Moreover, although the subjectively true description is based on

accidental determinations, this is no reason for confounding it with an

arbitrary description. After all, the subjectively true emanates also

from the general constitution of the human soul, modified only in

particular directions by special circumstances; and the two kinds of

truth are equally necessary conditions of the human mind. If the

resolution of Cato were in contradiction with the general laws of human

nature, it could not be true, even subjectively. The only difference is

that the ideas of the second kind are enclosed in a narrower sphere of

action; because they imply, besides the general modes of the human mind,

other special determinations. Tragedy can make use of it with a very

intense effect, if it will renounce the extensive effect; still the

unconditionally true, what is purely human in human relations, will be

always the richest matter for the tragic poet, because this ground is the

only one on which tragedy, without ceasing to aspire to strength of

expression can be certain of the generality of this impression.

3d. Besides the vividness and the truth of tragic pictures, there must

also be completeness. None of the external data that are necessary to

give to the soul the desired movement ought to be omitted in the

representation. In order that the spectator, however Roman his

sentiments may be, may understand the moral state of Cato--that he may

make his own the high resolution of the republican, this resolution must

have its principle, not only in the mind of the Roman, but also in the

circumstances of the action. His external situation as well as his

internal situation must be before our eyes in all their consequences and

extent: and we must, lastly, have unrolled before us, without omitting a

single link, the whole chain of determinations to which are attached the

high resolution of the Roman as a necessary consequence. It may be said

in general that without this third condition, even the truth of a

painting cannot be recognized; for the similarity of circumstances, which

ought to be fully evident, can alone justify our judgment on the

similarity of the feelings, since it is only from the competition of

external conditions and of internal conditions that the affective

phenomenon results. To decide if we should have acted like Cato, we must

before all things transport ourselves in thought to the external

situation in which Cato was placed, and then only we are entitled to

place our feelings alongside his, to pronounce if there is or is not

likeness, and to give a verdict on the truth of these feelings.

A complete picture, as I understand it, is only possible by the

concatenation of several separate ideas, and of several separate

feelings, which are connected together as cause and effect, and which, in

their sum total, form one single whole for our cognitive faculty. All

these ideas, in order to affect us closely, must make an immediate

impression on our senses; and, as the narrative form always weakens this

impression, they must be produced by a present action. Thus, in order

that a tragic picture may be complete, a whole series is required of

particular actions, rendered sensuous and connected with the tragic

action as to one whole.

4th. It is necessary, lastly, that the ideas we receive of suffering

should act on us in a durable manner, to excite in us a high degree of

emotion. The affection created in us by the suffering of another is to

us a constrained state, from which we hasten to get free; and the

illusion so necessary for pity easily disappears in this case. It is,

therefore, a necessity to fasten the mind closely to these ideas, and not

to leave it the freedom to get rid too soon of the illusion. The

vividness of sudden ideas and the energy of sudden impressions, which in

rapid succession affect our senses, would not suffice for this end. For

the power of reaction in the mind is manifested in direct proportion to

the force with which the receptive faculty is solicited, and it is

manifested to triumph over this impression. Now, the poet who wishes to

move us ought not to weaken this independent power in us, for it is

exactly in the struggle between it and the suffering of our sensuous

nature that the higher charm of tragic emotions lies. In order that the

heart, in spite of that spontaneous force which reacts against sensuous

affections, may remain attached to the impressions of sufferings, it is,

therefore, necessary that these impressions should be cleverly suspended

at intervals, or even interrupted and intercepted by contrary

impressions, to return again with twofold energy and renew more

frequently the vividness of the first impression. Against the exhaustion

and languor that result from habit, the most effectual remedy is to

propose new objects to the senses; this variety retempers them, and the

gradation of impressions calls forth the innate faculty, and makes it

employ a proportionately stronger resistance. This faculty ought to be

incessantly occupied in maintaining its independence against the attacks

of the senses, but it must not triumph before the end, still less must it

succumb in the struggle. Otherwise, in the former case, suffering, and,

in the latter, moral activity is set aside; while it is the union of

these two that can alone elicit emotion. The great secret of the tragic

art consists precisely in managing this struggle well; it is in this that

it shows itself in the most brilliant light.

For this, a succession of alternate ideas is required: therefore a

suitable combination is wanted of several particular actions

corresponding with these different ideas; actions round which the

principal action and the tragic impression which it is wished to produce

through it unroll themselves like the yarn from the distaff, and end by

enlacing our souls in nets, through which they cannot break. Let me be

permitted to make use of a simile, by saying that the artist ought to

begin by gathering up with parsimonious care all the separate rays that

issue from the object by aid of which he seeks to produce the tragic

effect that he has in view, and these rays, in his hands, become a

lightning flash, setting the hearts of all on fire. The tyro casts

suddenly and vainly all the thunderbolts of horror and fear into the

soul; the artist, on the contrary, advances step by step to his end; he

only strikes with measured strokes, but he penetrates to the depth of our

soul, precisely because he has only stirred it by degrees.

If we now form the proper deductions from the previous investigation, the

following will be the conditions that form bases of the tragic art. It

is necessary, in the first place, that the object of our pity should

belong to our own species--I mean belong in the full sense of the term

and that the action in which it is sought to interest us be a moral

action; that is, an action comprehended in the field of free-will. It is

necessary, in the second place, that suffering, its sources, its degrees,

should be completely communicated by a series of events chained together.

It is necessary, in the third place, that the object of the passion be

rendered present to our senses, not in a mediate way and by description,

but immediately and in action. In tragedy art unites all these

conditions and satisfies them.

According to these principles tragedy might be defined as the poetic

imitation of a coherent series of particular events (forming a complete

action): an imitation which shows us man in a state of suffering, and

which has for its end to excite our pity.

I say first that it is the imitation of an action; and this idea of

imitation already distinguishes tragedy from the other kinds of poetry,

which only narrate or describe. In tragedy particular events are

presented to our imagination or to our senses at the very time of their

accomplishment; they are present, we see them immediately, without the

intervention of a third person. The epos, the romance, simple narrative,

even in their form, withdraw action to a distance, causing the narrator

to come between the acting person and the reader. Now what is distant

and past always weakens, as we know, the impressions and the sympathetic

affection; what is present makes them stronger. All narrative forms make

of the present something past; all dramatic form makes of the past a

present.

Secondly, I say that tragedy is the imitation of a succession of events,

of an action. Tragedy has not only to represent by imitation the

feelings and the affections of tragic persons, but also the events that

have produced these feelings, and the occasion on which these affections

are manifested. This distinguishes it from lyric poetry, and from its

different forms, which no doubt offer, like tragedy, the poetic imitation

of certain states of the mind, but not the poetic imitation of certain

actions. An elegy, a song, an ode, can place before our eyes, by

imitation, the moral state in which the poet actually is--whether he

speaks in his own name, or in that of an ideal person--a state determined

by particular circumstances; and up to this point these lyric forms seem

certainly to be incorporated in the idea of tragedy; but they do not

complete that idea, because they are confined to representing our

feelings. There are still more essential differences, if the end of

these lyrical forms and that of tragedy are kept in view.

I say, in the third place, that tragedy is the imitation of a complete

action. A separate event, though it be ever so tragic, does not in

itself constitute a tragedy. To do this, several events are required,

based one on the other, like cause and effect, and suitably connected so

as to form a whole; without which the truth of the feeling represented,

of the character, etc.--that is, their conformity with the nature of our

mind, a conformity which alone determines our sympathy--will not be

recognized. If we do not feel that we ourselves in similar circumstances

should have experienced the same feelings and acted in the same way, our

pity would not be awakened. It is, therefore, important that we should

be able to follow in all its concatenation the action that is represented

to us, that we should see it issue from the mind of the agent by a

natural gradation, under the influence and with the concurrence of

external circumstances. It is thus that we see spring up, grow, and come

to maturity under our eyes, the curiosity of Oedipus and the jealousy of

Iago. It is also the only way to fill up the great gap that exists

between the joy of an innocent soul and the torments of a guilty

conscience, between the proud serenity of the happy man and his terrible

catastrophe; in short, between the state of calm, in which the reader is

at the beginning, and the violent agitation he ought to experience at the

end.

A series of several connected incidents is required to produce in our

souls a succession of different movements which arrest the attention,

which, appealing to all the faculties of our minds, enliven our instinct

of activity when it is exhausted, and which, by delaying the satisfaction

of this instinct, do not kindle it the less. Against the suffering of

sensuous nature the human heart has only recourse to its moral nature as

counterpoise. It is, therefore, necessary, in order to stimulate this in

a more pressing manner, for the tragic poet to prolong the torments of

sense, but he must also give a glimpse to the latter of the satisfaction

of its wants, so as to render the victory of the moral sense so much the

more difficult and glorious. This twofold end can only be attained by a

succession of actions judiciously chosen and combined to this end.

In the fourth place, I say that tragedy is the poetic imitation of an

action deserving of pity, and, therefore, tragic imitation is opposed to

historic imitation. It would only be a historic imitation if it proposed

a historic end, if its principal object were to teach us that a thing has

taken place, and how it took place. On this hypothesis it ought to keep

rigorously to historic accuracy, for it would only attain its end by

representing faithfully that which really took place. But tragedy has a

poetic end, that is to say, it represents an action to move us, and to

charm our souls by the medium of this emotion. If, therefore, a matter

being given, tragedy treats it conformably with this poetic end, which is

proper to it, it becomes, by that very thing, free in its imitation. It

is a right--nay, more, it is an obligation--for tragedy to subject

historic truth to the laws of poetry; and to treat its matter in

conformity with requirements of this art. But as it cannot attain its

end, which is emotion, except on the condition of a perfect conformity

with the laws of nature, tragedy is, notwithstanding its freedom in

regard to history, strictly subject to the laws of natural truth, which,

in opposition to the truth of history, takes the name of poetic truth.

It may thus be understood how much poetic truth may lose, in many cases

by a strict observance of historic truth, and, reciprocally, how much it

may gain by even a very serious alteration of truth according to history.

As the tragic poet, like poets in general, is only subject to the laws of

poetic truth, the most conscientious observance of historic truth could

never dispense him from his duties as poet, and could never excuse in him

any infraction of poetic truth or lack of interest. It is, therefore,

betraying very narrow ideas on tragic art, or rather on poetry in

general, to drag the tragic poet before the tribunal of history, and to

require instruction of the man who by his very title is only bound to

move and charm you. Even supposing the poet, by a scrupulous submission

to historic truth, had stripped himself of his privilege of artist, and

that he had tacitly acknowledged in history a jurisdiction over his work,

art retains all her rights to summon him before its bar; and pieces such

as "The Death of Hermann," "Minona," "Fust of Stromberg," if they could

not stand the test on this side, would only be tragedies of mediocre

value, notwithstanding all the minuteness of costume--of national

costume--and of the manners of the time.

Fifthly, tragedy is the imitation of an action that lets us see man

suffering. The word man is essential to mark the limits of tragedy.

Only the suffering of a being like ourselves can move our pity. Thus,

evil genii, demons--or even men like them, without morals--and again pure

spirits, without our weaknesses, are unfit for tragedy. The very idea of

suffering implies a man in the full sense of the term. A pure spirit

cannot suffer, and a man approaching one will never awaken a high degree

of sympathy. A purely sensuous being can indeed have terrible suffering;

but without moral sense it is a prey to it, and a suffering with reason

inactive is a disgusting spectacle. The tragedian is right to prefer

mixed characters, and to place the ideal of his hero half way between

utter perversity and entire perfection.

Lastly, tragedy unites all these requisites to excite pity. Many means

the tragic poet takes might serve another object; but he frees himself

from all requirements not relating to this end, and is thereby obliged to

direct himself with a view to this supreme object.

The final aim to which all the laws tend is called the end of any style

of poetry. The means by which it attains this are its form. The end and

form are, therefore, closely related. The form is determined by the end,

and when the form is well observed the end is generally attained. Each

kind of poetry having a special end must have a distinguishing form.

What it exclusively produces it does in virtue of this special nature it

possesses. The end of tragedy is emotion; its form is the imitation of

an action that leads to suffering. Many kinds may have the same object

as tragedy, of emotion, though it be not their principal end. Therefore,

what distinguishes tragedy is the relation of its form to its end, the

way in which it attains its end by means of its subject.

If the end of tragedy is to awaken sympathy, and its form is the means of

attaining it, the imitation of an action fit to move must have all that

favors sympathy. Such is the form of tragedy.

The production of a kind of poetry is perfect when the form peculiar to

its kind has been used in the best way. Thus, a perfect tragedy is that

where the form is best used to awaken sympathy. Thus, the best tragedy

is that where the pity excited results more from the treatment of the

poet than the theme. Such is the ideal of a tragedy.

A good number of tragedies, though fine as poems are bad as dramas,

because they do not seek their end by the best use of tragic form.

Others, because they use the form to attain an end different from

tragedy. Some very popular ones only touch us on account of the subject,

and we are blind enough to make this a merit in the poet. There are

others in which we seem to have quite forgotten the object of the poet,

and, contented with pretty plays of fancy and wit, we issue with our

hearts cold from the theatre. Must art, so holy and venerable, defend

its cause by such champions before such judges? The indulgence of the

public only emboldens mediocrity: it causes genius to blush, and

discourages it.

OF THE CAUSE OF THE PLEASURE WE DERIVE FROM TRAGIC OBJECTS.

Whatever pains some modern aesthetics give themselves to establish,

contrary to general belief, that the arts of imagination and of feeling

have not pleasure for their object, and to defend them against this

degrading accusation, this belief will not cease: it reposes upon a solid

foundation, and the fine arts would renounce with a bad grace the

beneficent mission which has in all times been assigned to them, to

accept the new employment to which it is generously proposed to raise

them. Without troubling themselves whether they lower themselves in

proposing our pleasure as object, they become rather proud of the

advantages of reaching immediately an aim never attained except mediately

in other routes followed by the activity of the human mind. That the aim

of nature, with relation to man, is the happiness of man,--although he

ought of himself, in his moral conduct, to take no notice of this aim,--

is what, I think, cannot be doubted in general by any one who admits that

nature has an aim. Thus the fine arts have the same aim as nature, or

rather as the Author of nature, namely, to spread pleasure and render

people happy. It procures for us in play what at other more austere

sources of good to man we extract only with difficulty. It lavishes as a

pure gift that which elsewhere is the price of many hard efforts. With

what labor, what application, do we not pay for the pleasures of the

understanding; with what painful sacrifices the approbation of reason;

with what hard privations the joys of sense! And if we abuse these

pleasures, with what a succession of evils do we expiate excess! Art

alone supplies an enjoyment which requires no appreciable effort, which

costs no sacrifice, and which we need not repay with repentance. But who

could class the merit of charming in this manner with the poor merit of

amusing? who would venture to deny the former of these two aims of the

fine arts solely because they have a tendency higher than the latter.

The praiseworthy object of pursuing everywhere moral good as the supreme

aim, which has already brought forth in art so much mediocrity, has

caused also in theory a similar prejudice. To assign to the fine arts a

really elevated position, to conciliate for them the favor of the State,

the veneration of all men, they are pushed beyond their due domain, and a

vocation is imposed upon them contrary to their nature. It is supposed

that a great service is awarded to them by substituting for a frivolous

aim--that of charming--a moral aim; and their influence upon morality,

which is so apparent, necessarily militates against this pretension. It

is found illogical that the art which contributes in so great a measure

to the development of all that is most elevated in man, should produce

but accessorily this effect, and make its chief object an aim so vulgar

as we imagine pleasure to be. But this apparent contradiction it would

be very easy to conciliate if we had a good theory of pleasure, and a

complete system of aesthetic philosophy.

It would result from this theory that a free pleasure, as that which the

fine arts procure for us, rests wholly upon moral conditions, and all the

moral faculties of man are exercised in it. It would further result that

this pleasure is an aim which can never be attained but by moral means,

and consequently that art, to tend and perfectly attain to pleasure, as

to a real aim, must follow the road of healthy morals. Thus it is

perfectly indifferent for the dignity of art whether its aim should be a

moral aim, or whether it should reach only through moral means; for in

both cases it has always to do with the morality, and must be rigorously

in unison with the sentiment of duty; but for the perfection of art, it

is by no means indifferent which of the two should be the aim and which

the means. If it is the aim that is moral, art loses all that by which

it is powerful,--I mean its freedom, and that which gives it so much

influence over us--the charm of pleasure. The play which recreates is

changed into serious occupation, and yet it is precisely in recreating us

that art can the better complete the great affair--the moral work. It

cannot have a salutary influence upon the morals but in exercising its

highest aesthetic action, and it can only produce the aesthetic effect in

its highest degree in fully exercising its liberty.

