinker may be

named, is the sign of vigour and well-being; so likewise is the

Logician, or uninspired thinker, the sign of disease, probably of

decrepitude and decay. Thus, not to mention other instances, one of

them much nearer hand,--so soon as Prophecy among the Hebrews had

ceased, then did the reign of Argumentation begin; and the ancient

Theocracy, in its Sadducecisms and Phariseeisms, and vain jangling of

sects and doctors, give token that the _soul_ of it had fled, and that

the _body_ itself, by natural dissolution, "with the old forces still

at work, but working in reverse order," was on the road to final

disappearance.

* * * * *

We might pursue this question into innumerable other ramifications;

and everywhere, under new shapes, find the same truth, which we here

so imperfectly enunciate, disclosed; that throughout the whole world

of man, in all manifestations and performances of his nature, outward

and inward, personal and social, the Perfect, the Great is a mystery

to itself, knows not itself; whatsoever does know itself is already

little, and more or less imperfect. Or otherwise, we may say,

Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; Consciousness to a

diseased mixture and conflict of life and death: Unconsciousness is

the sign of creation; Consciousness, at best, that of manufacture. So

deep, in this existence of ours, is the significance of Mystery. Well

might the Ancients make Silence a god; for it is the element of all

godhood, infinitude, or transcendental greatness; at once the source

and the ocean wherein all such begins and ends. In the same sense too,

have Poets sung "Hymns to the Night;" as if Night were nobler than

Day; as if Day were but a small motley-coloured veil spread

transiently over the infinite bosom of Night, and did but deform and

hide from us its purely transparent, eternal deeps. So likewise have

they spoken and sung as if Silence were the grand epitome and complete

sum-total of all Harmony; and Death, what mortals call Death, properly

the beginning of Life. Under such figures, since except in figures

there is no speaking of the Invisible, have men endeavoured to express

a great Truth;--a Truth, in our Times, as nearly as is perhaps

possible, forgotten by the most; which nevertheless continues forever

true, forever all-important, and will one day, under new figures, be

again brought home to the bosoms of all.

But indeed, in a far lower sense, the rudest mind has still some

intimation of the greatness there is in Mystery. If Silence was made a

god of by the Ancients, he still continues a government-clerk among us

Moderns. To all quacks, moreover, of what sort soever, the effect of

Mystery is well known: here and there some Cagliostro, even in latter

days, turns it to notable account: the blockhead also, who is

ambitious, and has no talent, finds sometimes in "the talent of

silence," a kind of succedaneum. Or again, looking on the opposite

side of the matter, do we not see, in the common understanding of

mankind, a certain distrust, a certain contempt of what is altogether

self-conscious and mechanical? As nothing that is wholly seen through

has other than a trivial character; so anything professing to be

great, and yet wholly to see through itself, is already known to be

false, and a failure. The evil repute your "theoretical men" stand in,

the acknowledged inefficiency of "paper constitutions," and all that

class of objects, are instances of this. Experience often repeated,

and perhaps a certain instinct of something far deeper that lies under

such experiences, has taught men so much. They know beforehand, that

the loud is generally the insignificant, the empty. Whatsoever can

proclaim itself from the house-tops may be fit for the hawker, and for

those multitudes that must needs buy of him; but for any deeper use,

might as well continue unproclaimed. Observe too, how the converse of

the proposition holds; how the insignificant, the empty, is usually

the loud; and, after the manner of a drum, is loud even because of its

emptiness. The uses of some Patent Dinner Calefactor can be bruited

abroad over the whole world in the course of the first winter; those

of the Printing Press are not so well seen into for the first three

centuries: the passing of the Select-Vestries Bill raises more noise

and hopeful expectancy among mankind than did the promulgation of the

Christian Religion. Again, and again, we say, the great, the creative

and enduring is ever a secret to itself; only the small, the barren

and transient is otherwise.

* * * * *

If we now, with a practical medical view, examine, by this same test

of Unconsciousness, the Condition of our own Era, and of man's Life

therein, the diagnosis we arrive at is nowise of a flattering sort.

The state of Society in our days is, of all possible states, the least

an unconscious one: this is specially the Era when all manner of

Inquiries into what was once the unfelt, involuntary sphere of man's

existence, find their place, and, as it were, occupy the whole domain

of thought. What, for example, is all this that we hear, for the last

generation or two, about the Improvement of the Age, the Spirit of the

Age, Destruction of Prejudice, Progress of the Species, and the March

of Intellect, but an unhealthy state of self-sentience, self-survey;

the precursor and prognostic of still worse health? That Intellect do

march, if possible at double-quick time, is very desirable;

nevertheless, why should she turn round at every stride, and cry: See

you what a stride I have taken! Such a marching of Intellect is

distinctly of the spavined kind; what the Jockeys call "all action and

no go." Or at best, if we examine well, it is the marching of that

gouty Patient, whom his Doctors had clapt on a metal floor

artificially heated to the searing point, so that he was obliged to

march, and did march with a vengeance--nowhither. Intellect did not

awaken for the first time yesterday; but has been under way from

Noah's Flood downwards: greatly her best progress, moreover, was in

the old times, when she said nothing about it. In those same "dark

ages," Intellect (metaphorically as well as literally) could invent

_glass_, which now she has enough ado to grind into _spectacles_.

Intellect built not only Churches, but a Church, _the_ Church, based

on this firm Earth, yet reaching up, and leading up, as high as

Heaven; and now it is all she can do to keep its doors bolted, that

there be no tearing of the Surplices, no robbery of the Alms-box. She

built a Senate-house likewise, glorious in its kind; and now it costs

her a well-nigh mortal effort to sweep it clear of vermin, and get the

roof made rain-tight.

But the truth is, with Intellect, as with most other things, we are

now passing from that first or boastful stage of Self-sentience into

the second or painful one: out of these often-asseverated declarations

that "our system is in high order," we come now, by natural sequence,

to the melancholy conviction that it is altogether the reverse. Thus,

for instance, in the matter of Government, the period of the

"Invaluable Constitution" must be followed by a Reform Bill; to

laudatory De Lolmes succeed objurgatory Benthams. At any rate, what

Treatises on the Social Contract, on the Elective Franchise, the

Rights of Man, the Rights of Property, Codifications, Institutions,

Constitutions, have we not, for long years, groaned under! Or again,

with a wider survey, consider those Essays on Man, Thoughts on Man,

Inquiries concerning Man; not to mention Evidences of the Christian

Faith, Theories of Poetry, Considerations on the Origin of Evil, which

during the last century have accumulated on us to a frightful extent.