It is certain, besides, that all pleasure, the moment it flows from a

moral source, renders man morally better, and then the effect in its turn

becomes cause. The pleasure we find in what is beautiful, or touching,

or sublime, strengthens our moral sentiments, as the pleasure we find in

kindness, in love, etc., strengthens these inclinations. And just as

contentment of the mind is the sure lot of the morally excellent man, so

moral excellence willingly accompanies satisfaction of heart. Thus the

moral efficacy of art is, not only because it employs moral means in

order to charm us, but also because even the pleasure which it procures

us is a means of morality.

There are as many means by which art can attain its aim as there are in

general sources from which a free pleasure for the mind can flow. I call

a free pleasure that which brings into play the spiritual forces--reason

and imagination--and which awakens in us a sentiment by the

representation of an idea, in contradistinction to physical or sensuous

pleasure, which places our soul under the dependence of the blind forces

of nature, and where sensation is immediately awakened in us by a

physical cause. Sensual pleasure is the only one excluded from the

domain of the fine arts; and the talent of exciting this kind of pleasure

could never raise itself to the dignity of an art, except in the case

where the sensual impressions are ordered, reinforced or moderated, after

a plan which is the production of art, and which is recognized by

representation. But, in this case even, that alone here can merit the

name of art which is the object of a free pleasure--I mean good taste in

the regulation, which pleases our understanding, and not physical charms

themselves, which alone flatter our sensibility.

The general source of all pleasure, even of sensual pleasure, is

propriety, the conformity with the aim. Pleasure is sensual when this

propriety is manifested by means of some necessary law of nature which

has for physical result the sensation of pleasure. Thus the movement of

the blood, and of the animal life, when in conformity with the aim of

nature, produces in certain organs, or in the entire organism, corporeal

pleasure with all its varieties and all its modes. We feel this

conformity by the means of agreeable sensation, but we arrive at no

representation of it, either clear or confused.

Pleasure is free when we represent to ourselves the conformability, and

when the sensation that accompanies this representation is agreeable.

Thus all the representations by which we have notice that there is

propriety and harmony between the end and the means, are for us the

sources of free pleasure, and consequently can be employed to this end by

the fine arts. Thus, all the representations can be placed under one of

these heads: the good, the true, the perfect, the beautiful, the

touching, the sublime. The good especially occupies our reason; the true

and perfect, our intelligence; the beautiful interests both the

intelligence and the imagination; the touching and the sublime, the

reason and the imagination. It is true that we also take pleasure in the

charm (Reiz) or the power called out by action from play, but art uses

charm only to accompany the higher enjoyments which the idea of propriety

gives to us. Considered in itself the charm or attraction is lost amid

the sensations of life, and art disdains it together with all merely

sensual pleasures.

We could not establish a classification of the fine arts only upon the

difference of the sources from which each of them draws the pleasure

which it affords us; for in the same class of the fine arts many sorts of

pleasures may enter, and often all together. But in as far as a certain

sort of pleasure is pursued as a principal aim, we can make of it, if not

a specific character of a class properly so called, at least the

principle and the tendency of a class in the works of art. Thus, for

example, we could take the arts which, above all, satisfy the

intelligence and imagination--consequently those which have as chief

object the true, the perfect, and the beautiful--and unite them under the

name of fine arts (arts of taste, arts of intelligence); those, on the

other hand, which especially occupy the imagination and the reason, and

which, in consequence, have for principal object the good, the sublime,

and the touching, could be limited in a particular class under the

denomination of touching arts (arts of sentiment, arts of the heart).

Without doubt it is impossible to separate absolutely the touching from

the beautiful, but the beautiful can perfectly subsist without the

touching. Thus, although we are not authorized to base upon this

difference of principle a rigorous classification of the liberal arts, it

can at least serve to determine with more of precision the criterion, and

prevent the confusion in which we are inevitably involved, when, drawing

up laws of aesthetic things, we confound two absolutely different

domains, as that of the touching and that of the beautiful.

The touching and the sublime resemble in this point, that both one and

the other produce a pleasure by a feeling at first of displeasure, and

that consequently (pleasure proceeding from suitability, and displeasure

from the contrary) they give us a feeling of suitability which

presupposes an unsuitability.

The feeling of the sublime is composed in part of the feeling of our

feebleness, of our impotence to embrace an object; and, on the other

side, of the feeling of our moral power--of this superior faculty which

fears no obstacle, no limit, and which subdues spiritually that even to

which our physical forces give way. The object of the sublime thwarts,

then, our physical power; and this contrariety (impropriety) must

necessarily excite a displeasure in us. But it is, at the same time, an

occasion to recall to our conscience another faculty which is in us--a

faculty which is even superior to the objects before which our

imagination yields. In consequence, a sublime object, precisely because

it thwarts the senses, is suitable with relation to reason, and it gives

to us a joy by means of a higher faculty, at the same time that it wounds

us in an inferior one.

The touching, in its proper sense, designates this mixed sensation, into

which enters at the same time suffering and the pleasure that we find in

suffering. Thus we can only feel this kind of emotion in the case of a

personal misfortune, only when the grief that we feel is sufficiently

tempered to leave some place for that impression of pleasure that would

be felt by a compassionate spectator. The loss of a great good

prostrates for the time, and the remembrance itself of the grief will

make us experience emotion after a year. The feeble man is always the

prey of his grief; the hero and the sage, whatever the misfortune that

strikes them, never experience more than emotion.

Emotion, like the sentiment of the sublime, is composed of two

affections--grief and pleasure. There is, then, at the bottom a

propriety, here as well as there, and under this propriety a

contradiction. Thus it seems that it is a contradiction in nature that

man, who is not born to suffer, is nevertheless a prey to suffering, and

this contradiction hurts us. But the evil which this contradiction does

us is a propriety with regard to our reasonable nature in general,

insomuch as this evil solicits us to act: it is a propriety also with

regard to human society; consequently, even displeasure, which excites in

us this contradiction, ought necessarily to make us experience a

sentiment of pleasure, because this displeasure is a propriety. To

determine in an emotion if it is pleasure or displeasure which triumphs,

we must ask ourselves if it is the idea of impropriety or that of

propriety which affects us the more deeply. That can depend either on

the number of the aims reached or abortive, or on their connection with

the final aim of all.

The suffering of the virtuous man moves us more painfully than that of

the perverse man, because in the first case there is contradiction not

only to the general destiny of man, which is happiness, but also to this

other particular principle, viz., that virtue renders happy; whilst in

the second case there is contradiction only with regard to the end of man

in general. Reciprocally, the happiness of the wicked also offends us

much more than the misfortune of the good man, because we find in it a

double contradiction: in the first place vice itself, and, in the second

place, the recompense of vice.

There is also this other consideration, that virtue is much more able to

recompense itself than vice, when it triumphs, is to punish itself; and

it is precisely for this that the virtuous man in misfortune would much

more remain faithful to the cultus of virtue than the perverse man would

dream of converting himself in prosperity.

But what is above all important in determining in the emotions the

relation of pleasure and displeasure, is to compare the two ends--that

which has been fulfilled and that which has been ignored--and to see

which is the most considerable. There is no propriety which touches us

so nearly as moral propriety, and no superior pleasure to that which we

feel from it. Physical propriety could well be a problem, and a problem

forever unsolvable. Moral propriety is already demonstrated. It alone

is founded upon our reasonable nature and upon internal necessity. It is

our nearest interest, the most considerable, and, at the same time, the

most easily recognized, because it is not determined by any external

element but by an internal principle of our reason: it is the palladium

of our liberty.

This moral propriety is never more vividly recognized than when it is

found in conflict with another propriety, and still keeps the upper hand;

then only the moral law awakens in full power, when we find it struggling

against all the other forces of nature, and when all those forces lose in

its presence their empire over a human soul. By these words, "the other

forces of nature," we must understand all that is not moral force, all

that is not subject to the supreme legislation of reason: that is to say,

feelings, affections, instincts, passions, as well as physical necessity

and destiny. The more redoubtable the adversary, the more glorious the

victory; resistance alone brings out the strength of the force and

renders it visible. It follows that the highest degree of moral

consciousness can only exist in strife, and the highest moral pleasure is

always accompanied by pain.

Consequently, the kind of poetry which secures us a high degree of moral

pleasure, must employ mixed feelings, and please us through pain or

distress,--this is what tragedy does specially; and her realm embraces

all that sacrifices a physical propriety to a moral one; or one moral

propriety to a higher one. It might be possible, perhaps, to form a

measure of moral pleasure, from the lowest to the highest degree, and to

determine by this principle of propriety the degree of pain or pleasure

experienced. Different orders of tragedy might be classified on the same

principle, so as to form a complete exhaustive tabulation of them. Thus,

a tragedy being given, its place could be fixed, and its genus

determined. Of this subject more will be said separately in its proper

place.

A few examples will show how far moral propriety commands physical

propriety in our souls.

Theron and Amanda are both tied to the stake as martyrs, and free to

choose life or death by the terrible ordeal of fire--they select the

latter. What is it which gives such pleasure to us in this scene? Their

position so conflicting with the smiling destiny they reject, the reward

of misery given to virtue--all here awakens in us the feeling of

impropriety: it ought to fill us with great distress. What is nature,

and what are her ends and laws, if all this impropriety shows us moral

propriety in its full light. We here see the triumph of the moral law,

so sublime an experience for us that we might even hail the calamity

which elicits it. For harmony in the world of moral freedom gives us

infinitely more pleasure than all the discords in nature give us pain.

When Coriolanus, obedient to duty as husband, son, and citizen, raises

the siege of Rome, them almost conquered, withdrawing his army, and

silencing his vengeance, he commits a very contradictory act evidently.

He loses all the fruit of previous victories, he runs spontaneously to

his ruin: yet what moral excellence and grandeur he offers! How noble to

prefer any impropriety rather than wound moral sense; to violate natural

interests and prudence in order to be in harmony with the higher moral

law! Every sacrifice of a life is a contradiction, for life is the

condition of all good; but in the light of morality the sacrifice of life

is in a high degree proper, because life is not great in itself, but only

as a means of accomplishing the moral law. If then the sacrifice of life

be the way to do this, life must go. "It is not necessary for me to

live, but it is necessary for Rome to be saved from famine," said Pompey,

when the Romans embarked for Africa, and his friends begged him to defer

his departure till the gale was over.

But the sufferings of a criminal are as charming to us tragically as

those of a virtuous man; yet here is the idea of moral impropriety. The

antagonism of his conduct to moral law, and the moral imperfection which

such conduct presupposes, ought to fill us with pain. Here there is no

satisfaction in the morality of his person, nothing to compensate for his

misconduct. Yet both supply a valuable object for art; this phenomenon

can easily be made to agree with what has been said.

We find pleasure not only in obedience to morality, but in the punishment

given to its infraction. The pain resulting from moral imperfection

agrees with its opposite, the satisfaction at conformity with the law.

Repentance, even despair, have nobleness morally, and can only exist if

an incorruptible sense of justice exists at the bottom of the criminal

heart, and if conscience maintains its ground against self-love.

Repentance comes by comparing our acts with the moral law, hence in the

moment of repenting the moral law speaks loudly in man. Its power must

be greater than the gain resulting from the crime as the infraction

poisons the enjoyment. Now, a state of mind where duty is sovereign is

morally proper, and therefore a source of moral pleasure. What, then,

sublimer than the heroic despair that tramples even life underfoot,

because it cannot bear the judgment within? A good man sacrificing his

life to conform to the moral law, or a criminal taking his own life

because of the morality he has violated: in both cases our respect for

the moral law is raised to the highest power. If there be any advantage

it is in the case of the latter; for the good man may have been

encouraged in his sacrifice by an approving conscience, thus detracting

from his merit. Repentance and regret at past crimes show us some of the

sublimest pictures of morality in active condition. A man who violates

morality comes back to the moral law by repentance.

But moral pleasure is sometimes obtained only at the cost of moral pain.

Thus one duty may clash with another. Let us suppose Coriolanus encamped

with a Roman army before Antium or Corioli, and his mother a Volscian; if

her prayers move him to desist, we now no longer admire him. His

obedience to his mother would be at strife with a higher duty, that of a

citizen. The governor to whom the alternative is proposed, either of

giving up the town or of seeing his son stabbed, decides at once on the

latter, his duty as father being beneath that of citizen. At first our

heart revolts at this conduct in a father, but we soon pass to admiration

that moral instinct, even combined with inclination, could not lead

reason astray in the empire where it commands. When Timoleon of Corinth

puts to death his beloved but ambitious brother, Timophanes, he does it

because his idea of duty to his country bids him to do so. The act here

inspires horror and repulsion as against nature and the moral sense, but

this feeling is soon succeeded by the highest admiration for his heroic

virtue, pronouncing, in a tumultuous conflict of emotions, freely and

calmly, with perfect rectitude. If we differ with Timoleon about his

duty as a republican, this does not change our view. Nay, in those

cases, where our understanding judges differently, we see all the more

clearly how high we put moral propriety above all other.

But the judgments of men on this moral phenomenon are exceedingly

various, and the reason of it is clear. Moral sense is common to all

men, but differs in strength. To most men it suffices that an act be

partially conformable with the moral law to make them obey it; and to

make them condemn an action it must glaringly violate the law. But to

determine the relation of moral duties with the highest principle of

morals requires an enlightened intelligence and an emancipated reason.

Thus an action which to a few will be a supreme propriety, will seem to

the crowd a revolting impropriety, though both judge morally; and hence

the emotion felt at such actions is by no means uniform. To the mass the

sublimest and highest is only exaggeration, because sublimity is

perceived by reason, and all men have not the same share of it. A vulgar

soul is oppressed or overstretched by those sublime ideas, and the crowd

sees dreadful disorder where a thinking mind sees the highest order.

This is enough about moral propriety as a principle of tragic emotion,

and the pleasure it elicits. It must be added that there are cases where

natural propriety also seems to charm our mind even at the cost of

morality. Thus we are always pleased by the sequence of machinations of

a perverse man, though his means and end are immoral. Such a man deeply

interests us, and we tremble lest his plan fail, though we ought to wish

it to do so. But this fact does not contradict what has been advanced

about moral propriety,--and the pleasure resulting from it.

Propriety, the reference of means to an end, is to us, in all cases, a

source of pleasure; even disconnected with morality. We experience this

pleasure unmixed, so long as we do not think of any moral end which

disallows action before us. Animal instincts give us pleasure--as the

industry of bees--without reference to morals; and in like manner human

actions are a pleasure to us when we consider in them only the relation

of means to ends. But if a moral principle be added to these, and

impropriety be discovered, if the idea of moral agent comes in, a deep

indignation succeeds our pleasure, which no intellectual propriety can

remedy. We must not call to mind too vividly that Richard III., Iago,

and Lovelace are men; otherwise our sympathy for them infallibly turns

into an opposite feeling. But, as daily experience teaches, we have the

power to direct our attention to different sides of things; and pleasure,

only possible through this abstraction, invites us to exercise it, and to

prolong its exercise.

Yet it is not rare for intelligent perversity to secure our favor by

being the means of procuring us the pleasure of moral propriety. The

triumph of moral propriety will be great in proportion as the snares set

by Lovelace for the virtue of Clarissa are formidable, and as the trials

of an innocent victim by a cruel tyrant are severe. It is a pleasure to

see the craft of a seducer foiled by the omnipotence of the moral sense.

On the other hand, we reckon as a sort of merit the victory of a

malefactor over his moral sense, because it is the proof of a certain

strength of mind and intellectual propriety.

Yet this propriety in vice can never be the source of a perfect pleasure,

except when it is humiliated by morality. In that case it is an

essential part of our pleasure, because it brings moral sense into

stronger relief. The last impression left on us by the author of

Clarissa is a proof of this. The intellectual propriety in the plan of

Lovelace is greatly surpassed by the rational propriety of Clarissa.

This allows us to feel in full the satisfaction caused by both.

When the tragic poet has for object to awaken in us the feeling of moral

propriety, and chooses his means skilfully for that end, he is sure to

charm doubly the connoisseur, by moral and by natural propriety. The

first satisfies the heart, the second the mind. The crowd is impressed

through the heart without knowing the cause of the magic impression.

But, on the other hand, there is a class of connoisseurs on whom that

which affects the heart is entirely lost, and who can only be gained by

the appropriateness of the means; a strange contradiction resulting from

over-refined taste, especially when moral culture remains behind

intellectual. This class of connoisseurs seek only the intellectual

side in touching and sublime themes. They appreciate this in the

justest manner, but you must beware how you appeal to their heart! The

over-culture of the age leads to this shoal, and nothing becomes the

cultivated man so much as to escape by a happy victory this twofold and

pernicious influence. Of all other European nations, our neighbors, the

French, lean most to this extreme, and we, as in all things, strain every

nerve to imitate this model.

SCHILLER'S PHILOSOPHICAL LETTERS.

PREFATORY REMARKS.

The reason passes, like the heart, through certain epochs and

transitions, but its development is not so often portrayed. Men seem to

have been satisfied with unfolding the passions in their extremes, their

aberration, and their results, without considering how closely they are

bound up with the intellectual constitution of the individual.

Degeneracy in morals roots in a one-sided and wavering philosophy, doubly

dangerous, because it blinds the beclouded intellect with an appearance

of correctness, truth, and conviction, which places it less under the

restraining influence of man's instinctive moral sense. On the other

hand, an enlightened understanding ennobles the feelings,--the heart must

be formed by the head.

The present age has witnessed an extraordinary increase of a thinking

public, by the facilities afforded to the diffusion of reading; the

former happy resignation to ignorance begins to make way for a state of

half-enlightenment, and few persons are willing to remain in the

condition in which their birth has placed then. Under these

circumstances it may not be unprofitable to call attention to certain

periods of the awakening and progress of the reason, to place in their

proper light certain truths and errors, closely connected with morals,

and calculated to be a source of happiness or misery, and, at all events,

to point out the hidden shoals on which the reason of man has so often

suffered shipwreck. Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without

running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error,

and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of

tranquil wisdom.

Some friends, inspired by an equal love of truth and moral beauty, who

have arrived at the same conviction by different roads, and who view with

serener eye the ground over which they have travelled, have thought that

it might be profitable to present a few of these resolutions and epochs

of thought. They propose to represent these and certain excesses of the

inquiring reason in the form of two young men, of unequal character,

engaged in epistolary correspondence. The following letters are the

beginning of this essay.

The opinions that are offered in these letters can only be true and false

relatively, and in the form in which the world is mirrored in the soul of

the correspondent, and of him only. But the course of the correspondence

will show that the one-sided, often exaggerated and contradictory

opinions at length issue in a general, purified, and well-established

truth.

Scepticism and free-thinking are the feverish paroxysms of the human

mind, and must needs at length confirm the health of well-organized souls

by the unnatural convulsion which they occasion. In proportion to the

dazzling and seducing nature of error will be the greatness of the

triumphs of truth: the demand for conviction and firm belief will be

strong and pressing in proportion to the torment occasioned by the pangs

of doubt. But doubt was necessary to elicit these errors; the knowledge

of the disease had to precede its cure. Truth suffers no loss if a

vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way that virtue and

religion suffer no detriment if a criminal denies them.

It was necessary to offer these prefatory remarks to throw a proper light

on the point of view from which the following correspondence has to be

read and judged.

LETTER I.

Julius to Raphael. October.

You are gone, Raphael--and the beauty of nature departs: the sere and

yellow leaves fall from the trees, while a thick autumn fog hangs

suspended like a bier over the lifeless fields. Solitary, I wander

through the melancholy country. I call aloud your name, and am irritated

that my Raphael does not answer me.

I had received your last embrace. The mournful sound of the carriage

wheels that bore you away had at length died upon my ear. In happier

moments I had just succeeded in raising a tumulus over the joys of the

past, but now again you stand up before me, as your departed spirit, in

these regions, and you accompany me to each favorite haunt and pleasant

walk. These rocks I have climbed by your side: by your side have my eyes

wandered over this immense landscape. In the dark sanctuary of this

beech-grove we first conceived the bold ideal of our friendship. It was

here that we unfolded the genealogical tree of the soul, and that we

found that Julius was so closely related to Raphael. Not a spring, not a

thicket, or a hill exists in this region where some memory of departed

happiness does not come to destroy my repose. All things combine to

prevent my recovery. Wherever I go, I repeat the painful scene of our

separation.

What have you done to me, Raphael? What am I become? Man of dangerous

power! would that I had never known or never lost you! Hasten back; come

on the wings of friendship, or the tender plant, your nursling, shall

have perished. How could you, endowed with such tender feelings, venture

to leave the work you had begun, but still so incomplete. The

foundations that your proud wisdom tried to establish in my brain and

heart are tottering; all the splendid palaces which you erected are

crumbling, and the worm crushed to earth is writhing under the ruins.

Happy, heavenly time, when I groped through life, with bandaged eyes,

like a drunken man,--when all my knowledge and my wishes were confined

to the narrow horizon of my childhood's teachings! Blessed time, when

a cheerful sunset raised no higher aspiration in my soul than the wish

of a fine day on the morrow; when nothing reminded me of the world save

the newspaper; nothing spoke of eternity save the passing bell; only

ghost-stories brought to mind the thought of death and judgment; when I

trembled at the thought of the devil, and was proportionately drawn to

the Godhead! I felt and was happy. Raphael has taught me to think I am

on the way to regret that I was ever created.

Creation? No, that is only a sound lacking all meaning, which my reason

cannot receive. There was a time when I knew nothing, when no one knew

me: accordingly, it is usual to say, I was not. That time is past:

therefore it is usual to say that I was created. But also of the

millions who existed centuries ago nothing more is now known, and yet men

are wont to say, they are. On what do we found the right to grant the

beginning and to deny the end? It is assumed that the cessation of

thinking beings contradicts Infinite Goodness. Did, then, Infinite

Goodness cone first into being at the creation of the world? If there

was a period when there were no spirits, Infinite Goodness must have been

imperative for a whole eternity. If the fabric of the universe is a

perfection of the Creator, He, therefore, lacked a perfection before the

creation of the world. But an assumption like this contradicts the idea

of perfect goodness, therefore there is no creation. To what have I

arrived, Raphael? Terrible fallacy of my conclusions! I give up the

Creator as soon as I believe in a God. Wherefore do I require a God, if

I suffice without the Creator?

You have robbed me of the thought that gave me peace. You have taught me

to despise where I prayed before. A thousand things were venerable in my

sight till your dismal wisdom stripped off the veil from them. I saw a

crowd of people streaming to church, I heard their enthusiastic devotion

poured forth in a common act of prayer and praise; twice did I stand

beside a deathbed, and saw--wonderful power of religion!--the hope of

heaven triumphant over the terror of annihilation, and the serene light

of joy beaming from the eyes of those departing.

"Surely that doctrine must be divine," I exclaimed, "which is

acknowledged by the best among men, which triumphs and comforts so

wondrously!" Your cold-blooded wisdom extinguished my enthusiasm. You

affirmed that an equal number of devotees streamed formerly round the

Irmensaeule and to Jupiter's temple; an equal number of votaries, with

like exultation, ascended the stake kindled in honor of Brahma. "Can the

very feeling," you added, "which you found so detestable in heathenism

prove the truth of your doctrine?"

You proceeded to say: "Trust nothing but your own reason. There is

nothing holy, save truth." I have obeyed you: I have sacrificed all my

opinions, I have set fire to all my ships when I landed on this island,

and I have destroyed all my hopes of return. Never can I become

reconciled to a doctrine which I joyfully welcomed once. My reason is

now all to me--my only warrant for God, virtue, and immortality. Woe to

me if I catch this, my only witness, in a contradiction! if my esteem for

its conclusions diminishes! if a broken vessel in my brain diverts its

action! My happiness is henceforth intrusted to the harmonious action of

my sensorium: woe to me if the strings of this instrument give a false

note in the critical moments of my life--if my convictions vary with my

pulsations!

LETTER II.

Julius to Raphael.

Your doctrine has flattered my pride. I was a prisoner: you have led me

out into the daylight; the golden shimmer and the measureless vault have

enraptured my eye. Formerly, I was satisfied with the modest reputation

of being a good son of my father's house, a friend of my friends, a

useful member of society. You have changed me into a citizen of the

universe. At that time my wishes had not aspired to infringe on the

rights of the great: I tolerated these fortunate people because beggars

tolerated me. I did not blush to envy a part of the human race, because

there was a still larger part of humanity that I was obliged to pity.

Meeting you, I learned for the first time that my claims on enjoyment

were as well founded as those of my brethren. Now, for the first time, I

learned that, raised one stratum above this atmosphere, I weighed just as

much and as little as the rulers of this world. Raphael severed all

bonds of agreement and of opinion. I felt myself quite free; for reason,

as Raphael declared, is the only monarchy in the world of spirits, and I

carried my imperial throne in my brain. All things in heaven and earth

have no value, no estimation, except that which my reason grants them.

The whole creation is mine, for I possess an irresistible omnipotence,

and am empowered to enjoy it fully. All spirits--one degree below the

most perfect Spirit--are my brethren, because we all obey one rule, and

do homage to one supremacy.

How magnificent and sublime this announcement sounds! What a field for

my thirst of knowledge! But--unlucky contradiction of nature--this free

and soaring spirit is woven together with the rigid, immovable clockwork

of a mortal body, mixed up with its little necessities, and yoked to its

fate--this god is banished into a world of worms. The immense space of

nature is opened to his research, but he cannot think two ideas at the

same time. With his eyes he reaches up to the sunny focus of the

Godhead, but he himself is obliged to creep after Him slowly and wearily

through the elements of time. To absorb one enjoyment he must give up

all others: two unlimited desires are too great for his little heart.

Every fresh joy costs him the sum of all previous joys. The present

moment is the sepulchre of all that went before it. An idyllic hour of

love is an intermittent pulsation of friendship.

Wherever I look, Raphael, how limited man appears! How great the

distance between his aims and their fulfilment!--yet do not begrudge him

his soothing slumber. Wake him not! He was so happy before he began to

inquire whither he was to go and whence he came! Reason is a torch in a

prison. The prisoner knew nothing of the light, but a dream of freedom

appeared over him like a flash in the night which leaves the darkness

deeper than before. Our philosophy is the unhappy curiosity of Oedipus,

who did not cease to inquire till the dreadful oracle was unravelled.

Mayest thou never learn who thou art!

Does your wisdom replace what it has set aside? If you had no key to

open heaven, why did you lead me away from earth? If you knew beforehand

that the way to wisdom leads through the frightful abyss of doubt, why

did you venture the innocence of your friend Julius on this desperate

throw?--

If to the good, which I propose to do,

Something very bad borders far too near,

I prefer not to do this good.

You have pulled down a shelter that was inhabited, and founded a splendid

but lifeless palace on the spot.

Raphael, I claim my soul from you! I am unhappy. My courage is gone. I

despair of my own strength. Write to me soon!--your healing hand alone

can pour balm on my burning wounds.

LETTER III.

Raphael to Julius.

Julius, happiness such as ours, if unbroken, would be too much for human

lot. This thought often haunted me even in the full enjoyment of our

friendship. This thought, then darkening our happiness, was a salutary

foretaste, intended to mitigate the pain of my present position.

Hardened in the stern school of resignation, I am still more susceptible

of the comfort of seeing in our separation a slight sacrifice whose merit

may win from fate the reward of our future reunion. You did not yet know

what privation was. You suffer for the first time.

And yet it is perhaps an advantage for you that I have been torn from you

exactly at this time. You have to endure a malady, from which you can

only perfectly recover by your own energy, so as not to suffer a relapse.

The more deserted you feel, the more you will stir up all healing power

in yourself, and in proportion as you derive little or no benefit from

temporary and deceptive palliatives, the more certainly will you succeed

in eradicating the evil fundamentally.

I do not repent that I roused you from your dream, though your present

position is painful. I have done nothing more than hasten a crisis,

which every soul like yours has sooner or later to pass through, and

where the essential thing is, at what time of life it is endured. There

are times and seasons when it is terrible to doubt truth and virtue. Woe

to the man who has to fight through the quibbles of a self-sufficient

reason while he is immersed in the storms of the passions. I have felt

in its fulness all that is expressed by this, and, to preserve you from

similar troubles I could devise no means but to ward off the pestilence

by timely inoculation.

Nor could I, my dear Julius, choose a more propitious time? I met you in

the full and glorious bloom of youthful intelligence and bodily vigor,

before you had been oppressed by care or enchained by passion; fully

prepared, in your freedom and strength, to stand the great fight, of

which a sublime tranquillity, produced by conviction, is the prize.

Truth and error had not yet been interwoven with your interests. Your

enjoyments and virtues were independent of both. You required no images

of terror to tear you from low dissipation. The feeling for nobler joys

had made these odious to you. You were good from instinct and from

unconsecrated moral grace. I had nothing to fear for your morality, if a

building crumbled down on which it was not founded. Nor do your

anxieties alarm me, though you may conjure up many dark anticipations in

your melancholy mood. I know you better, Julius!

You are ungrateful, too! You despise the reason, and forget what joys it

has procured you. Though you might have escaped the dangers of doubt all

your life, still it was my duty not to deprive you of the pleasures which

you were capable of enjoying. The height at which you were was not

worthy of you. The way up which you climbed gave you compensation for

all of which I deprived you. I still recall the delight--with what

delight you blessed the moment when the bandage dropped from your eyes!

The warmth with which you grasped the truth possibly may have led your

all-devouring imagination to an abyss at sight of which you draw back

shuddering.

I must follow the course of your inquiries to discover the sources of

your complaints. You have written down the results of your thoughts:

send me these papers and then I will answer you.

LETTER IV.

Julius to Raphael.

I have been looking over my papers this morning. Among them I have found

a lost memorandum written down in those happy hours when I was inspired

with a proud enthusiasm. But on looking over it how different seem all

the things treated of! My former views look like the gloomy boarding of

a playhouse when the lights have been removed. My heart sought a

philosophy, and imagination substituted her dreams. I took the warmest

for the truest coloring.

I seek for the laws of spirits--I soar up to the infinite, but I forget

to prove that they really exist. A bold attack of materialism overthrows

my creation.

You will read through this fragment, my dear Raphael. Would that you

could succeed in kindling once again the extinct flames of my enthusiasm,

to reconcile me again to my genius! but my pride has sunk so low that

even Raphael's friendly hand can hardly raise me up again.

THEOSOPHY OF JULILTS.

THE WORLD AND THE THINKING BEING.

The universe is a thought of God. After this ideal thought-fabric passed

out into reality, and the new-born world fulfilled the plan of its

Creator--permit me to use this human simile--the first duty of all

thinking beings has been to retrace the original design in this great

reality; to find the principle in the mechanism, the unity in the

compound, the law in the phenomenon, and to pass back from the structure

to its primitive foundation. Accordingly to me there is only one

appearance in nature--the thinking being. The great compound called the

world is only remarkable to me because it is present to shadow forth

symbolically the manifold expressions of that being. All in me and out

of me is only the hieroglyph of a power which is like to me. The laws of

nature are the cyphers which the thinking mind adds on to make itself

understandable to intelligence--the alphabet by means of which all

spirits communicate with the most perfect Spirit and with one another.

Harmony, truth, order, beauty, excellence, give me joy, because they

transport me into the active state of their author, of their possessor,

because they betray the presence of a rational and feeling Being, and let

me perceive my relationship with that Being. A new experience in this

kingdom of truth: gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the natural

system of Linnaeus, correspond essentially in my mind to the discovery of

an antique dug up at Herculaneum--they are both only the reflections of

one spirit, a renewed acquaintance with a being like myself. I speak

with the Eternal through the instrument of nature,--through the world's

history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

If you wish to be convinced, my clear Raphael, look back. Each state of

the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is

shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most

abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we

name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it;

eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth

dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny

of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily

creation. Each coming spring, forcing the sprouts of plants out of the

earth, gives me explanations of the awful riddle of death, and

contradicts my anxious fears about an everlasting sleep. The swallow

that we find stiffened in winter, and see waking up to life after; the

dead grub coming to life again as the butterfly and rising into the

air,--all these give excellent pictures of our immortality.

How strange all seems to me now, Raphael! Now all seems peopled round

about me. To me there is no solitude in nature. Wherever I see a body I

anticipate a spirit. Wherever I trace movement I infer thought.