Never since the beginning of Time was there, that we hear or read of,

so intensely self-conscious a Society. Our whole relations to the

Universe and to our fellow man have become an Inquiry, a Doubt;

nothing will go on of its own accord, and do its function quietly; but

all things must be probed into, the whole working of man's world be

anatomically studied. Alas, anatomically studied, that it may be

medically aided! Till at length indeed, we have come to such a pass,

that except in this same _medicine_, with its artifices and

appliances, few can so much as imagine any strength or hope to remain

for us. The whole Life of Society must now be carried on by drugs:

doctor after doctor appears with his nostrum, of Cooperative

Societies, Universal Suffrage, Cottage-and-Cow systems, Repression of

Population, Vote by Ballot. To such height has the dyspepsia of

Society reached; as indeed the constant grinding internal pain, or

from time to time the mad spasmodic throes, of all Society do

otherwise too mournfully indicate.

Far be it from us to attribute, as some unwise persons do, the disease

itself to this unhappy sensation that there is a disease! The

Encyclopedists did not produce the troubles of France; but the

troubles of France produced the Encyclopedists, and much else. The

Self-consciousness is the symptom merely; nay, it is also the attempt

towards cure. We record the fact, without special censure; not

wondering that Society should feel itself, and in all ways complain of

aches and twinges, for it has suffered enough. Napoleon was but a

Job's-comforter, when he told his wounded Staff-officer, twice

unhorsed by cannon-balls, and with half his limbs blown to pieces:

"_Vous vous ecoutez trop!_"

On the outward, as it were Physical diseases of Society, it were

beside our purpose to insist here. These are diseases which he who

runs may read; and sorrow over, with or without hope. Wealth has

accumulated itself into masses; and Poverty, also in accumulation

enough, lies impassably separated from it; opposed, uncommunicating,

like forces in positive and negative poles. The gods of this lower

world sit aloft on glittering thrones, less happy than Epicurus's

gods, but as indolent, as impotent; while the boundless living chaos

of Ignorance and Hunger welters terrific, in its dark fury, under

their feet. How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulchre;

outwardly all pomp and strength; but inwardly full of horror and

despair and dead-men's bones! Iron highways, with their wains

firewinged, are uniting all ends of the firm Land; quays and moles,

with their innumerable stately fleets, tame the Ocean into our pliant

bearer of burdens; Labour's thousand arms, of sinew and of metal,

all-conquering everywhere, from the tops of the mountain down to the

depths of the mine and the caverns of the sea, ply unweariedly for the

service of man: yet man remains unserved. He has subdued this Planet,

his habitation and inheritance; yet reaps no profit from the victory.

Sad to look upon: in the highest stage of civilisation, nine-tenths of

mankind must struggle in the lowest battle of savage or even animal

man, the battle against Famine. Countries are rich, prosperous in all

manner of increase, beyond example: but the Men of those countries are

poor, needier than ever of all sustenance outward and inward; of

Belief, of Knowledge, of Money, of Food. The rule, _Sic vos non

vobis_, never altogether to be got rid of in men's Industry, now

presses with such incubus weight, that Industry must shake it off, or

utterly be strangled under it; and, alas, can as yet but gasp and

rave, and aimlessly struggle, like one in the final deliration. Thus

Change, or the inevitable approach of Change, is manifest everywhere.

In one Country we have seen lava-torrents of fever-frenzy envelop all

things; Government succeed Government, like the phantasms of a dying

brain. In another Country, we can even now see, in maddest

alternation, the Peasant governed by such guidance as this: To labour

earnestly one month in raising wheat, and the next month labour

earnestly in burning it. So that Society, were it not by nature

immortal, and its death ever a new-birth, might appear, as it does in

the eyes of some, to be sick to dissolution, and even now writhing in

its last agony. Sick enough we must admit it to be, with disease

enough, a whole nosology of diseases; wherein he perhaps is happiest

that is not called to prescribe as physician;--wherein, however, one

small piece of policy, that of summoning the Wisest in the

Commonwealth, by the sole method yet known or thought of, to come

together and with their whole soul consult for it, might, but for late

tedious experiences, have seemed unquestionable enough.

But leaving this, let us rather look within, into the Spiritual

condition of Society, and see what aspects and prospects offer

themselves there. For after all, it is there properly that the secret

and origin of the whole is to be sought: the Physical derangements of

Society are but the image and impress of its Spiritual; while the

heart continues sound, all other sickness is superficial, and

temporary. False Action is the fruit of false Speculation; let the

spirit of Society be free and strong, that is to say, let true

Principles inspire the members of Society, then neither can disorders

accumulate in its Practice; each disorder will be promptly, faithfully

inquired into, and remedied as it arises. But alas, with us the

Spiritual condition of Society is no less sickly than the Physical.

Examine man's internal world, in any of its social relations and

performances, here too all seems diseased self-consciousness,

collision and mutually-destructive struggle. Nothing acts from within

outwards in undivided healthy force; everything lies impotent, lamed,

its force turned inwards, and painfully "listens to itself."

To begin with our highest Spiritual function, with Religion, we might

ask, Whither has Religion now fled? Of Churches and their

establishments we here say nothing; nor of the unhappy domains of

Unbelief, and how innumerable men, blinded in their minds, must "live

without God in the world;" but, taking the fairest side of the matter,

we ask, What is the nature of that same Religion, which still lingers

in the hearts of the few who are called, and call themselves,

specially the Religious? Is it a healthy religion, vital, unconscious

of itself; that shines forth spontaneously in doing of the Work, or

even in preaching of the Word? Unhappily, no. Instead of heroic martyr

Conduct, and inspired and soul-inspiring Eloquence, whereby Religion

itself were brought home to our living bosoms, to live and reign

there, we have "Discourses on the Evidences," endeavouring, with

smallest result, to make it probable that such a thing as Religion

exists. The most enthusiastic Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, but

keep describing how it should and might be preached: to awaken the

sacred fire of faith, as by a sacred contagion, is not their

endeavour; but, at most, to describe how Faith shows and acts, and

scientifically distinguish true Faith from false. Religion, like all

else, is conscious of itself, listens to itself; it becomes less and

less creative, vital; more and more mechanical. Considered as a whole,

the Christian Religion of late ages has been continually dissipating

itself into Metaphysics; and threatens now to disappear, as some

rivers do, in deserts of barren sand.