Where no dead lie buried, where no resurrection will be, Omnipotence

speaks to me this through His works, and thus I understand the doctrine

of the omnipresence of God.

IDEA.

All spirits are attracted by perfection. There may be deviations, but

there is no exception to this, for all strive after the condition of the

highest and freest exercise of their powers; all possess the common

instinct of extending their sphere of action; of drawing all, and

centring all in themselves; of appropriating all that is good, all that

is acknowledged as charming and excellent. When the beautiful, the true,

and the excellent are once seen, they are immediately grasped at. A

condition once perceived by us, we enter into it immediately. At the

moment when we think of them, we become possessors of a virtue, authors

of an action, discoverers of a truth, possessors of a happiness. We

ourselves become the object perceived. Let no ambiguous smile from you,

dear Raphael, disconcert me here,--this assumption is the basis on which

I found all that follows, and we must be agreed before I take courage to

complete the structure.

His inner feeling or innate consciousness tells every man almost the same

thing. For example, when we admire an act of magnanimity, of bravery and

wisdom, does not a secret feeling spring up in our heart that we are

capable of doing the same? Does not the rush of blood coloring our

cheeks on hearing narratives of this kind proclaim that our modesty

trembles at the admiration called forth by such acts? that we are

confused at the praise which this ennobling of our nature must call down

upon us? Even our body at such moments agrees with the attitude of the

man, and shows clearly that our soul has passed into the state we admire.

If you were ever present, Raphael, when a great event was related to a

large assembly, did you not see how the relater waited for the incense of

praise, how he devoured it, though it was given to the hero of his

story,--and if you were ever a relater did you not trace how your heart

was subject to this pleasing deception? You have had examples, my dear

Raphael, of how easily I can wrangle with my best friend respecting the

reading aloud of a pleasing anecdote or of a beautiful poem, and my heart

told me truly on these occasions that I was only displeased at your

carrying off the laurels because these passed from the head of author to

that of the reader. A quick and deep artistic appreciation of virtue is

justly held to be a great aptitude for virtue, in the same way as it is

usual to have no scruple in distrusting the heart of a man whose

intelligence is slow to take in moral beauty.

You need not advance as an objection that, frequently, coupled with a

lively perception of a perfection, the opposite failing is found to

coexist, that evil-doers are often possessed with strong enthusiasm for

what is excellent, and that even the weak flame up into enthusiasm of

herculean growth. I know, for example, that our admired Haller, who

unmasked in so manly a spirit the sickly nothingness of vain honors; a

man whose philosophical greatness I so highly appreciated, that he was

not great enough to despise the still greater vanity of an order of

knighthood, which conferred an injury on his greatness. I am convinced

that in the happy moment of their ideal conceptions, the artist, the

philosopher, and the poet are really the great and good man whose image

they throw out; but with many this ennobling of the mind is only an

unnatural condition occasioned by a more active stirring of the blood, or

a more rapid vibration of the fancy: it is accordingly very transient,

like every other enchantment, disappearing rapidly and leaving the heart

more exhausted than before, and delivered over to the despotic caprice of

low passions. I expressly said more exhausted than before, for universal

experience teaches that a relapsing criminal is always the most furious,

and that the renegades of virtue seek additional sweets in the arms of

crime to compensate for the heavy pressure of repentance.

I wished to establish, my Raphael, that it is our own condition, when we

feel that of another, that perfection becomes ours for the moment during

which we raise in ourselves the representation of it; that the delight we

take in truth, beauty, and virtue shows itself when closely analyzed to

be the consciousness of our individual ennobling and enriching; and I

think I have proved this.

We have ideas of the wisdom of the highest Being, of His goodness, of His

justice, but none of His omnipotence. To describe His omnipotence, we

help ourselves by the graduated representation of three successions:

Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and empty; God calls on

light; and there is light. If we had a real idea of His operative

omnipotence we should be creators, as He.

Accordingly, every perfection which I perceive becomes my own; it gives

me joy, because it is my own; I desire it, because I love myself.

Perfection in nature is no property of matter, but of spirits. All

spirits are happy through their perfection. I desire the happiness of

all souls, because I love myself. The happiness which I represent to

myself becomes my happiness; accordingly I am interested in awakening

these representations, to realize them, to exalt them; I am interested in

diffusing happiness around me. Whenever I produce beauty, excellence, or

enjoyment beyond myself, I produce myself; when I neglect or destroy

anything, I neglect, I destroy myself. I desire the happiness of others,

because I desire my own; and the desire of the happiness of others we

call benevolence and love.

LOVE.

Now, my most worthy Raphael, let me look round. The height has been

ascended, the mist is dissipated; I stand in the midst of immensity, as

in the middle of a glowing landscape. A purer ray of sunlight has

clarified all my thoughts. Love is the noblest phenomenon in the world

of souls, the all-powerful magnet in the spiritual sphere, the source of

devotion and of the sublimest virtue. Yet love is only the reflection of

this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, based upon an

instantaneous permutation of individuality, an interchange of being.

When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer

by what I love. To pardon is to recover a property that has been lost.

Misanthropy is a protracted suicide: egotism is the supremest poverty of

a created being.

When Raphael tore himself from my embrace my soul was rent in twain, and

I weep over the loss of my nobler half. On that holy evening--you must

remember it--when our souls first communed together in ardent sympathy,

all your great emotions became my own, and I only entered into my

unvarying right of property over your excellence; I was prouder to love

you than to be loved by you, for my own affection had changed me into

Raphael.

Was it not this almighty instinct

That forced our hearts to meet

In the eternal bond of love?

Raphael! enraptured, resting on your arm,

I venture, joyful, the march towards perfection,

That leadeth to the spiritual sun.

Happy! happy! I have found thee,

Have secured thee 'midst millions,

And of all this multitude thou art mine!

Let the wild chaos return;

Let it cast adrift the atoms!

Forever our hearts fly to meet each other.

Must I not draw reflections of my ecstasy

From thy radiant, ardent eyes?

In thee alone do I wonder at myself.

The earth in brighter tints appears,

Heaven itself shines in more glowing light,

Seen through the soul and action of my friend.

Sorrow drops the load of tears;

Soothed, it rests from passion's storms,

Nursed upon the breast of love.

Nay, delight grows torment, and seeks

My Raphael, basking in thy soul,

Sweetest sepulchre! impatiently.

If I alone stood in the great All of things,

Dreamed I of souls in the very rocks,

And, embracing, I would have kissed them.

I would have sighed my complaints into the air;

The chasms would have answered me.

O fool! sweet sympathy was every joy to me.

Love does not exist between monotonous souls, giving out the same tone;

it is found between harmonious souls. With pleasure I find again my

feelings in the mirror of yours, but with more ardent longing I devour

the higher emotions that are wanting in me. Friendship and love are led

by one common rule. The gentle Desdemona loves Othello for the dangers

through which he has passed; the manly Othello loves her for the tears

that she shed hearing of his troubles.

There are moments in life when we are impelled to press to our heart

every flower, every remote star, each worm, and the sublimest spirit we

can think of. We are impelled to embrace them, and all nature, in the

arms of our affection, as things most loved. You understand me, Raphael.

A man who has advanced so far as to read off all the beauty, greatness,

and excellence in the great and small of nature, and to find the great

unity for this manifold variety, has advanced much nearer to the

Divinity. The great creation flows into his personality. If each man

loved all men, each individual would possess the whole world.

I fear that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many

of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this

heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in

the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the

cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish

influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with

self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to

explain a phenomenon which was too godlike for their narrow hearts. They

have spun their comfortless doctrine out of a miserable egotism, and they

have made their own limits the measure of the Creator; degenerate slaves

decrying freedom amidst the rattle of their own chains. Swift, who

exaggerated the follies of men till he covered the whole race with

infamy, and wrote at length his own name on the gallows which he had

erected for it--even Swift could not inflict such deadly wounds on human

nature as these dangerous thinkers, who, laying great claim to

penetration, adorn their system with all the specious appearance of art,

and strengthen it with all the arguments of self-interest.

Why should the whole species suffer for the shortcomings of a few

members?

I admit freely that I believe in the existence of a disinterested love.

I am lost if I do not exist; I give up the Deity, immortality, and

virtue. I have no remaining proof of these hopes if I cease to believe

in love. A spirit that loves itself alone is an atom giving out a spark

in the immeasurable waste of space.

SACRIFICE.

But love has produced effects that seem to contradict its nature.

It can be conceived that I increase my own happiness by a sacrifice which

I offer for the happiness of others; but suppose this sacrifice is my

life? History has examples of this kind of sacrifice, and I feel most

vividly that it would cost me nothing to die in order to save Raphael.

How is it possible that we can hold death to be a means of increasing the

sum of our enjoyments? How can the cessation of my being be reconciled

with the enriching of my being?

The assumption of immortality removes this contradiction; but it also

displaces the supreme gracefulness of this act of sacrifice. The

consideration of a future reward excludes love. There must be a virtue

which even without the belief in immortality, even at the peril of

annihilation, suffices to carry out this sacrifice.

I grant it is ennobling to the human soul to sacrifice present enjoyment

for a future eternal good; it is the noblest degree of egotism; but

egotism and love separate humanity into two very unlike races, whose

limits are never confounded.

Egotism erects its centre in itself; love places it out of itself in the

axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude.

Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot

in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the

ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the

throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the

following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent

whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Think, O Raphael, of a truth that benefits the whole human race to remote

ages; add that this truth condemns its confessor to death; that this

truth can only be proved and believed if he dies. Conceive this man

gifted with the clear all-embracing and illumining eye of genius, with

the flaming torch of enthusiasm, with all the sublime adaptations for

love; let the grand ideal of this great effect be presented to his soul;

let him have only an obscure anticipation of all the happy beings he will

make; let the present and future crowd at the same time into his soul;

and then answer me,--does this man require to be referred to a future

life?

The sum of all these emotions will become confounded with his

personality; will flow together in his personal identity, his I or Ego.

The human race he is thinking of is himself. It is a body, in which his

life swims forgotten like a blood-drop, forgotten, but essential to the

welfare of the economy; and how quickly and readily he will shed it to

secure his health.

GOD.

All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are

two magnitudes which are quite alike. The whole sum of harmonic activity

which exists together in the divine substance, is in nature the antitype

of this substance, united to incalculable degrees, and measures, and

steps. If I may be allowed this expressive imagery, nature is an

infinitely divided God.

Just as in the prism a white ray of light is split up into seven darker

shades of color, so the divine personality or Ego has been broken into

countless susceptible substances. As seven darker shades melt together

in one clear pencil of light, out of the union of all these substances a

divine being would issue. The existing form of nature's fabric is the

optical glass, and all the activities of spirits are only an endless play

of colors of that simple divine ray. If it pleased Omnipotence some day

to break up this prism, the barrier between it and the world would fall

down, all spirits would be absorbed in one infinite spirit, all accords

would flow together in one common harmony, all streams would find their

end in the ocean.

The bodily form of nature came to pass through the attractive force of

the elements. The attraction of spirits, varied and developed

infinitely, would at length lead to the cessation of that separation (or

may I venture the expression) would produce God. An attraction of this

kind is love.

Accordingly, my dear Raphael, love is the ladder by which we climb up to

likeness to God. Unconsciously to ourselves, without laying claim to it,

we aim at this.

Lifeless masses are we, when we hate;

Gods, when we cling; in love to one another,

Rejoicing in the gentle bond of love.

Upwards this divinest impulse holdeth sway

Through the thousandfold degrees of creation

Of countless spirits who did not create.

Arm-in-arm, higher and still higher,

From the savage to the Grecian seer,

Who is linked to the last seraph of the ring,

We turn, of one mind, in the same magic dance,

Till measure, and e'en time itself,

Sink at death in the boundless, glowing sea.

Friendless was the great world's blaster;

And feeling this, he made the spirit world

Blessed mirrors of his own blessedness!

And though the Highest found no equal,

Yet infinitude foams upward unto Him

From the vast basin of creation's realm.

Love is, Raphael, the great secret that can restore the dishonored king

of gold from the flat, unprofitable chalk; that can save the eternal from

the temporal and transient, and the great oracle of duration from the

consuming conflagration of time.

What does all that has been said amount to?

If we perceive excellence, it is ours. Let us become intimate with the

high ideal unit, and we shall be drawn to one another in brotherly love.

If we plant beauty and joy we shall reap beauty and joy. If we think

clearly we shall love ardently. "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven

is perfect," says the Founder of our Faith. Weak human nature turned

pale at this command, therefore He explained himself in clearer terms:

"Love one another!"

Wisdom, with thy sunlike look,

Awful goddess! turn thee back,

And give way to Love;

Who before thee went, with hero heart,

Up the steep and stormy path

To the Godhead's very throne;

Who, unveiling the Holiest,

Showed to thee Elysium

Through the vaulted sepulchre.

Did it not invite us in?

Could we reach immortality--

Or could we seek the spirit

Without Love, the spirit's master?

Love, Love leadeth only to Nature's Father,

Only love the spirits.

I have now given you, Raphael, my spirit's confession of faith--a flying

outline of the creation I have undertaken. As you may perceive, the seed

which you scattered in my soul took root. Mock, or rejoice, or blush at

your scholar, as you please. Certain it is this philosophy has ennobled

my heart, and extended and beautified the perspective of my life. It is

possible, my excellent friend, that the entire structure of my

conclusions may have been a baseless and visionary edifice. Perhaps the

world, as I depicted it, nowhere exists, save in the brain of your

Julius. Perhaps, after the lapse of thousands on thousands of years,

when the wiser Judge promised in the future, sits on the judgment-seat,

at the sight of the true original, filled with confusion, I should tear

in pieces my schoolboy's design. All this may happen--I expect it; and

even if not a vestige of reality is found in my dream, the reality will

fill me with proportionately greater delight and wonder. Ought my ideas

to be more beautiful than those of the Creator? How so? Could we

tolerate that His exalted artistic structure should fall beneath the

expectations of a mortal connoisseur? This is exactly the fiery

probation of His great perfection, and the sweetest triumph for the

Exalted Spirit, that false conclusions and deception do not injure His

acknowledgment; that all tortuous deviations of the wandering reason at

length strike into the straight road of everlasting truth; that all

diverging arms and currents ultimately meet in the main stream. What an

idea, Raphael, I form of the Great Artist, who, differently travestied in

a thousand copies, still retains identical features in all this

diversity, from which even the depreciating hand of a blunderer cannot

remove admiration.

Moreover, my representation may certainly be fallacious, wholly an

invention,--nay, I am persuaded that it must necessarily be so; and yet

it is possible that all results of this may come to pass. All great

sages are agreed that our whole knowledge moves on ultimately to a

conventional deception, with which, however, the strictest truth can

co-exist. Our purest ideas are by no means images of things, but only

their signs or symbols determined by necessity, and co-existing with

them.

Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we

consider them. Our thoughts of these are only the endemic forms in which

the planet we inhabit hands them to us. Our brain belongs to this

planet; accordingly, also, the idioms of our ideas, which are treasured

up in it. But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary, and always

consistent: the capricious nature of the materials through which it finds

expression changes nothing in the eternal laws, as long as this

capriciousness does not stand in contradiction with itself, and so long

as the sign remains true to the thing it designates. As the thinking

power develops the relations of the idioms, these relations of things

must also really be present in them. Therefore, truth is no property of

the idioms, but of the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the sign

with the thing signified, of the conception with the object; but the

agreement of this conception with the laws of thought. In a similar

manner, the doctrine of quantity makes use of cyphers which are nowhere

present, except upon paper, and yet it finds with them what is present in

the world of reality. For example, what resemblance is there between the

letters A and B, the signs : and =, +, and -, and the fact that has to be

ascertained? Yet the comet, foretold centuries before, advances from a

remote corner of the heavens and the expected planet eclipses the disk

at the proper time. Trusting to the infallibility of his calculation,

the discoverer Columbus plunges into unknown regions of the sea to seek

the missing other half of the known hemisphere--the great island of

Atlantis--to fill up a blank in his geographical map. He found this

island of his paper calculation, and his calculation was right. Would it

have been less great if a hostile storm had shattered his fleet or driven

it back? The human mind makes a similar calculation when it measures the

super-sensual by means of the sensible, and when mathematics applies its

conclusions to the hidden physics of the superhuman. But the last test

of its calculations is still wanting, for no traveller has come back from

that land to relate his discovery. Human nature has its proper bounds,

and so also has the individual. We will give each other mutual comfort

respecting the former: Raphael will concede this to the boyish age of his

Julius. I am poor in conceptions, a stranger in many branches of

knowledge which are thought to be essential in inquiries of this nature.