Of Literature, and its deep-seated, wide-spread maladies, why speak?

Literature is but a branch of Religion, and always participates in its

character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still

shows any greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main

stem. Now, apart from the subterranean and tartarean regions of

Literature;--leaving out of view the frightful, scandalous statistics

of Puffing, the mystery of Slander, Falsehood, Hatred and other

convulsion-work of rabid Imbecility, and all that has rendered

Literature on that side a perfect "Babylon the mother of

Abominations," in very deed making the world "drunk" with the wine of

her iniquity;--forgetting all this, let us look only to the regions of

the upper air; to such Literature as can be said to have some attempt

towards truth in it, some tone of music, and if it be not poetical, to

hold of the poetical. Among other characteristics, is not this

manifest enough: that it knows itself? Spontaneous devotedness to the

object, being wholly possessed by the object, what we can call

Inspiration, has well-nigh ceased to appear in Literature. Which

melodious Singer forgets that he is singing melodiously? We have not

the love of greatness, but the love of the love of greatness. Hence

infinite Affectations, Distractions; in every case inevitable Error.

Consider, for one example, this peculiarity of Modern Literature, the

sin that has been named View-hunting. In our elder writers, there are

no paintings of scenery for its own sake; no euphuistic gallantries

with Nature, but a constant heartlove for her, a constant dwelling in

communion with her. View-hunting, with so much else that is of kin to

it, first came decisively into action through the _Sorrows of Werter_;

which wonderful Performance, indeed, may in many senses be regarded as

the progenitor of all that has since become popular in Literature;

whereof, in so far as concerns spirit and tendency, it still offers

the most instructive image; for nowhere, except in its own country,

above all in the mind of its illustrious Author, has it yet fallen

wholly obsolete. Scarcely ever, till that late epoch, did any

worshipper of Nature become entirely aware that he was worshipping,

much to his own credit; and think of saying to himself: Come, let us

make a description! Intolerable enough: when every puny whipster draws

out his pencil, and insists on painting you a scene; so that the

instant you discern such a thing as "wavy outline," "mirror of the

lake," "stern headland," or the like, in any Book, you must timorously

hasten on; and scarcely the Author of Waverley himself can tempt you

not to skip.

Nay, is not the diseased self-conscious state of Literature disclosed

in this one fact, which lies so near us here, the prevalence of

Reviewing! Sterne's wish for a reader "that would give up the reins of

his imagination into his author's hands, and be pleased he knew not

why, and cared not wherefore," might lead him a long journey now.

Indeed, for our best class of readers, the chief pleasure, a very

stinted one, is this same knowing of the Why; which many a Kames and

Bossu has been, ineffectually enough, endeavouring to teach us: till

at last these also have laid down their trade; and now your Reviewer

is a mere _taster_; who tastes, and says, by the evidence of such

palate, such tongue, as he has got, It is good, It is bad. Was it thus

that the French carried out certain inferior creatures on their

Algerine Expedition, to taste the wells for them, and try whether they

were poisoned? Far be it from us to disparage our own craft, whereby

we have our living! Only we must note these things: that Reviewing

spreads with strange vigour; that such a man as Byron reckons the

Reviewer and the Poet equal; that at the last Leipzig Fair, there was

advertised a Review of Reviews. By and by it will be found that all

Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review; and as in

London routs, we have to _do_ nothing, but only to _see_ others do

nothing.--Thus does Literature also, like a sick thing,

superabundantly "listen to itself."

No less is this unhealthy symptom manifest, if we cast a glance on our

Philosophy, on the character of our speculative Thinking. Nay already,

as above hinted, the mere existence and necessity of a Philosophy is

an evil. Man is sent hither not to question, but to work: "the end of

man," it was long ago written, "is an Action, not a Thought." In the

perfect state, all Thought were but the picture and inspiring symbol

of Action; Philosophy, except as Poetry and Religion, would have no

being. And yet how, in this imperfect state, can it be avoided, can it

be dispensed with? Man stands as in the centre of Nature; his fraction

of Time encircled by Eternity, his handbreadth of Space encircled by

Infinitude: how shall he forbear asking himself, What am I; and

Whence; and Whither? How too, except in slight partial hints, in kind

asseverations and assurances, such as a mother quiets her fretfully

inquisitive child with, shall he get answer to such inquiries?

The disease of Metaphysics, accordingly, is a perennial one. In all

ages, those questions of Death and Immortality, Origin of Evil,

Freedom and Necessity, must, under new forms, anew make their

appearance; ever, from time to time, must the attempt to shape for

ourselves some Theorem of the Universe be repeated. And ever

unsuccessfully: for what Theorem of the Infinite can the Finite render

complete? We, the whole species of Mankind, and our whole existence

and history, are but a floating speck in the illimitable ocean of the

All; yet _in_ that ocean; indissoluble portion thereof; partaking of

its infinite tendencies: borne this way and that by its deep-swelling

tides, and grand ocean currents;--of which what faintest chance is

there that we should ever exhaust the significance, ascertain the

goings and comings? A region of Doubt, therefore, hovers forever in

the background; in Action alone can we have certainty. Nay properly

Doubt is the indispensable inexhaustible material whereon Action

works, which Action has to fashion into Certainty and Reality; only on

a canvas of Darkness, such is man's way of being, could the

many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine.

Thus if our eldest system of Metaphysics is as old as the _Book of

Genesis_, our latest is that of Mr. Thomas Hope, published only within

the current year. It is a chronic malady that of Metaphysics, as we

said, and perpetually recurs on us. At the utmost there is a better

and a worse in it; a stage of convalescence, and a stage of relapse

with new sickness: these forever succeed each other, as is the nature

of all Life-movement here below. The first, or convalescent stage, we

might also name that of Dogmatical or Constructive Metaphysics; when

the mind constructively endeavours to scheme out, and assert for

itself an actual Theorem of the Universe, and therewith for a time

rests satisfied. The second or sick stage might be called that of

Sceptical or Inquisitory Metaphysics; when the mind having widened its

sphere of vision, the existing Theorem of the Universe no longer

answers the phenomena, no longer yields contentment; but must be torn

in pieces, and certainty anew sought for in the endless realms of

denial. All Theologies and sacred Cosmogonies belong, in some measure,

to the first class; in all Pyrrhonism, from Pyrrho down to Hume and

the innumerable disciples of Hume, we have instances enough of the

second. In the former, so far as it affords satisfaction, a temporary

anodyne to doubt, an arena for wholesome action, there may be much

good; indeed in this case, it holds rather of Poetry than of

Metaphysics, might be called Inspiration rather than Speculation. The

latter is Metaphysics proper; a pure, unmixed, though from time to

time a necessary evil.

For truly, if we look into it, there is no more fruitless endeavour

than this same, which the Metaphysician proper toils in: to educe

Conviction out of Negation. How, by merely testing and rejecting what

is not, shall we ever attain knowledge of what is? Metaphysical

Speculation, as it begins in No or Nothingness, so it must needs end

in Nothingness; circulates and must circulate in endless vortices;

creating, swallowing--itself. Our being is made up of Light and

Darkness, the Light resting on the Darkness, and balancing it;

everywhere there is Dualism, Equipoise; a perpetual Contradiction

dwells in us: "where shall I place myself to escape from my own

shadow?" Consider it well, Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to

rise above the mind; to environ, and shut in, or as we say,

_comprehend_ the mind. Hopeless struggle, for the wisest, as for the

foolishest! What strength of sinew, or athletic skill, will enable the

stoutest athlete to fold his own body in his arms, and, by lifting,

lift up _himself_? The Irish Saint swam the Channel "carrying his head

in his teeth;" but the feat has never been imitated.

That this is the age of Metaphysics, in the proper, or sceptical

Inquisitory sense; that there was a necessity for its being such an

age, we regard as our indubitable misfortune. From many causes, the

arena of free Activity has long been narrowing, that of sceptical

Inquiry becoming more and more universal, more and more perplexing.

The Thought conducts not to the Deed; but in boundless chaos,

self-devouring, engenders monstrosities, fantasms, fire-breathing

chimeras. Profitable Speculation were this: What is to be done; and

How is it to be done? But with us not so much as the What can be got

sight of. For some generations, all Philosophy has been a painful,

captious, hostile question towards everything in the Heaven above, and

in the Earth beneath: Why art thou there? Till at length it has come

to pass that the worth and authenticity of all things seems dubitable

or deniable: our best effort must be unproductively spent not in

working, but in ascertaining our mere Whereabout, and so much as

whether we are to work at all. Doubt, which, as was said, ever hangs

in the background of our world, has now become our middle-ground and

foreground; whereon, for the time, no fair Life-picture can be

painted, but only the dark air-canvas itself flow round us,

bewildering and benighting.

Nevertheless, doubt as we will, man is actually Here; not to ask

questions, but to do work: in this time, as in all times, it must be

the heaviest evil for him, if his faculty of Action lie dormant, and

only that of sceptical Inquiry exert itself. Accordingly, whoever

looks abroad upon the world, comparing the Past with the Present, may

find that the practical condition of man in these days is one of the

saddest; burdened with miseries which are in a considerable degree

peculiar. In no time was man's life what he calls a happy one; in no

time can it be so. A perpetual dream there has been of Paradises, and

some luxurious Lubberland, where the brooks should run wine, and the

trees bend with ready-baked viands; but it was a dream merely; an

impossible dream. Suffering, contradiction, error, have their quite

perennial, and even indispensable abode in this Earth. Is not labour

the inheritance of man? And what labour for the present is joyous, and

not grievous? Labour, effort, is the very interruption of that ease,

which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness; and yet

without labour there were no ease, no rest, so much as conceivable.

Thus Evil, what we call Evil, must ever exist while man exists: Evil,

in the widest sense we can give it, is precisely the dark, disordered

material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order

and Good. Ever must Pain urge us to Labour; and only in free Effort

can any blessedness be imagined for us.

But if man has, in all ages, had enough to encounter, there has, in

most civilised ages, been an inward force vouchsafed him, whereby the

pressure of things outward might be withstood. Obstruction abounded;

but Faith also was not wanting. It is by Faith that man removes

mountains: while he had Faith, his limbs might be wearied with

toiling, his back galled with bearing; but the heart within him was

peaceable and resolved. In the thickest gloom there burnt a lamp to

guide him. If he struggled and suffered, he felt that it even should

be so; knew for what he was suffering and struggling. Faith gave him

an inward Willingness; a world of Strength wherewith to front a world

of Difficulty. The true wretchedness lies here: that the Difficulty

remain and the Strength be lost; that Pain cannot relieve itself in

free Effort; that we have the Labour, and want the Willingness. Faith

strengthens us, enlightens us, for all endeavours and endurances; with

Faith we can do all, and dare all, and life itself has a thousand

times been joyfully given away. But the sum of man's misery is even

this, that he feel himself crushed under the Juggernaut wheels, and

know that Juggernaut is no divinity, but a dead mechanical idol.

Now this is specially the misery which has fallen on man in our Era.