I have not belonged to any philosophical school, nor have I read many

printed books. It may quite well be that I occasionally substitute my

fancies in the place of stricter logical proofs, that I mistake the rush

of my blood or the hopes of my heart for sound wisdom; yet, my dear

friend, you must not grudge me the moments I have thus lost. It is a

real gain for universal perfection: it was the provision of the Wisest

Spirit that the erring reason should also people the chaotic world of

dreams, and make fruitful even the barren ground of contradiction. It is

not only the mechanical artist who polishes the rough diamond into a

brilliant whom we ought to value, but also that one who ennobles mere

ordinary stones by giving them the apparent dignity of the diamond. The

industry displayed in the forms may sometimes make us forget the massive

truth of the substance. Is not every exercise of the thinking power,

every sharpening of the edge of the spirit, a little step towards its

perfection; and every perfection has to obtain a being and substantial

existence in a complete and perfect world. Reality is not confined to

the absolutely necessary; it also embraces the conditionally necessary:

every offspring of the brain, every work elaborated by the wit, has an

irresistible right of citizenship in this wider acceptation of creation.

In the measureless plan of nature no activity was to be left out, no

degree of enjoyment was to be wanting in universal happiness. The great

Inventive Spirit would not even permit error to be wasted, nor allow this

wide world of thought to remain empty and chaotic in the mind of man.

For the Great Ruler of His world does not even allow a straw to fall

without use, leaves no space uninhabited where life may be enjoyed; for

He converts the very poison of man into the food of vipers; He even

raises plants from the realm of corruption, and hospitably grants the

little glimmer of pleasure that can co-exist with madness. He turns

crime and folly into excellence, and weaves out of the very vices of a

Tarquin the great idea of the universal monarchy of Rome. Every facility

of the reason, even in error, increases its readiness to accept truth.

Dear friend of my soul, suffer me to add my contribution to the great

woof of human wisdom. The image of the sun is reflected differently in

the dewdrop and in the majestic mirror of the wide-stretching ocean.

Shame to the turbid, murky swamp, which never receives and never reflects

this image! Millions of plants drink from the four elements of nature; a

magazine of supplies is open for all: but they mix their sap in a

thousand different ways, and return it in a thousand new forms. The most

beautiful variety proclaims a rich Lord of this house. There are four

elements from which all spirits draw their supplies: their Ego or

individuality, Nature, God, and the Future All intermingle in millions of

ways and offer themselves in a million differences of result: but one

truth remains which, like a firm axis, goes through all religions and

systems--draw nigh to the Godhead of whom you think!

LETTER V.

Raphael to Julius.

It would be very unfortunate, my dear Julius, if there were no other way

of quieting you than by restoring the first-fruits of your belief in you.

I found with delight these ideas, which I saw gaining in you, written

down in your papers. They are worthy of a soul like yours, but you could

not remain stationary in them. There are joys for every age and

enjoyments for each degree of spirits. It must have been a difficult

thing for you to sever yourself from a system that was entirely made to

meet the wants of your heart. I would wager that no other system will

strike such deep roots in you, and, possibly, if left quite to your own

direction, you would sooner or later become reconciled to your favorite

ideas. You would soon remark the weakness of the opposite system, and

then, if both systems appeared equally deficient in proof, you would

prefer the most desirable one, or, perhaps, you would find new arguments

to preserve at least the essential features of your former theory, even

if a few more doubtful points had to be given up.

But all this is remote from my plan. You must arrive at a higher freedom

of mind, where you no longer require support. I grant that this is not

the affair of a moment. The first aim of the earliest teaching is

commonly the subjugation of the mind, and among all the artifices of the

art of education this generally succeeds the first. Even you, though

endowed with great elasticity of character, yet appear destined to submit

readily to the sway of opinions, and even more inclined to this than

thousands; and this state of infancy might last very long with you, as

you do not readily feel the oppression of it. Your head and heart are in

very close connection. A doctrine is sweet to you on account of the

teacher. You soon succeeded in finding an interesting side in this

doctrine, you ennobled it according to the wants of your heart, and you

suffered your mind to be resigned to other points that must needs appear

strange to you. You regarded attacks on this doctrine as boyish revenge

taken by a slavish soul against the rod of its tutor. You played with

your chains, which you thought you carried by your own free will.

I found you in this situation, and the sight gave me pain--how, in the

midst of the enjoyment, of your glowing life, and while giving expression

to your noblest powers, you were hemmed in by narrow considerations. The

very logical consistency with which you acted according to your

convictions, and the strength of soul that made every sacrifice light to

you, were twofold hinderances to your activity and to your joys. I then

resolved to set aside these clumsy efforts by which it had been

endeavored to cramp a soul like yours in the measure of ordinary natures.

The result of your first exertions favored my intentions. I admit that

your imagination was more actively employed upon the work than was your

penetration. The loss of your fondest convictions was more than atoned

for by your presentiments, which gathered results much more rapidly than

the tortoise pace of cold scientific inquiry, passing from the known to

the unknown. Your kind of inspired system gave you your first enjoyment

in this new field of activity, and I was very careful not to destroy a

welcome enthusiasm which was very favorable to the development of your

excellent disposition. The scene is now changed. A return into the

restrictions of infancy is closed forever. Your way leads onwards, and

you require no further precautions.

You must not be surprised to find that a system such as yours cannot

resist the searching of a severe criticism. All essays of this kind,

equal in breadth and boldness to yours, have had no other fate. It was

also most natural that your philosophical progress began with you

individually, as with the human race in general. The first object on

which man's spirit of inquiry first attempted its strength was, at all

times, the universe. Hypotheses relating to the origin of the world, and

the combination of its parts, had occupied the greatest thinkers for

ages, when Socrates called down the philosophy of his day from heaven to

earth. But the limits of human wisdom were too narrow for the proud

intellect of his followers. New systems arose on the ruins of the former

ones. The penetrating mind of subsequent ages explored the immeasurable

field of possible answers to those ever-recurring questions, bearing on

the mysterious interior of nature, which could not be disclosed by any

human intellect. Some, indeed, succeeded in giving a certain coloring of

distinctness, completeness, and evidence to their views. There are many

conjuring tricks by which the pride of reason seeks to avoid the disgrace

of not being able to exceed the bounds of human nature in extending the

circle of its knowledge. It is a frequent conceit with men to believe

that they have discovered new truths, when they have dissected a

conception into the separate elements out of which it was first

compounded by an act of caprice. Not unfrequently an imperceptible

assumption lies at the basis of a chain of consequences, whose breaks and

deficiencies are cunningly concealed, while the false conclusions are

admired as sublime wisdom. In other cases, partial experiences are

accumulated to found a hypothesis, and all contradictory phenomena are

either ignored, or the meaning of words is changed according to the

requirements of the reasoning. Nor is it only the philosophical quack

who employs these conjuring tricks to deceive the public; without being

conscious of it, the most upright and the least prejudiced thinker uses

analogous means to satisfy his thirst for knowledge directly that he

issues from the only sphere where reason can legitimately enjoy the fruit

of its activity.

After what you have heard me say on former occasions, Julius, these

expressions must cause you no little astonishment; yet they are not the

product of a sceptical caprice. I could lay before you the foundations

on which they rest, but this would require, as prelude, a somewhat dry

examination into the nature of human knowledge,--and I prefer to reserve

this for a time when you will feel the want of it. You have not yet

arrived at that state of mind when humiliating truths on the limits of

human knowledge can have any interest for you. Make a first essay with

the system which has supplanted your own in your mind. Examine it with

the same impartiality as severity. Proceed in the same manner with other

theories with which you have recently become acquainted; and if none of

them can fully satisfy your requirements, you will ask yourself if, after

all, these requirements are reasonable.

Perhaps you will tell me this is a poor consolation. You will infer that

resignation is your only refuge after so many brilliant hopes had been

raised. "Was it worth while," you will say, "to challenge me to a full

exercise of my reason in order to set bounds to it at the very moment

when it was beginning to bear the noblest fruit? Was I only to become

acquainted with a higher enjoyment in order to feel with a double

keenness how painful it is to be thus bounded?"

Nevertheless, it is this very feeling of discouragement that I expressly

wish to banish from your soul. My aim is this: to remove all that places

an obstacle to the free enjoyment of your being, to bring to life in you

the germ of all lofty inspiration--the consciousness of the nobility of

your soul. You have been awakened from the slumber in which you were

rocked by the slavery of others' opinions; but you would never reach the

degree of grandeur to which you are called if you dissipated your

strength in the pursuit of an unattainable end. This course was all

proper up to the present time; it was the natural consequence of your

recently acquired freedom. It was necessary that the ideas which had

most engaged you previously should give the first impulse to the activity

of your mind.. Among all possible directions that your mind could take,

is its present course the most fertile in results? The answer would be

given, sooner or later, by your own experience. My part was confined to

hastening, if possible, this crisis.

It is a common prejudice to take as a measure of the greatness of man

that matter on which he works, and not the manner of his work. But it is

certain that a superior Being honors the stamp of perfection even in the

most limited sphere, whilst He casts an eye of pity on the vain attempts

of the insect which seeks to overlook the universe. It follows from this

that I am especially unwilling to agree to the proposition in your

papers, which assumes that the high destiny of man is to detect the

spirit of the Divine Artist in the work of creation. To express the

activity of infinite perfection, I admit that I do not know any sublimer

image than art; but you appear to have overlooked an important

distinction. The universe is not the pure expression of an ideal, like

the accomplished work of a human artist. The latter governs despotically

the inanimate matter which he uses to give a body to his ideas. But in

the divine work the proper value of each one of its parts is respected,

and this conservative respect with which the Great Architect honors every

germ of activity, even in the lowliest creature, glorifies it as much as

the harmony of the immeasurable whole. Life and liberty to all possible

extent are the seal of divine creation; nowhere is it more sublime than

where it seems to have departed most widely from its ideal. But it is

precisely this highest perfection that prevents us from grasping the

limits in which we are at present confined. We embrace only too small a

part of the universe, and the explanation of most of its discords is

inaccessible to our faculties. Each step we climb in the scale of being

will make us more susceptible of these enjoyments of art; but even then

their only value will be that of means, and to excite us to an analogous

exercise of our activity. The idle admiration of a greatness foreign to

ourselves can never be a great merit. A superior man is never wanting in

matter for his activity, nor in the forces necessary to become himself a

creator in his sphere. This vocation is yours also, Julius; when you

have recognized this you will never have a thought of complaining of the

limits that your desire of knowledge cannot overstep.

When you have arrived at this conviction I expect to find you wholly

reconciled to me. You must first know fully the extent of your strength

before you can appreciate the value of its freest manifestation. Till

then, continue to be dissatisfied with me, but do not despair of

yourself.

ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE SPIRITUAL NATURE IN MAN.

"It behooves us to clearly realize, as the broad facts which have most

wide-reaching consequences in mental physiology and pathology, that all

parts of the body, the highest and the lowest, have a sympathy with one

another more intelligent than conscious intelligence can yet, or perhaps

ever will, conceive; that there is not an organic motion, visible or

invisible, sensible or insensible, ministrant to the noblest or to the

most humble purposes, which does not work its appointed effect in the

complex recesses of the mind, and that the mind, as the crowning

achievement of organization, and the consummation and outcome of all its

energies, really comprehends the bodily life."--MAWDESLEY, Body and Mind.

"It is an indisputable truth that what we call the material world is only

known to us under the forms of the ideal world, and, as Descartes tells

us, our knowledge of the soul is more intimate and certain than our

knowledge of the body."--HUXLEY.

INTRODUCTION.

S 1.

Many philosophers have asserted that the body is, as it were, the

prison-house of the spirit, holding it only too firmly to what is

earthly, and checking its so-called flight towards perfection. On the

other hand, it has been held by another philosophic school that knowledge

and virtue are not so much an end as a means towards happiness, and that

the whole perfection of man culminates in the amelioration of his body.

Both opinions [1], methinks, are one-sided. The latter system has

almost entirely disappeared from our schemes of ethics and philosophy,

and is, I am inclined to think, not seldom cast out with over-fanatical

zeal--(nothing assuredly is so dangerous to truth as when one-sided

opinions meet with one-sided opponents). The former system has on the

whole been more patiently endured, since it has the greatest capacity for

warming the heart towards virtue, and has already justified its value in

the case of truly great souls. Who is there that does not admire the

strength of mind of a Cato, the lofty virtue of a Brutus and Aurelius,

the equanimity of an Epictetus and a Seneca? But, in spite of all this,

the system in question is nothing more than a beautiful aberration of the

understanding, a real extreme, which in its wild enthusiasm underrates

one part of our human nature, and desires to raise us into the order of

ideal beings without at the same time relieving us of our humanity,--a

system which runs directly contrary to all that we historically know or

philosophically can explain either of the evolution of the single man or

of that of the entirer race, and can in no way be reconciled with the

limitations of our human soul. It is therefore here, as ever, the wisest

plan to hold the balance between the two opinions, and thus reach with

greater certainty the middle line of truth. But, inasmuch as a mistake

has very often been committed by treating the mental powers in an

exclusive way, that is, in so far as they can be considered in

independence of the body, and through an intentional subordination of

this same body, the aim of this present essay will be to bring into a

clearer light the remarkable contributions made by the body to the

workings of the soul, and the great and real influence of the animal

system of sensations upon the spiritual. But this is as like the

philosophy of Epicurus as the holding of virtue to be the summum bonum is

stoicism.

Before we seek to discover those higher moral ends which the animal

nature assists us in attaining to, we must establish their physical

necessity, and come to an agreement as to some fundamental conceptions.

[1] Huxley, speaking of psychology and physiology (idealism and

materialism), says: "Our stem divides into two main branches, which grow

in opposite ways, and bear flowers which look as different as they can

well be. But each branch is sound and healthy, and has as much life and

vigor as the other. If a botanist found this state of things in a new

plant, I imagine he might be inclined to think that his tree was

monoecious, that the flowers were of different sexes, and that, so far

from setting up a barrier between the branches of the tree, the only hope

of fertility lay in bringing them together. This is my notion of what is

to be done with physics and metaphysics. Their differences are

complementary, not antagonistic, and thought will never be completely

fruitful until the one unites with the other."--HUXLEY, Macmillan's Mag.,

May 1870.

Descartes' method (according to Huxley) leads straight up to the critical

idealism of his great successor, Kant, in declaring that the ultimate

fact of all knowledge is a consciousness and therefore affirming that the

highest of all certainties, and indeed the only absolute certainty, is

the existence of mind. But it stops short of Berkeley in declaring that

matter does not exist: his arguments against its existence would equally

tend to prove the non-existence of soul. In Descartes' stem, the body is

simply a machine, in the midst of which the rational soul (peculiar to

man) is lodged, and which it directs at its will, as a skilful engineer

familiar with its working might do--through will and through affection he

can "increase, slacken, and alter their movements at his pleasure." At

the same time, he admits, in all that regards its mere animal life--in

active functions, such as those connected with hunger, respiration,

sleep, digestion; in many passive ones, such as we are accustomed to call

mental, as in memory, the perception of color, sound--a purely automatic

action of the body, which it pursues simply by following out its own

laws, independent of the soul's direction or interference.

PHYSICAL CONNECTION.

THE ANIMAL NATURE STRENGTHENS THE ACTION OF THE SPIRIT.

S 2.--Organism of the Operations of the Soul--of its Maintenance and

Support--of Generation.

All those conditions which we accept as requisite to the perfection of

man in the moral and material world may be included in one fundamental

sentence: The perfection of man consists in his ability to exercise his

powers in the observation of the plan of the world; and since between the

measure of the power and the end towards which it works there must exist

the completest harmony, perfection will consist in the highest possible

activity of his powers, and, at the same time, in their mutual

subordination. But the action of the human soul is--from a necessity

which I do not understand--bound fast to the action of matter. The

changes in the world of matter must be modified and, so to speak, refined

by a peculiar class of secondary powers--I mean the senses--before they

can produce in me any corresponding ideas; while, on the other hand, a

fresh set of organic powers, the agents of voluntary movements must come

into play between the inner spirit and the outward world in order to make

the changes of the former tell upon the latter; thus must the operations

of thinking and sensation alike correspond to certain movements of the

internal sensorium. All this goes to make up the organism of the soul's

activities.