Belief, Faith has well-nigh vanished from the world. The youth on

awakening in this wondrous Universe, no longer finds a competent

theory of its wonders. Time was, when if he asked himself, What is

man, What are the duties of man? the answer stood ready written for

him. But now the ancient "ground-plan of the All" belies itself when

brought into contact with reality; Mother Church has, to the most,

become a superannuated Stepmother, whose lessons go disregarded; or

are spurned at, and scornfully gainsaid. For young Valour and thirst

of Action no Ideal Chivalry invites to heroism, prescribes what is

heroic: the old ideal of Manhood has grown obsolete, and the new is

still invisible to us, and we grope after it in darkness, one

clutching this phantom, another that; Werterism, Byronism, even

Brummelism, each has its day. For Contemplation and love of Wisdom, no

Cloister now opens its religious shades; the Thinker must, in all

senses, wander homeless, too often aimless, looking up to a Heaven

which is dead for him, round to an Earth which is deaf. Action, in

those old days, was easy, was voluntary, for the divine worth of human

things lay acknowledged; Speculation was wholesome, for it ranged

itself as the handmaid of Action; what could not so range itself died

out by its natural death, by neglect. Loyalty still hallowed

obedience, and made rule noble; there was still something to be loyal

to: the Godlike stood embodied under many a symbol in men's interests

and business; the Finite shadowed forth the Infinite; Eternity looked

through Time. The Life of man was encompassed and overcanopied by a

glory of Heaven, even as his dwelling-place by the azure vault.

How changed in these new days! Truly may it be said, the Divinity has

withdrawn from the Earth; or veils himself in that wide-wasting

Whirlwind of a departing Era, wherein the fewest can discern his

goings. Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of Necessity embraces

all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or

else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic Action is paralysed; for

what worth now remains unquestionable with him? At the fervid period

when his whole nature cries aloud for Action, there is nothing sacred

under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of

free Action are all but undiscoverable. Doubt storms-in on him through

every avenue; inquiries of the deepest, painfullest sort must be

engaged with; and the invincible energy of young years waste itself in

sceptical, suicidal cavillings; in passionate "questionings of

Destiny," whereto no answer will be returned.

For men, in whom the old perennial principle of Hunger (be it Hunger

of the poor Day-drudge who stills it with eighteenpence a-day, or of

the ambitious Placehunter who can nowise still it with so little)

suffices to fill up existence, the case is bad; but not the worst.

These men have an aim, such as it is; and can steer towards it, with

chagrin enough truly; yet, as their hands are kept full, without

desperation. Unhappier are they to whom a higher instinct has been

given; who struggle to be persons, not machines; to whom the Universe

is not a warehouse, or at best a fancy-bazaar, but a mystic temple and

hall of doom. For such men there lie properly two courses open. The

lower, yet still an estimable class, take up with worn-out Symbols of

the Godlike; keep trimming and trucking between these and Hypocrisy,

purblindly enough, miserably enough. A numerous intermediate class end

in Denial; and form a theory that there is no theory; that nothing is

certain in the world, except this fact of Pleasure being pleasant; so

they try to realise what trifling modicum of Pleasure they can come

at, and to live contented therewith, winking hard. Of these we speak

not here; but only of the second nobler class, who also have dared to

say No, and cannot yet say Yea; but feel that in the No they dwell as

in a Golgotha, where life enters not, where peace is not appointed

them. Hard, for most part, is the fate of such men; the harder the

nobler they are. In dim forecastings, wrestles within them the "Divine

Idea of the World," yet will nowhere visibly reveal itself. They have

to realise a Worship for themselves, or live unworshipping. The

Godlike has vanished from the world; and they, by the strong cry of

their soul's agony, like true wonder-workers, must again evoke its

presence. This miracle is their appointed task; which they must

accomplish, or die wretchedly: this miracle has been accomplished by

such; but not in our land; our land yet knows not of it. Behold a

Byron, in melodious tones, "cursing his day:" he mistakes earthborn

passionate Desire for heaven-inspired Freewill; without heavenly

loadstar, rushes madly into the dance of meteoric lights that hover on

the mad Mahlstrom; and goes down among its eddies. Hear a Shelley

filling the earth with inarticulate wail; like the infinite,

inarticulate grief and weeping of forsaken infants. A noble Friedrich

Schlegel, stupefied in that fearful loneliness, as of a silenced

battle-field, flies back to Catholicism; as a child might to its slain

mother's bosom, and cling there. In lower regions, how many a poor

Hazlitt must wander on God's verdant earth, like the Unblest on

burning deserts; passionately dig wells, and draw up only the dry

quicksand; believe that he is seeking Truth, yet only wrestle among

endless Sophisms, doing desperate battle as with spectre-hosts; and

die and make no sign!

To the better order of such minds any mad joy of Denial has long since

ceased: the problem is not now to deny, but to ascertain and perform.

Once in destroying the False, there was a certain inspiration; but now

the genius of Destruction has done its work, there is now nothing more

to destroy. The doom of the Old has long been pronounced, and

irrevocable; the Old has passed away; but, alas, the New appears not

in its stead; the Time is still in pangs of travail with the New. Man

has walked by the light of conflagrations, and amid the sound of

falling cities; and now there is darkness, and long watching till it

be morning. The voice even of the faithful can but exclaim: "As yet

struggles the twelfth hour of the Night: birds of darkness are on the

wing, spectres up-rear, the dead walk, the living dream.--Thou,

Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to dawn!"[52]

[Footnote 52: Jean Paul's _Hesperus_. Vorrede.]

Such being the condition, temporal and spiritual, of the world at our

Epoch, can we wonder that the world "listens to itself," and struggles

and writhes, everywhere externally and internally, like a thing in

pain? Nay, is not even this unhealthy action of the world's

Organisation, if the symptom of universal disease, yet also the

symptom and sole means of restoration and cure? The effort of Nature,

exerting her medicative force to cast out foreign impediments, and

once more become One, become whole? In Practice, still more in

Opinion, which is the precursor and prototype of Practice, there must

needs be collision, convulsion; much has to be ground away. Thought

must needs be Doubt and Inquiry, before it can again be Affirmation

and Sacred Precept. Innumerable "Philosophies of Man," contending in

boundless hubbub, must annihilate each other, before an inspired Poesy

and Faith for Man can fashion itself together.