But matter is spoil stolen from the eternal change, and wears itself

away, even as it works; in its movement its very element is driven from

its grooves, chased away and lost. Because now, on the contrary, that

simple essence, the soul, possesses in itself permanence and stability,

and in its essence neither gains nor loses aught,--matter cannot keep

step with the activity of the spirit, and there would thus soon be an end

of the organism of spiritual life, and therewith of all action of the

soul. To prevent which there must be added to the first system or

organic powers a second one, which shall make good the losses sustained,

and sustain the decay by a chain of new creations ready to take the place

of those that have gone. This is the organism of maintenance.

Still further. After a short period of activity, when the equal balance

of loss and reparation is once removed, man quits the stage of life, and

the law of mortality depopulates the earth. There is not room enough for

the multitude of sentient beings, whom eternal love and wisdom seemed to

have called to a happy existence, to live side by side within the narrow

boundaries of our world, and the life of one generation shuts out the

life of another. Therefore was it necessary that new men should appear,

to take the place of those who had departed, and that life should be kept

up in unbroken succession. But of creation there is no longer any trace;

what now becomes new becomes so only by development. The development of

man must come to pass through man, if it is to bear a proportion to the

original number, if man is to be cultivated into man. On this account a

new system of organic powers was added to the two that had preceded it,

which had for its object to quicken and to develop the seed of humanity.

This is the organism of generation.

These three organisms, brought into the most thorough connection, local

and real, go to form the human body.

S 3.--The Body.

The organic powers of the human body naturally divide themselves into two

principal classes. The first class embraces those which no known laws

and phenomena of the physical world enable us to comprehend; and to these

belong the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles.

Inasmuch as it has hitherto been impossible to penetrate the economy of

the invisible, men have sought to interpret this unknown mechanism

through that with which they were already familiar, and have considered

the nerves as a canal conducting an excessively fine, volatile, and

active fluid, which in rapidity of motion and fineness was held to excel

ether and the electric spark. This fluid was held to be the principle

and author of our sensibility and power of motion, and hence received the

name of the spirit of life. Further, the irritability of the muscles was

held to consist, in a certain effort to contract themselves on the touch

of some external provocation. These two principles go to form the

specific character of animal organism.

The second class of powers embraces those which we can account for by the

universally-known laws of physics. Among these I reckon the mechanism of

motion, and the chemistry of the human body, the source of vegetable

life. Vegetation, then, and animal mechanism, thoroughly mingled, form

the proper physical life of the human body.

S 4.-Animal Life.

This is not yet all. Since loss or misfortune, when it occurs, falls

more or less within the will-power of the spirit, the spirit must be

able to make some compensation for it. Further, since the body is

subjected to all the consequences of this connection, and in the circle

of circumstances is exposed to countless hostile forces, it must be

within the power of the soul to protect the body against these harmful

influences, and to bring it into such relations with the physical

world as shall tend most to its preservation. The soul must therefore

be conscious of the present evil or good state of its organs; from a

bad state it must draw dissatisfaction, from a good state satisfaction,

so that it may either retain or remove the condition, seek it or fly

from it. Here then we have the organism at once and closely linked to

the sensational capacity, and the soul drawn into the service of the

body. We have now something more than vegetation, something more than a

dead model and the mechanism of nerves and muscles. Now we have animal

life. [1]

A healthy condition of our animal life is, as we know, most important for

the healthy condition of our spiritual life; and we dare never ignore the

animal life so long as we are not quit of it. It must therefore possess

a firm foundation, not easily moved; that is, the soul must be fitted and

prepared for the actions of our bodily life by an irresistible power.

Were then the sensations of our animal loss or well-being to become

spiritual perceptions, and had they to be created by thought, how often

would the soul be obscured by the overwhelming blaze of passion; how

often stifled by laziness and stupidity; how often overlooked in the

absorptions and distractions of business! Further, would not, in this

case, the most perfect knowledge of his economy be demanded of the animal

man--would not the child need to be a master in a branch of knowledge in

which, after fifty years of investigation, Harvey, Boerhaave, and Haller

were only beginners? The soul could thus have positively no idea of the

condition she was called upon to alter. How shall she become acquainted

with it? how shall she begin to act at all?

[1] But we have something more than the animal life of the animal

(beast). A beast lives an animal life in order that it may experience

pleasant sensations. It experiences pleasant sensations that it may

preserve the animal life. It lives now, therefore, in order that it may

live again tomorrow. It is happy now that it may be happy to-morrow.

But it is a simple, an uncertain happiness, which depends upon the action

of the organism, it is a slave to luck and blind chance; because it

consists in sensation only. Man, too, lives an animal life,--is sensible

of its pleasures and suffers its pains. But why? He feels and suffers

that he may preserve his animal life. He preserves his animal life that

he may longer have the power to live a spiritual one. Here, then, the

means differ from the end; there, end and means seem to coincide. This

is one of the lines of separation between man and the animal.

S 5.--Animal Sensations.

So far we have met with such sensations only as they take their rise in

an antecedent operation of the understanding; but we have now to deal

with sensations in which the understanding bears no part. These

sensations, if they are not exactly the expression of the present state

of our organs, mark it out specifically, or, better, accompany it. These

sensations have quickly and forcibly to determine the will to aversion or

desire; but, on the other hand, they are ever to float on the surface of

the soul, and never to extend to the province of the reason. The part,

accordingly, played by thought, in the case of a mental perception, is

here taken up by that modification in the animal parts of us which either

threatens the destruction of the sensation or insures its duration: that

is, an eternal law of wisdom has combined with that condition of the

machine which confirms its welfare, a pleasant emotion of the soul; and,

on the other hand, with that condition which undermines it and threatens

ruin, an unpleasant emotion is connected; and this in such a manner that

the sensation itself has not the faintest resemblance to the state of the

organs of which it is the mark. Animal sensations have, on this showing,

a double origin: (1) in the present state of the machine; (2) in the

capacity or faculty (of sensation).

We are now able to understand how it is that the animal sensations have

the power to drive the soul with an irresistible tyranny in the direction

of passionate action, and not seldom gain the upper hand in a struggle

with those sensations which are most purely intellectual. For these last

the soul has produced by means of thought, and therefore they can by

thought be solved or even destroyed. Abstraction and philosophy have

this power over the passions, over opinions--in short, over all the

situations of life; but the animal sensations are forced upon the soul by

a blind necessity, by a stern mechanical law. The understanding, which

did not create them, likewise cannot dissolve them and make them as if

they were not, though by giving an opposite direction to our attention it

can do much to weaken their power and obscure their pretensions. The

most stubborn stoic, lying in the agony of the stone, will never be able

to boast that he did not feel its pain; but, lost in the consideration of

the end of his existence, he will be able to divide his whole power of

sensation and perception, and the preponderating pleasure of a great

achievement, which can subordinate even pain to the general welfare, will

be victorious over the present discomfort. It was neither absence of nor

annihilation of sensation that enabled Mucius, while he was roasting his

hand in the fire, to gaze upon the foe with the Roman look of proud

repose, but the thought of great Rome in admiration of his deed. This it

was that ruled in his soul, and kept it grandly self-possessed, so that

the terrible provocation of the animal pain was too slight to disturb the

equal balance of his nature. But not on this account was the pain the

Roman suffered less than it would have been in the case of the most

effeminate voluptuary. True enough, the man who is accustomed to pass

his days in a state of confused ideas will be less capable of manly

action, in the critical moment of sensuous pain, than he who lives

persistently among ideas distinct and clear; but, for all that, neither

the loftiest virtue, nor the profoundest philosophy, nor even divine

religion, can save a man from the result of a necessary law, though

religion can bless her servants even at the stake, and make them happy as

the pile gives way.

The wisest purpose is served by the power which the animal sensations

possess over the perceptive faculty of the soul. The spirit once

initiated in the mysteries of a higher pleasure would look with disdain

upon the motions of its companion, and would pay no heed to the poor

necessities of physical life, were it not that the animal feeling

compelled it to do so. The mathematician, soaring in the region of the

infinite, and dreaming away reality in a world of abstractions, is roused

by the pang of hunger from his intellectual slumber; the natural

philosopher, dismembering the solar system, accompanying through

immeasurable space the wanderings of the planets, is restored by the

prick of a needle to his mother earth; the philosopher who unfolds the

nature of the Deity, and fancies himself to have broken through the

fetters of mortality, returns to himself and everyday life when the bleak

north wind whistles through his crazy hut, and teaches him that he stands

midway between the beast and the angel.

Against an excess of the animal sensations the severest mental exertion

in the end possesses no influence; as they continue to grow stronger,

reason closes her ears, and the fettered soul moves but to subserve the

purposes of the bodily organization. To satisfy hunger or to quench

thirst man will do deeds at which humanity will shudder: against his will

he turns traitor or murderer--even cannibal:--

Tiger! in the bosom of thy mother wilt thou set thy teeth?

--so violent is the influence of the animal sensation over the mind.

Such watchful care has the Creator shown for the preservation of the

machine that the pillars on which it rests are the firmest, and

experience has taught us that it is rather the over-abundance than the

want of animal sensations that has carried destruction with it.

The animal sensations therefore may be said to further the welfare of the

animal nature, just as the moral and intellectual perceptions promote

spiritual progress or perfection. The system of animal sensations and

motions, then, comprises the conception of the animal nature. This is

the ground on which all the activities of the soul depend, and the

conformation of this fabric determines the duration of the spiritual

activity itself, and the degree of ease with which it works. Here, then,

we find ourselves in possession of the first member of the connection

between the two natures.

S 6.--Objections against the Connection of the Two Natures, drawn from

Ideas of Morality.

There is no doubt that thus much will be conceded; but the next remark

will be: "Here ends, too, any determining influence the body may possess;

beyond this point the body is but the soul's inert companion, with whom

she must sustain a constant battle, attendance on whose necessities robs

her of all leisure, whose attacks and interruptions break the thread of

the most intricate speculation, and drive the spirit from the clearest

and plainest conceptions into a chaotic complexity of the senses, whose

pleasures remove the greatest part of our fellow-creatures far from their

high original, and reduce them to the level of the beasts, which, in a

word, entangles them in a slavery from which death only can deliver them.

Is it not senseless and injust," our complainer might go on to say, "to

mix up a being, simple, necessary, that has its subsistence in itself,

with another being that moves in an eternal whirl, exposed to every

chance and change, and becomes the victim of every external necessity?"

On cooler afterthought we shall perhaps see a great beauty take its rise

out of this apparent confusion and want of plan.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONNECTION.

ANIMAL IMPULSES AWAKEN AND DEVELOP THE IMPULSES OF THE SOUL.

S 7.--The Metho.

The surest way, perhaps, to throw some light upon this matter is the

following: Let us detach from man all idea of what can be called

organization,--that is, let the body be separated from the spirit,

without, however, depriving the latter of the power to attain to

representations of, and to produce actions in, the corporeal world; and

let us then inquire how the spirit would set to work, would develop its

powers, what steps it would take towards its perfection: the result of

this investigation must be founded upon facts. The actual culture of the

individual man is thus surveyed, while we at the same time obtain a view

of the development of the whole race. In the first place, then, we have

this abstract case: the power of representation and will are present, a

sphere of action is present, and a free way opened from the soul to the

world, from the world to the soul. The question then is, How will the

spirit act?

S 8.-The Soul viewed as out of connection with the Body.

We can form no conception without the antecedent will to form it; no

will, unless by experience of a better condition thereby induced, without

[some] sensation; no sensation without an antecedent idea (for along with

the body we excluded bodily sensations), therefore no idea without an

idea.

Let us consider now the case of a child; that is, according to our

hypothesis, a spirit conscious in itself of the power to form ideas, but

which for the first time is about to exercise this power. What will

determine him to think, unless it be the pleasant sensation thereby

arising, and what can have procured for him the experience of this

pleasurable sensation? We have just seen that this, again, could be

nothing but thinking, and he is now for the first time to think.

Further, what shall invite him to a consideration of the [external]

world? Nothing but the experience of its perfection in so far as it

satisfies his instinct of activity, and as this satisfaction affords him

pleasure. What, then, can determine him to an exercise of his powers?

Nothing but the experience of their existence; and all these experiences

are now to be made for the first time. He must therefore have been

active from all eternity--which is contrary to the case as stated--or he

will to all eternity be inactive, just as the machine without a touch

from without remains idle and motionless.

S 9.--The Soul viewed in connection with the Body.

Now let the animal be added to the spirit. Weave these two natures so

closely together as they really are closely woven, and cause an unknown

something, born of the economy of the animal body, to be assailed by the

power of sensation,--let the soul be placed in the condition of physical

pain. That was the first touch, the first ray to light up the night of

slumbering powers, a touch as from a golden finger upon nature's lute.

Now is sensation there, and sensation only was it that before we missed.

This kind of sensation seems to have been made on purpose to remove all

these difficulties. In the first case none could be produced because we

were not allowed to presuppose an idea; here a modification of the bodily

organs becomes a substitute for the ideas that were lacking, and thus

does animal sensation come to the help of the spirits inward mechanism,

if I may so call it, and puts the same in motion. The will is active,

and the action of a single power is sufficient to set all the rest to

work. The following operations are self-developed and do not belong to

this chapter.

S 10.-Out of the History of the Individual.

Let us follow now the growth of the soul in the individual man in

relation to what I am trying to demonstrate, and let us observe how all

his spiritual capacities grow out of motive powers of sense.

a. The child. Still quite animal; or, rather more and at the same time

less than animal--human animal (for that being which at some time shall

be called man can at no time have been only animal). More wretched than

an animal, because he has not even instinct--the animal-mother may with

less danger leave her young than the mother abandon her child. Pain may

force from him a cry, but will never direct him to the source from which

it comes. The milk may give him pleasure, but he does not seek it. He

is altogether passive.

His thinking rises only to sensation.

His knowledge is but pain, hunger--and what binds these together.

b. The boy. Here we have already reflection, but only in so far as it

bears upon the satisfaction of the animal impulse. "He learns to value,"

says Garve [Observations on Ferguson's "Moral Philosophy," p. 319], "the

things of others, and his actions in respect of others, first of all

through the fact of their affording him [sensuous] pleasure."

A love of work, the love to his parents, to friends, yea even love to

God, must go along the pathway of physical sense [Sinnlichkeit] to reach

his soul. "That only is the sun," as Garve elsewhere observes, "which in

itself enlightens and warms: all other objects are dark and cold; but

they too can be warmed and illumined when they enter into such a

connection with the same as to become partakers of its rays."

[Observations on Ferguson's "Moral Philosophy," p. 393.] The good things

of the spirit possess a value with the boy only by transferrence--they

are the spiritual means to an animal end.

c. Youth and man. The frequent repetition of this process of induction

at last brings about a readiness, and the transferrence begins to

discover a beauty in what at first was regarded simply as a means. The

youth begins to linger in the process without knowing why. Without

observing it, he is often attracted to think about this means. Now is

the time when the beams of spiritual beauty in itself begin to fall upon

his open soul; the feeling of exercising his powers delights him, and

infuses an inclination to the object which, up to this time, was a means

only: the first end is forgotten. His enlightened mind and the richer

store of his ideas at last reveal to him the whole worth of spiritual

pleasures--the means has become the highest end.

Such is the teaching more or less of the history of each individual man--

whose means of education have been fairly good; and wisdom could hardly

choose a better road along which to lead mankind. Is not the mass of the

people even to this day in leading-strings?--much like our boy. And has

not the prophet from Medina left us an example of striking plainness how

to bridle the rude nature of the Saracens?

On this subject nothing more excellent can be said than what Garve

remarked in his translation of Ferguson's "Moral Philosophy," in the

chapter upon the Natural Impulses, and has developed as follows: "The

impulse of self-preservation and the attraction of sensual pleasure first

bring both man and beast to the point of action: he first comes to value

the things of others and his own actions in reference to them according

as they procure him pleasure. In proportion as the number of things

under whose influence he comes increases do his desires cover a wider

circle; as the road by which he reaches the objects of his wishes

lengthens, so do his desires become more artificial. Here we come to the

first line of separation between man and the mere animal, and herein we

may even discover a difference between one species of animal and another.