* * * * *

From this stunning hubbub, a true Babylonish confusion of tongues, we

have here selected two Voices; less as objects of praise or

condemnation, than as signs how far the confusion has reached, what

prospect there is of its abating. Friedrich Schlegel's _Lectures_,

delivered at Dresden, and Mr. Hope's _Essay_, published in London, are

the latest utterances of European Speculation: far asunder in external

place, they stand at a still wider distance in inward purport; are,

indeed, so opposite and yet so cognate that they may, in many senses,

represent the two Extremes of our whole modern system of Thought; and

be said to include between them all the Metaphysical Philosophies, so

often alluded to here, which, of late times, from France, Germany,

England, have agitated and almost overwhelmed us. Both in regard to

matter and to form, the relation of these two Works is significant

enough.

Speaking first of their cognate qualities, let us remark, not without

emotion, one quite extraneous point of agreement; the fact that the

Writers of both have departed from this world; they have now finished

their search, and had all doubts resolved: while we listen to the

voice, the tongue that uttered it has gone silent forever. But the

fundamental, all-pervading similarity lies in this circumstance, well

worthy of being noted, that both these Philosophers are of the

Dogmatic or Constructive sort: each in its way is a kind of Genesis;

an endeavour to bring the Phenomena of man's Universe once more under

some theoretic Scheme: in both there is a decided principle of unity;

they strive after a result which shall be positive; their aim is not

to question, but to establish. This, especially if we consider with

what comprehensive concentrated force it is here exhibited, forms a

new feature in such works.

Under all other aspects, there is the most irreconcilable opposition;

a staring contrariety, such as might provoke contrasts, were there far

fewer points of comparison. If Schlegel's Work is the apotheosis of

Spiritualism; Hope's again is the apotheosis of Materialism: in the

one, all Matter is evaporated into a Phenomenon, and terrestrial Life

itself, with its whole doings and showings, held out as a Disturbance

(_Zerruettung_) produced by the _Zeitgeist_ (Spirit of Time); in the

other, Matter is distilled and sublimated into some semblance of

Divinity: the one regards Space and Time as mere forms of man's mind,

and without external existence or reality; the other supposes Space

and Time to be "incessantly created," and rayed-in upon us like a sort

of "gravitation." Such is their difference in respect of purport: no

less striking is it in respect of manner, talent, success and all

outward characteristics. Thus, if in Schlegel we have to admire the

power of Words, in Hope we stand astonished, it might almost be said,

at the want of an articulate Language. To Schlegel his Philosophic

Speech is obedient, dextrous, exact, like a promptly-ministering

genius; his names are so clear, so precise and vivid, that they almost

(sometimes altogether) become things for him: with Hope there is no

Philosophical Speech; but a painful, confused stammering, and

struggling after such; or the tongue, as in dotish forgetfulness,

maunders, low, long-winded, and speaks not the word intended, but

another; so that here the scarcely intelligible, in these endless

convolutions, becomes the wholly unreadable; and often we could ask,

as that mad pupil did of his tutor in Philosophy, "But whether is

Virtue a fluid, then, or a gas?" If the fact, that Schlegel, in the

city of Dresden, could find audience for such high discourse, may

excite our envy; this other fact, that a person of strong powers,

skilled in English Thought and master of its Dialect, could write the

_Origin and Prospects of Man_, may painfully remind us of the

reproach, that England has now no language for Meditation; that

England, the most calculative, is the least meditative, of all

civilised countries.

It is not our purpose to offer any criticism of Schlegel's Book; in

such limits as were possible here, we should despair of communicating

even the faintest image of its significance. To the mass of readers,

indeed, both among the Germans themselves, and still more elsewhere,

it nowise addresses itself, and may lie forever sealed. We point it

out as a remarkable document of the Time and of the Man; can recommend

it, moreover, to all earnest Thinkers, as a work deserving their best

regard; a work full of deep meditation, wherein the infinite mystery

of Life, if not represented, is decisively recognised. Of Schlegel

himself, and his character, and spiritual history, we can profess no

thorough or final understanding; yet enough to make us view him with

admiration and pity, nowise with harsh contemptuous censure; and must

say, with clearest persuasion, that the outcry of his being "a

renegade," and so forth, is but like other outcries, a judgment where

there was neither jury, nor evidence, nor judge. The candid reader, in

this Book itself, to say nothing of all the rest, will find traces of

a high, far-seeing, earnest spirit, to whom "Austrian Pensions," and

the Kaiser's crown, and Austria altogether, were but a light matter to

the finding and vitally appropriating of Truth. Let us respect the

sacred mystery of a Person; rush not irreverently into man's Holy of

Holies! Were the lost little one, as we said already, found "sucking

its dead mother, on the field of carnage," could it be other than a

spectacle for tears? A solemn mournful feeling comes over us when we

see this last Work of Friedrich Schlegel, the unwearied seeker, end

abruptly in the middle; and, as if he _had not_ yet found, as if

emblematically of much, end with an "_Aber--_," with a "But--!" This

was the last word that came from the Pen of Friedrich Schlegel: about

eleven at night he wrote it down, and there paused sick; at one in the

morning, Time for him had merged itself in Eternity; he was, as we

say, no more.

Still less can we attempt any criticism of Mr. Hope's new Book of

Genesis. Indeed, under any circumstances, criticism of it were now

impossible. Such an utterance could only be responded to in peals of

laughter; and laughter sounds hollow and hideous through the vaults of

the dead. Of this monstrous Anomaly, where all sciences are heaped and

huddled together, and the principles of all are, with a childlike

innocence, plied hither and thither, or wholly abolished in case of

need; where the First Cause is figured as a huge Circle, with nothing

to do but radiate "gravitation" towards its centre; and so construct a

Universe, wherein all, from the lowest cucumber with its coolness, up

to the highest seraph with his love, were but "gravitation," direct or

reflex, "in more or less central globes,"--what can we say, except,

with sorrow and shame, that it could have originated nowhere save in

England? It is a general agglomerate of all facts, notions, whims and

observations, as they lie in the brain of an English gentleman; as an

English gentleman, of unusual thinking power, is led to fashion them,

in his schools and in his world: all these thrown into the crucible,

and if not fused, yet soldered or conglutinated with boundless

patience; and now tumbled out here, heterogeneous, amorphous,

unspeakable, a world's wonder. Most melancholy must we name the whole

business; full of long-continued thought, earnestness, loftiness of

mind; not without glances into the Deepest, a constant fearless

endeavour after truth; and with all this nothing accomplished, but the

perhaps absurdest Book written in our century by a thinking man. A

shameful Abortion; which, however, need not now be smothered or

mangled, for it is already dead; only, in our love and sorrowing

reverence for the writer of _Anastasius_, and the heroic seeker of

Light, though not bringer thereof, let it be buried and forgotten.

* * * * *

For ourselves, the loud discord which jars in these two Works, in

innumerable works of the like import, and generally in all the Thought

and Action of this period, does not any longer utterly confuse us.

Unhappy who, in such a time, felt not, at all conjunctures,

ineradicably in his heart the knowledge that a God made this Universe,

and a Demon not! And shall Evil always prosper, then? Out of all Evil

comes Good; and no Good that is possible but shall one day be real.

Deep and sad as is our feeling that we stand yet in the bodeful Night;

equally deep, indestructible is our assurance that the Morning also

will not fail. Nay already, as we look round, streaks of a day-spring

are in the east; it is dawning; when the time shall be fulfilled, it

will be day. The progress of man towards higher and nobler

developments of whatever is highest and noblest in him, lies not only

prophesied to Faith, but now written to the eye of Observation, so

that he who runs may read.

One great step of progress, for example, we should say, in actual

circumstances, was this same; the clear ascertainment that we are in

progress. About the grand Course of Providence, and his final Purposes

with us, we can know nothing, or almost nothing: man begins in

darkness, ends in darkness; mystery is everywhere around us and in us,

under our feet, among our hands. Nevertheless so much has become

evident to every one, that this wondrous Mankind is advancing

somewhither; that at least all human things are, have been and forever

will be, in Movement and Change:--as, indeed, for beings that exist in

Time, by virtue of Time, and are made of Time, might have been long

since understood. In some provinces, it is true, as in Experimental

Science, this discovery is an old one; but in most others it belongs

wholly to these latter days. How often, in former ages, by eternal

Creeds, eternal Forms of Government and the like, has it been

attempted, fiercely enough, and with destructive violence, to chain

the Future under the Past: and to say to the Providence, whose ways

with man are mysterious, and through the great deep: Hitherto shalt

thou come, but no farther! A wholly insane attempt; and for man

himself, could it prosper, the frightfullest of all enchantments, a

very Life-in-Death. Man's task here below, the destiny of every

individual man, is to be in turns Apprentice and Workman; or say

rather, Scholar, Teacher, Discoverer: by nature he has a strength for

learning, for imitating; but also a strength for acting, for knowing

on his own account. Are we not in a world seen to be Infinite; the

relations lying closest together modified by those latest discovered

and lying farthest asunder? Could you ever spell-bind man into a

Scholar merely, so that he had nothing to discover, to correct; could

you ever establish a Theory of the Universe that were entire,

unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were

spiritually defunct, the Species we now name Man had ceased to exist.

But the gods, kinder to us than we are to ourselves, have forbidden

such suicidal acts. As Phlogiston is displaced by Oxygen, and the

Epicycles of Ptolemy by the Ellipses of Kepler; so does Paganism give

place to Catholicism, Tyranny to Monarchy, and Feudalism to

Representative Government,--where also the process does not stop.

Perfection of Practice, like completeness of Opinion, is always

approaching, never arrived; Truth, in the words of Schiller, _immer

wird, nie ist_; never _is_, always _is a-being_.

Sad, truly, were our condition did we know but this, that Change is

universal and inevitable. Launched into a dark shoreless sea of

Pyrrhonism, what would remain for us but to sail aimless, hopeless; or

make madly merry, while the devouring Death had not yet engulfed us?

As indeed, we have seen many, and still see many do. Nevertheless so

stands it not. The venerator of the Past (and to what pure heart is

the Past, in that "moonlight of memory," other than sad and holy?)

sorrows not over its departure, as one utterly bereaved. The true Past

departs not, nothing that was worthy in the Past departs; no Truth or

Goodness realised by man ever dies, or can die; but is all still here,

and, recognised or not, lives and works through endless changes. If

all things, to speak in the German dialect, are discerned by us, and

exist for us, in an element of Time, and therefore of Mortality and

Mutability; yet Time itself reposes on Eternity: the truly Great and

Transcendental has its basis and substance in Eternity; stands

revealed to us as Eternity in a vesture of Time. Thus in all Poetry,

Worship, Art, Society, as one form passes into another, nothing is

lost: it is but the superficial, as it were the _body_ only, that

grows obsolete and dies; under the mortal body lies a _soul_ which is

immortal; which anew incarnates itself in fairer revelation; and the

Present is the living sum-total of the whole Past.

In Change, therefore, there is nothing terrible, nothing supernatural:

on the contrary, it lies in the very essence of our lot and life in

this world. Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our

Works and Thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue

always the same? Change, indeed, is painful; yet ever needful: and if

Memory have its force and worth, so also has Hope. Nay, if we look

well to it, what is all Derangement, and necessity of great Change, in

itself such an evil, but the product simply of _increased resources_

which the old _methods_ can no longer administer; of new wealth which

the old coffers will no longer contain? What is it, for example, that

in our own day bursts asunder the bonds of ancient Political Systems,

and perplexes all Europe with the fear of Change, but even this: the

increase of social resources, which the old social methods will no

longer sufficiently administer? The new omnipotence of the

Steam-engine is hewing asunder quite other mountains than the

physical. Have not our economical distresses, those barnyard

Conflagrations themselves, the frightfullest madness of our mad epoch,

their rise also in what is a real increase: increase of Men; of human

Force; properly, in such a Planet as ours, the most precious of all

increases? It is true again, the ancient methods of administration

will no longer suffice. Must the indomitable millions, full of old

Saxon energy and fire, lie cooped up in this Western Nook, choking one

another, as in a Blackhole of Calcutta, while a whole fertile

untenanted Earth, desolate for want of the ploughshare, cries: Come

and till me, come and reap me? If the ancient Captains can no longer

yield guidance, new must be sought after: for the difficulty lies not

in nature, but in artifice; the European Calcutta-Blackhole has no

walls but air ones and paper ones.--So too, Scepticism itself, with

its innumerable mischiefs, what is it but the sour fruit of a most

blessed increase, that of Knowledge; a fruit too that will not always

continue _sour_?