With few animals does the act of feeding follow immediately upon the

sensation of hunger; the heat of the chase, or the industry of collection

must come first. But in the case of no animal does the satisfaction of

this want follow so late upon the preparations made in reference thereto

as in the case of man; with no animal does the endeavor wind through so

long a chain of means and intentions before it arrives at the last link.

How far removed from this end, though in reality they have no other, are

the labors of the artisan or the ploughman. But even this is not all.

When the means of human subsistence have become richer and more various

through the institutions of society; when man begins to discover that

without a full expenditure of time and labor a surplus remains to him;

when at the same time by the communication of ideas he becomes more

enlightened; then he begins to find a last end for all his actions in

himself; he then remarks that, even when his hunger is thoroughly

satisfied, a good supply of raiment, a roof above him, and a sufficiency

of furniture within doors, there still remains something over and

above for him to do. He goes a step further, he becomes conscious that

in those very actions by which he has procured for himself food and

comfort--in so far as they have their origin in certain powers of a

spirit, and in so far as they exercise these powers--there lies a higher

good than in the external ends which thereby are attained. From this

moment on he works, indeed--in company with the rest of the human race,

and along with the whole animal kingdom--to keep himself alive, and to

provide for himself and his friends the necessaries of physical

existence;--for what else could he do? What other sphere of action could

he create for himself, if he were to leave this? But he knows now that

nature has not so much awakened in him these various impulses and desires

for the purpose of affording so many particular pleasures,--but, and far

more, places before him the attraction of those pleasures and advantages,

in order that these impulses may be put in motion--and with this end,

that to a thinking being there may be given matter for thought, to a

sensitive spirit matter for sensations, to the benevolent means of

beneficence, and to the active opportunity for work. Thus does

everything, living or lifeless, assume to him a new form. All the facts

and changes of life were formerly estimated by him only in so far as they

caused him pleasure or pain: now, in so far as they offer occasion for

expression of his desire of perfection. In the first case, events are

now good, now bad; in the latter, all are equally good. For there is no

chance or accident which does not give scope for the exercise of some

virtue, or for the employment of a special faculty. At first he loved

his fellows because he believed that they could be of use to him; he

loves them now far more--because he looks upon benevolence as the

condition of the perfect mind."

S 11.-From the History of Humanity.

Yet once more, a glance at the universal history of the whole human

race--from its cradle to the maturity of full-grown man--and the truth of

what has been said up to this point will stand forth in clearest relief.

Hunger and nakedness first made of man a hunter, a fisher, a cowherd, a

husbandman, and a builder. Sensual pleasure founded families, and the

defencelessness of single men was the origin of the tribe. Here already

may the first roots of the social duties be discovered. The soil would

soon become too poor for the increasing multitude of men; hunger would

drive them to other climates and countries that would discover their

wealth to the necessity that forced men to seek it; in the process they

would learn many improvements in the cultivation of the soil, and perhaps

some means to escape the hurtful influence of many things they would

necessarily encounter. These separate experiences passed from

grandfather to grandson, and their number was always on the increase.

Man learned to use the powers of nature against herself; these powers

were brought into new relations and the first invention was made. Here

we have the first roots of the simple and healing arts--always, we admit,

art and invention for the behoof of the animal, but still an exercise of

power, an addition to knowledge; and at the very fire in whose embers the

savage roasted his fish, Boerhaave afterwards made his inquiries into the

composition of bodies; through the very knife which this wild man used to

cut up his game, Lionet invented what led to his discovery of the nerves

of insects; with the very circle wherewith at first hoofs were measured,

Newton measures heaven and earth. Thus did the body force the mind to

pay attention to the phenomena around it; thus was the world made

interesting and important, through being made indispensable. The inward

activity of their nature, and the barrenness of their native soil,

combined in teaching our forefathers to form bolder plans, and invented

for them a house wherein, under conduct of the stars, they could safely

move upon rivers and seas, and sail toward regions new:--

Fluctibus ignotis insultavere carinae.

(Their keels danced upon waves unknown.)

Here again they met with new productions of nature, new dangers, new

needs that called for new exertions. The collision of animal instincts

drives hordes against hordes, forges a sword out of the raw metal, begets

adventurers, heroes, and despots. Towns are fortified, states are

founded: with the states arise civic duties and rights, arts, figures,

codes of law, subtle priests--and gods.

And now, when necessities have degenerated into luxury, what a boundless

field is opened to our eyes! Now are the veins of the earth burrowed

through, the foot of man is planted on the bottom of the sea, commerce

and travel flourish:--

Latet sub classibus aequor.

(The sea is hid beneath the fleets.)

The West wonders at the East, the East at the West; the productions of

foreign countries accustom themselves to grow under other skies, and the

art of gardening shows the products of three-quarters of the world in one

garden. Artists learn her works from nature, music soothes the savage

breast, beauty and harmony ennoble taste and manners, and art leads the

way to science and virtue. "Man," says Schloezer [see Schloezer's Plan

of his Universal History, S 6], "this mighty demigod, clears rocks from

his path, digs out lakes, and drives his plough where once the sail was

seen. By canals he separates quarters of the globe and provinces from

one another; leads one stream to another and discharges them upon a sandy

desert, changed thereby into smiling meadow; three quarters of the globe

he plunders and transplants them into a fourth. Even climate, air, and

weather acknowledge his sway. While he roots out forests and drains the

swamp, the heaven grows clear above his head, moisture and mist are lost,

winter becomes milder and shorter, because rivers are no longer frozen

over." And the mind of man is refined with the refining of his clime.

The state occupies the citizen in the necessities and comforts of life.

Industry gives the state security and rest from without; from within,

granting to thinker and artist that fruitful leisure through which the

age of Augustus came to be called the Golden Age. The arts now take a

more daring and untrammelled flight, science wins a light pure and dry,

natural history and physical science shatter superstition, history

extends a mirror of the times that were, and philosophy laughs at the

follies of mankind. But when luxury grows into effeminacy and excess,

when the bones begin to ache, and the pestilence to spread and the air

becomes infected, man hastens in his distress from one realm of nature to

another, that he may at least find means for lessening his pains. Then

he finds the divine plant of China; from the bowels of the earth he digs

out the mightily-working mercury, and from the poppy of the East learns

to distil its precious juice. The most hidden corners of nature are

investigated; chemistry separates material objects into their ultimate

elements, and creates worlds of her own; alchemists enrich the province

of physical science; the microscopic glance of a Schwammerdam surprises

nature in her most secret operations. Man goes still further; necessity

or curiosity transcends the boundaries set by superstition: he seizes the

knife, takes courage, and the masterpiece of nature is discovered, even

man. Thus did it behoove the least, the poorest, to help us to reach the

highest; disease and death must lend their aid to man in teaching him

Gnothi seauton ("Know thyself!"). The plague produced and formed our

Hippocrates, our Sydenhams, as war is the mother of generals; and we owe

to the most devastating disease that ever visited humanity an entire

reformation of our medical system.

Our intention was to show the influence upon the perfecting of the soul

through the temperate enjoyment of the pleasures held out by the senses;

and how marvellously has the matter changed, even while under our hands!

We found that even excess and abuse in this direction have furthered the

real demands of humanity; the deflections from the primitive end of

nature--merchants, conquerors, and luxury--have, undoubtedly, tended to

hasten a progress which had otherwise been more regular, but very slow.

Let us compare the old world with the new! In the first, desire was

simple, its satisfaction easy; but how mistaken, how painful was the

judgment passed on nature and her laws! Now, the road is made more

difficult by a thousand windings, but how full the light that has been

shed upon all our conceptions!

We may, then, repeat: Man needed to be an animal before he knew that he

was a spirit; he needed to crawl in the dust before he ventured on a

Newtonian flight through the universe. The body, therefore, is the first

spur to action; sense the first step on the ladder to perfection.

ANIMAL SENSATIONS ACCOMPANY MENTAL SENSATIONS.

S 12.--Law.

The understanding of man is extremely limited, and, therefore, all

sensations resulting from its action must of necessity be also limited.

In order, therefore, to give these sensations greater impulse, and with

redoubled force to attract the will to good and restrain it from evil,

both natures, the spiritual and the animal, are so intimately connected

with each other that their modifications, being mutually interchanged,

impart strength to one another. Hence arises a fundamental law of mixed

natures, which, being reduced to its primary divisions, runs thus: the

activities of the body correspond to the activities of the mind; that is,

any overstraining of a mental activity is necessarily followed by an

overstraining of certain bodily actions,--just as the equilibrium, or

harmonious action, of the mental powers is associated with that of the

bodily powers in perfect accord. Further: mental indolence induces

indolence in the bodily actions; mental inaction causes them to cease

altogether. Thus, as perfection is ever accompanied by pleasure,

imperfection by the absence of pleasure, this law may be thus expressed:

Mental pleasure is invariably attended by animal pleasure, mental pain by

animal pain. [Complacency and Displacency perhaps more aptly express the

meaning of Lust and Unlust, which we translate by pleasure and pain.]

S 13.--Mental Pleasure furthers the Welfare of the Human Frame.

Thus, a sensation which embraces within its range the whole spiritual

being agitates in the same measure the whole framework of the organic

body,--heart, veins and blood, muscles and nerves, all, from those mighty

nerves that give to the heart its living impulse of motion down to the

tiny and unimportant nerves by which hairs are attached to the skin,

share equally its influence. Everything tends to a more violent motion.

If the sensation be an agreeable one, all these parts will acquire a

higher degree of harmonious activity; the heart's beat will be free,

lively, uniform, the blood will flow unchecked, gently or with fiery

speed, according as the affection is of a gentle or violent description;

digestion, secretion, and excretion will follow their natural course; the

excitable membranes will pliantly play in a gentle vapor-bath, and

excitability as well as sensitiveness will increase. Therefore the

condition of the greatest momentary mental pleasure is at the same time

the condition of the greatest bodily well-being.

As many as there may be of these partial activities (and is not every

beat of the pulse the result perhaps of thousands?) so many will be the

obscure sensations crowding upon the soul, each one of which indicates

perfection. Out of this confused complexity arises entire sensation of

the animal harmonies, that is, the highest possible combined sensation of

animal pleasure, which ranges itself, as it were, alongside of the

original intellectual or moral sensation, which this addition infinitely

increases. Thus is every agreeable affection the source of countless

bodily pleasures.

This is most evidently confirmed by the examples of sick persons who have

been cured by joy. Let one whom a terrible home-sickness has wasted to a

skeleton be brought back to his native land, and the bloom of health will

soon be his again; or let us enter a prison in which miserable men have

for ten or twenty years inhabited filthy dungeons and possess at last

barely strength to move,--and let us tell them suddenly they are free;

the single word of freedom will endow their limbs with the strength of

youth, and cause dead eyes to sparkle with life. Sailors, whom thirst

and famine have made their prey during a long voyage, are half cured by

the steersman's cry of "Land!" and he would certainly greatly err who

ascribed the whole result to a prospect of fresh food. The sight of a

dear one, whom the sufferer has long desired to see, sustains the life

that was about to go, and imparts strength and health. It is a fact,

that joy can quicken the nervous system more effectually than all the

cordials of the apothecary, and can do wonders in the case of inveterate

internal disorders denied to the action of rhubarb and even mercury. Who

then does not perceive that the constitution of the soul which knows how

to derive pleasure from every event and can dissipate every ache in the

perfection of the universe, must be the most beneficial to the whole

organism? and this constitution of the soul is--virtue.

S 14.--Mental pain undermines the Welfare of the Whole Organisms.

In the very same way, the opposite result is brought about by a

disagreeable affection of the mind. The ideas which rule so intensely

the angry or terrified man may, as rightly as Plato called the passions a

fever of the soul, be regarded as convulsions of the organ of thought.

These convulsions quickly extend through the nervous system, and so

disturb the vital powers that they lose their perfection, and all organic

actions lose their equilibrium. The heart beats violently and

irregularly; the blood is so confined to the lungs that the failing pulse

has barely enough to sustain it. The internal chemical processes are at

cross-purposes; beneficent juices lose their way and work harm in other

provinces, while what is malignant may attack the very core of our

organism. In a word, the condition of the greatest mental distress

becomes the condition of the greatest bodily sickness.

The soul is informed of the threatened ruin of the organs that should

have been her good and willing servants by a thousand obscure sensations,

and is filled with an entire sensation of pain, associating itself to the

primary mental suffering, and giving to this a sharper sting.

S 15.--Examples.

Deep, chronic pains of the soul, especially if accompanied by a strong

exertion of thought--among which I would give a prominent place to that

lingering anger which men call indignation--gnaw the very foundations of

physical life, and dry up the sap that nourish it. Sufferers of this

kind have a worn and pale appearance, and the inward grief betrays itself

by the hollow, sunken eyes. "Let me," says Caesar, "have men about me

that are fat":--

Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights;

Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look;

He thinks too much--such men are dangerous.

Fear, trouble, distress of conscience, despair, are little less powerful

in their effects than the most violent fevers. Richard, when in deepest

anxiety, finds his former cheerfulness is gone, and thinks to bring it

back with a glass of wine. But it is not mental sorrow only that has

banished comfort, it is a sensation of discomfort proceeding from the

very root of his physical organism, the very same sensation that

announces a malignant fever. The Moor, heavily burdened with crimes, and

once crafty enough in absolving all the sensations of humanity--by his

skeleton-process--into nothing, now rises from a dreadful dream, pale and

breathless, with a cold sweat upon his brow. All the images of a future

judgment which he had perhaps believed in as a boy, and blotted out from

his remembrance as a man, assail his dream-bewildered brain. The

sensations are far too confused for the slower march of reason to

overtake and unravel them. Reason is still struggling with fancy, the

spirit with the horrors of the corporeal frame. ["Life of Moor," tragedy

of Krake. Act. v. sc. 1.]

MOOR.--No! I am not shaking. It was but a dream. The dead are not

beginning to rise. Who says I tremble and turn pale? I am quite well,

quite well.

BED.--You are pale as death; your voice is frightened and hesitating.

MOOR.--I am feverish. I will be bled to-morrow. Say only, when the

priest comes, that I have fever.

BED.--But you are very ill.

MOOR.--Yes truly; that is all. And sickness disturbs the brain and

breeds strange mad dreams. Dreams mean nothing. Fie on womanish

cowardice! Dreams mean nothing. I have just had a pleasant dream.

[He falls down in a faint.

Here we have the whole image of the dream suddenly forcing itself upon a

man, and setting in motion the entire system of obscure ideas, stirring

up from the foundation the organ of thought. From all these causes

arises an intense sensation of pain in its utmost concentration, which

shatters the soul from its depth, and lames per consensum the whole

structure of the nerves.

The cold horror that seizes on the man who is about to commit some crime,

or who has just committed one, is nothing else than the horror which

agitates the feverish man, and which is felt on taking nauseous

medicines. The nightly tossings of those who are troubled by remorse,

always accompanied by a high pulse, are veritable fevers, induced by the

connection between the physical organism with the soul; and Lady Macbeth,

walking in her sleep, is an instance of brain delirium. Even the

imitation of a passion makes the actor for the moment ill; and after

Garrick had played Lear or Othello he spent some hours in convulsions on

his bed. Even the illusion of the spectator, through sympathy with acted

passion, has brought on shivering, gout, and fits of fainting.

Is not he, then, who is plagued with an evil temper, and draws gall and

bitterness from every situation in life: is not the vicious man, who

lives in a chronic state of hatred and malevolence; is not the envious

man, who finds torture in every excellence of his neighbor,--are not

these, all of them, the greatest foes to their own health? Has vice not

enough of the horrible in it, when it destroys not only happiness but

health.

S 16.-Exceptions.

But a pleasant affection has sometimes been a fatal one, and an

unpleasant one has sometimes worked a marvellous cure. Both facts rest

upon experience: should they remove the limits of the law we have

expounded?

Joy is fatal when it rises into ecstacy: nature cannot support the strain

which in one moment is thrown upon the whole nervous system. The motion

of the brain is no longer harmony, but convulsion, an extremely sudden

and momentary force which soon changes into the ruin of the organism,

since it has transgressed the boundary line of health (for into the very

idea of health there enters and is essentially interwoven the idea of a

certain moderation of all natural motions). The joy as well as the grief

of finite beings is limited, and dare not pass beyond a certain point

without ruin.

As far as the second part is concerned, we have many examples of cure,

through a moderate fit of anger, of inveterate dyspepsia; and through

fright,--as in the case of a fire--of rheumatic pains and lameness

apparently incurable. But even dysentery has sometimes resolved an

internal stoppage, and the itch has been a cure for melancholy madness

and insanity: is the itch, for this, less a disease?--is dysentery

therefore health.