In fact, much as we have said and mourned about the unproductive

prevalence of Metaphysics, it was not without some insight into the

use that lies in them. Metaphysical Speculation, if a necessary evil,

is the forerunner of much good. The fever of Scepticism must needs

burn itself out, and burn out thereby the Impurities that caused it;

then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of life,

which now struggles painfully, in the outer, thin and barren domain of

the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw into its inner

sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle; withdraw deeper than

ever into that domain of the Unconscious, by nature infinite and

inexhaustible; and that creatively work there. From that mystic

region, and from that alone, all wonders, all Poesies and Religions,

and Social Systems have proceeded: the like wonders, and greater and

higher, lie slumbering there; and, brooded on by the spirit of the

waters, will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the

Deep.

Of our Modern Metaphysics, accordingly, may not this already be said,

that if they have produced no Affirmation, they have destroyed much

Negation? It is a disease expelling a disease: the fire of Doubt, as

above hinted, consuming away the Doubtful; that so the Certain come to

light, and again lie visible on the surface. English or French

Metaphysics, in reference to this last stage of the speculative

process, are not what we allude to here; but only the Metaphysics of

the Germans. In France or England, since the days of Diderot and Hume,

though all thought has been of a sceptico-metaphysical texture, so far

as there was any Thought, we have seen no Metaphysics; but only more

or less ineffectual questionings whether such could be. In the

Pyrrhonism of Hume and the Materialism of Diderot, Logic had, as it

were, overshot itself, overset itself. Now, though the athlete, to use

our old figure, cannot, by much lifting, lift up his own body, he may

shift it out of a laming posture, and get to stand in a free one. Such

a service have German Metaphysics done for man's mind. The second

sickness of Speculation has abolished both itself and the first.

Friedrich Schlegel complains much of the fruitlessness, the tumult and

transiency of German as of all Metaphysics; and with reason. Yet in

that wide-spreading, deep-whirling vortex of Kantism, so soon

metamorphosed into Fichteism, Schellingism, and then as Hegelism, and

Cousinism, perhaps finally evaporated, is not the issue visible

enough, That Pyrrhonism and Materialism, themselves necessary

phenomena in European culture, have disappeared; and a Faith in

Religion has again become possible and inevitable for the scientific

mind; and the word _Free_-thinker no longer means the Denier or

Caviller, but the Believer, or the Ready to believe? Nay, in the

higher Literature of Germany, there already lies, for him that can

read it, the beginning of a new revelation of the Godlike; as yet

unrecognised by the mass of the world; but waiting there for

recognition, and sure to find it when the fit hour comes. This age

also is not wholly without its Prophets.

Again, under another aspect, if Utilitarianism, or Radicalism, or the

Mechanical Philosophy, or by whatever name it is called, has still its

long task to do; nevertheless we can now see through it and beyond it:

in the better heads, even among us English, it has become obsolete; as

in other countries, it has been, in such heads, for some forty or even

fifty years. What sound mind among the French, for example, now

fancies that men can be governed by "Constitutions;" by the never so

cunning mechanising of Self-interests, and all conceivable adjustments

of checking and balancing; in a word, by the best possible solution of

this quite insoluble and impossible problem, _Given a world of Knaves,

to produce an Honesty from their united action_? Were not experiments

enough of this kind tried before all Europe, and found wanting, when,

in that doomsday of France, the infinite gulf of human Passion

shivered asunder the thin rinds of Habit; and burst forth

all-devouring as in seas of Nether Fire? Which cunningly-devised

"Constitution," constitutional, republican, democratic, sansculottic,

could bind that raging chasm together? Were they not all burnt up,

like paper as they were, in its molten eddies; and still the fire-sea

raged fiercer than before? It is not by Mechanism, but by Religion;

not by Self-interest, but by Loyalty, that men are governed or

governable.

Remarkable it is, truly, how everywhere the eternal fact begins again

to be recognised, that there is a Godlike in human affairs; that God

not only made us and beholds us, but is in us and around us; that the

Age of Miracles, as it ever was, now is. Such recognition we discern

on all hands and in all countries: in each country after its own

fashion. In France, among the younger nobler minds, strangely enough;

where, in their loud contention with the Actual and Conscious, the

Ideal or Unconscious is, for the time, without exponent; where

Religion means not the parent of Polity, as of all that is highest,

but Polity itself; and this and the other earnest man has not been

wanting, who could audibly whisper to himself: "Go to, I will make a

religion." In England still more strangely; as in all things, worthy

England will have its way: by the shrieking of hysterical women,

casting out of devils, and other "gifts of the Holy Ghost." Well might

Jean Paul say, in this his twelfth hour of the Night, "the living

dream"; well might he say, "the dead walk." Meanwhile let us rejoice

rather that so much has been seen into, were it through never so

diffracting media, and never so madly distorted; that in all dialects,

though but half-articulately, this high Gospel begins to be preached:

Man is still Man. The genius of Mechanism, as was once before

predicted, will not always sit like a choking incubus on our soul; but

at length, when by a new magic Word the old spell is broken, become

our slave, and as familiar-spirit do all our bidding. "We are near

awakening when we dream that we dream."

He that has an eye and a heart can even now say: Why should I falter?

Light has come into the world; to such as love Light, so as Light must

be loved, with a boundless all-doing, all enduring love. For the rest,

let that vain struggle to read the mystery of the Infinite cease to

harass us. It is a mystery which, through all ages, we shall only read

here a line of, there another line of. Do we not already know that the

name of the Infinite is GOOD, is GOD? Here on Earth we are as

Soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of

the campaign, and have no need to understand it; seeing well what is

at our hand to be done. Let us do it like Soldiers, with submission,

with courage, with a heroic joy. "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do,

do it with all thy might." Behind us, behind each one of us, lie Six

Thousand Years of human effort, human conquest: before us is the

boundless Time, with its as yet uncreated and unconquered Continents

and Eldorados, which we, even we, have to conquer, to create; and from

the bosom of Eternity there shine for us celestial guiding stars.

"My inheritance how wide and fair!

Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir."

_Carlyle._