S 17.--Indolence of Mind brings about greater Indolence in the Organic

Movements.

As, according to the testimony of Herr von Haller, activity of mind

during the day tends to quicken the pulse towards evening, will not

indolence of mind make it more sluggish, and absolute inactivity

completely stop it? For, although the circulation of the blood does not

seem to be so very dependent on the mind, is it altogether unreasonable

to suppose that the heart, which, in any case, borrows from the brain the

larger portion of its strength, must necessarily, when the soul ceases to

maintain the action of the brain, suffer thereby a great loss of power?

A condition of phlegm is accompanied by a sluggish pulse, the blood is

thin and watery, and the circulation defective in the abdomen. The

idiots, whom Muzell has described for us [Muzell's "Medical and Surgical

Considerations."], breathed slowly and with difficulty, had no

inclination to eat and drink, nor to the natural functions; the pulse was

slow, all bodily movements slumberous and indicative of weariness. The

mental numbness which is the result of terror or wonder is sometimes

accompanied by a general suspension of all natural physical activity.

Was the mind the origin of this condition, or was it the body which

brought about this torpid state of mind? But these considerations lead

to subtleties and intricate questions, and, besides, must not be

discussed in this place.

S 18.--Second Law.

All that has been said of the transferrence of the mental sensations to

the animal holds true of the transferrence of animal affections to the

mental. Bodily sickness--for the most part the natural result of

intemperance--brings its punishment in the form of bodily pain; but the

mind also cannot escape a radical attack, in order that a twofold pain

may more powerfully impress upon it the necessity of restraint in the

desires. In like manner the feeling of bodily health is accompanied by a

more lively consciousness of mental improvement, and man is thus the more

spurred on to maintain his body in good condition. We arrive thus at a

second law of mixed natures--that, with the free action of the bodily

organism, the sensations and ideas gain a freer flow; and learn that,

with a corrupted organism, corruption of the thinking faculty and of the

sensations inevitably follows. Or, more shortly, that the general

sensation of a harmonious animal life is the fountain of mental pleasure,

and that animal pain and sickness is the fountain of mental pain.

In these different respects, or from their consideration, soul and body

may not unaptly be compared with two stringed instruments tuned by the

same hand, and placed alongside of one another. When a string of one of

them is touched and a certain tone goes forth, the corresponding string

of the other will sound of itself and give the same tone, only somewhat

weaker. And, using this comparison, we may say that the string of

gladness in the body wakes the glad string in the soul, and the sad

string the string of sadness. This is that wonderful and noteworthy

sympathy which unites the heterogeneous principles in man so as to form

one being. Man is not soul and body--but the most inward and essential

blending of the two.

S 19.--Moods of Mind result from Moods of Body.

Hence the heaviness, the incapacity of thought, the discontented temper;

which are the consequence of excess in physical indulgence; hence the

wonderful effects of wine upon those who always drink in moderation.

"When you have drunk wine," says Brother Martin, "you see everything

double, you think doubly easily, you are doubly ready for any

undertaking, and twice as quickly bring it to a conclusion." Hence the

comfort and good-humor experienced in fine weather, proceeding partly

from association of ideas, but mostly from the increased feeling of

bodily health that goes along with it, extending over all the functions

of our organism. Then it is that people use such expressions as, "I feel

that I am well," and at such a season they are more disposed towards all

manner of mental labor, and have a heart more open to the humaner

feelings, and more prompt to the practice of moral duties. The same may

be seen in the national character of different peoples. Those who dwell

in gloomy regions mourn along with the dismal scenery: in wild and stormy

zones man grows wild: where his lot is cast in friendly climates he

laughs with the sky that is bright above him. Only under the clear

heaven of Greece lived a Homer, a Plato, a Phidias; there were born the

Muses and the Graces, while the Lapland mists can hardly bring forth men,

and never a genius. While our Germany was yet a wild forest or morass,

the German was a hunter as wild as the beast whose skin he slung about

his shoulders. As soon as industry had changed the aspect of his country

began the epoch of moral progress. I will not maintain that character

takes its rise in climate only, but it is certain that towards the

civilization of a people one main means is the improvement of their

skies.

The disorders of the body may disorder the whole range of our moral

perceptions, and prepare the way for an outburst of the most evil

passions. A man whose constitution is ruined by a course of dissipation

is more easily led to extremes than one who has kept his body as it

should be kept. This is, indeed, the horrible plan of those who destroy

our youths, and that father of robbers must have known man well, who

said, "We must destroy both body and soul." Catiline was a profligate

before he became a conspirator, and Doria greatly erred when he thought

he had no cause to fear a voluptuary like Fiesco. On the whole, it is

very often remarked that an evil spirit dwells in a sick body.

In diseases this sympathy is still more striking. All severe illnesses,

especially those of malignant nature and arising from the economy of the

abdominal regions, announce themselves, more or less, by a strange

revolution in the character. Even while the disease is still silently

stealing through the hidden corners of our mechanism, and undermining the

strength of nerve, the mind begins to anticipate by dark forebodings the

fall of her companion. This is a main element in that condition which a

great physician described in a masterly manner under the name of

"Horrores." Hence their moroseness of disposition, which none can

account for, their wavering fancies and inclinations, their disgust at

what used to give them pleasure. The amiable man grows quarrelsome, the

merry man cross, and he who used to lose himself, and gladly, in the

bustle of the world, flies the face of man and retires into a gloomy

melancholy. But underneath this treacherous repose the enemy is making

ready for a deadly onslaught. The universal disturbance of the entire

mechanism, when the disease once breaks forth, is the most speaking proof

of the wonderful dependence of the soul on the body. The feeling,

springing from a thousand painful sensations, of the utter ruin of the

organism, brings about a frightful mental confusion. The most horrible

ideas and fancies rise from their graves. The villain whom nothing could

move yields under the dominant power of mere animal terror. Winchester,

in dying, yells in the anguish of despair. The soul is under a terrible

necessity, it would seem, of snatching at whatever will drag it deeper

into darkness, and rejects with obstinate madness every ray of comfort.

The string, the tone of pain is in the ascendant, and just as the

spiritual misery rose in the bodily disorder, so now it turns and renders

the disorder more universal and more intense.

S 20.--Limitations of the foregoing.

But there are daily examples of sufferers who courageously lift

themselves above bodily ills: of dying men who, amidst the distressful

struggles of the frame, ask, "Where is thy sting, O death?" Should not

wisdom, one might urge, avail to combat the blind terrors of the organic

nature? Nay, much more than wisdom, should religion have so little power

to protect her friends against the assaults springing from the dust? Or,

what is the same thing, does it not depend upon the preceding condition

of the soul, as to how she accepts the alterations of the processes of

life?

Now, this is an irrefragable truth. Philosophy, and still more a mind

courageous and elevated by religion, are capable of completely weakening

the influence of the animal sensations which assault the soul of one in

pain, and able, as it were, to withdraw it from all coherence with the

material. The thought of God, which is interwoven with death, as with

all the universe, the harmony of past life, the anticipation of an

ever-happy future, spread a bright light over all its ideas; while night

is drawn round the soul of him who departs in folly and in unbelief. If

even involuntary pangs force themselves upon the Christian and wise man

(for is he less a human being?), yet will he resolve the sensations of

his dissolving frame into happiness:--

The soul, secured in her existence, smiles

At the drawn dagger and defies its point.

The stars shall fade away, the sun himself

Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years;

But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,

Unhurt amidst the war of elements,

The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds.

It is precisely this unwonted cheerfulness on the part of those who

are mortally sick which has often a physical reason at the basis, and

which has the most express significance for the practical physician.

It is often found in conjunction with the most fatal symptoms of

Hippocrates, and without being attributable to any bygone crisis. Such

a cheerfulness is of bad import. The nerves, which during the height of

the fever have been most sharply assailed, have now lost sensation; the

inflamed members, it is well known, cease to smart as soon as they are

destroyed; but it would be a hapless thought to rejoice that the time of

burning pain were passed and gone. Stimulus fails before the dead

nerves, and a deathly indolence belies future healing. The soul finds

herself under the illusion of a pleasant sensation, because she is free

from a long-enduring painful one. She is free from pain, not because the

tone of her instrument is restored, but because she no more experiences

the discord. Sympathy ceases as soon as the connection is lost.

S 21.--Further Aspects of the Connection.

If I might now begin to go deeper--if I might speak of delirium, of

slumber, of stupor, of epilepsy and catalepsy, and such like, wherein the

free and rational spirit is subjected to the despotism of the body--if I

might enlarge especially on the wide field of hysteria and hypochondria--

if it were allowed me to speak of temperaments, idiosyncrasies, and

constitutions, which for physicians and philosophers are an abyss--in one

word, should I attempt to demonstrate truth of the foregoing from the bed

of sickness, which is ever a chief school of psychology--my matter would

be extended to an endless length. We have, it seems to me, enough to

prove that the animal nature is throughout mingled with the spiritual,

and that this combination is perfection.

PHYSICAL PHENOMENA EXPRESS THE EMOTIONS OF THE MIND.

S 22.--Physiognomy of Sensations.

It is just this close correspondence between the two natures which is the

basis of the whole science of physiognomy. By means of this nervous

connection (which, as we have seen, lies at the bottom of the

communication of feelings) the most secret movements of the soul are

revealed on the exterior of the body, and passion penetrates even through

the veil of the hypocrite. Each passion has its specific expressions,

its peculiar dialect, so to speak, by which one knows it. And, indeed,

it is an admirable law of Supreme Wisdom, that every passion which is

noble and generous beautifies the body, while those that are mean and

hateful distort it into animal forms. The more the mind departs from the

likeness of the Deity, the nearer does the outward form seem to approach

the animal, and always that animal which has a kindred proclivity. Thus,

the mild expression of the philanthropist attracts the needy, whom the

insolent look of the angry man repels. This is an indispensable guide in

social life. It is astonishing what an accordance bodily appearance has

with the passions; heroism and fearlessness pour life and strength

through the veins and muscles, the eyes sparkle, the breast heaves, all

the limbs arm themselves alike for combat--the man has the appearance of

a war-horse. Fright and fear extinguish the fire in the eyes, the limbs

sink powerless and heavy, the marrow in the bones seems frozen, the blood

falls back on the heart like a stone, a general weakness cripples the

powers of life.

A great, bold, lofty thought compels us to stand on tiptoe, to hold up

the head, to expand the mouth and nose. The feeling of eternity, the

outlook on a wide open horizon, the sea, etc., make us stretch out our

arms--we would merge ourselves into the eternal: with the mountains, we

would grow towards the heavens, rush thither on storms and waves: yawning

abysses throw us down in giddiness. In like manner, hate is expressed in

the body by a repelling force; while, on the contrary, in every pressure

of the hand, in every embrace, our body will merge into that of our

friend, in the same manner as the souls are in harmonious combination.

Pride makes the body erect as the soul rises; pettiness bends the head,

the limbs hang down; servile fear is expressed in the cringing walk; the

thought of pain distorts our face, if pleasurable aspects spread a grace

over the whole body; anger, on the other hand, will break through every

strong opposing cord, and need will almost overcome the impossible. I

would now ask through what mechanism it happens that exactly these

movements result from these feelings, that just these organs are affected

by these passions? Might I not just as well want to know why a certain

wounding of the ligament should stiffen the lower jaw?

If the passion which sympathetically awakened these movements of the

frame be often renewed, if this sensation of soul become habitual, then

these movements of the body will become so also. If this matured passion

be of a lasting character, then these constitutional features of the

frame become deeply engraved: they become, if I may borrow the

pathologist's word, "deuteropathetic," and are at last organic. Thus, at

last, the firm perennial physiognomy of man is formed, so that it is

almost easier afterwards to change the soul than the form. In this

sense, one may also say, without being a "Stahlian," that the soul forms

the body; and perhaps the earliest years of youth decide the features of

a man for life, as they certainly are the foundation of his moral

character. An inert and weak soul, which never overflows in passions,

has no physiognomy at all; and want of expression is the leading

characteristic of the countenance of the imbecile. The original features

which nature gave him continue unaltered; the face is smooth, for no soul

has played upon it; the eyebrows retain a perfect arch, for no wild

passion has distorted them; the whole form retains its roundness, for the

fat reposes in its cells; the face is regular, perhaps even beautiful,

but I pity the soul of it!

A physiognomy of (perfect) organic parts, e.g., as to the form and size

of the nose, eyes, mouth, ears, etc., the color of the hair, the height

of the neck, and such like, may perhaps possibly be found, but certainly

not very easily, however much Lavater should continue to rave about it

through ten quarto volumes. He who would reduce to order the capricious

play of nature, and classify the forms which she has punished like a

stepmother, or endowed as a mother, would venture more than Linnaeus, and

should be very careful lest he become one with the original presented to

him, through its monstrous sportive variety.

Yet one more kind of sympathy deserves to be noticed, since it is of

great importance in physiology. I mean the sympathy of certain

sensations for the organs from which they sprang. A certain cramp in the

stomach causes a feeling of disgust; the reproduction of this sensation

brings back the cramp. How is this?

S 23.--The Remains of the Animal Nature is also a Source of Perfection.

Although the animal part of man preserves for him the many great

advantages of which we have already spoken, still, one may say that, in

another aspect, it remains always despicable; viz., the soul thus

depends, slave-like, on the activity of its tools; the periodical

relaxation of these prescribes to the soul an inactive pause and

annihilation at periods. I mean sleep, which, one cannot deny, robs us

at least of the third part of our life. Further, our mind is completely

dependent on the laws of the body, so that the cessation of the latter

puts a sudden stop to the continuance of thoughts, even though we be on

the straight, open path towards truth. If the reason have ever so little

fixed upon an idea, when the lazy matter refuses to carry it out, the

strings of the thinking organs grow weary, if they have been but slightly

strained; the body fails us where we need it most. What astonishing

steps, one may infer, would man make in the use of his powers if he could

continue to think in a state of unbroken intensity! How he would unravel

every idea to its final elements; how he would trace every appearance to

its most hidden sources, if he could keep them uninterruptedly before his

mind! But, alas! it is not thus. Why is it not so?

S 24.--Necessity for Relaxation.

The following will lead us on the track of truth:--

1. Pleasant sensation was necessary to lead man to perfection, and he can

only be perfect when he feels comfortable.

2. The nature of a mortal being makes unpleasant feeling unavoidable.

Evil does not shut man out from the best world, and the worldly-wise find

their perfection therein.

3. Thus pain and pleasure are necessary. It seems harder, but it is no

less true.

4. Every pain, as every pleasure, grows according to its nature, and

would continue to do so.

5. Every pain and every pleasure of a mixed being tend to their own

dissolution.

S 25.--Explanation.

It is a well-known law of the connection between ideas that every

sensation, of whatever kind, immediately seizes another of its kind, and

enlarges itself through this addition. The larger and more manifold it

becomes, so much the more does it awaken similar sensations in all

directions through the organs of thought, until, by degrees, it becomes

universally predominant, and occupies the whole soul. Consequently,

every sensation grows through itself; every present condition of the

feeling power contains the root of a feeling to follow, similar, but more

intense. This is evident. Now, every mental sensation is, as we know,

allied to a similar animal one; in other words, each one is connected

with more or less movement of the nerves, which take a direction

according to the measure of their strength and extension. Thus, as

mental sensations grow, must the movements in the nervous system increase

also. This is no less clear. Now, pathology teaches us that a nerve

never suffers alone: and to say, "Here is a superfluity of strength," is

as much as to say, "There is want of strength." Thus, every nervous

movement grows through itself. Now, we have remarked that the movements

of the nervous system react upon the mind, and strengthen the mental

sensations;

[Why, how one weeps when one's too weary!

Tears, tears! why we weep,

'Tis worth inquiry:--that we've shamed a life,

Or lost a love, or missed a world, perhaps?

By no means. Simply, that we've walked too far,

Or talked too much, or felt the wind in the east, etc.

--Aurora Leigh.]

vice versa, the strengthened sensation of the mind increase and

strengthen the motions of the nerves. Thus we have a circle, in which

sensation must always increase, and nervous movements every moment become

more powerful and universal.

Now, we know that the movements of the bodily frame which cause the

feeling of pain run counter to the harmony by which it would exist in

well-being; that is, that they are diseased. But disease cannot grow

unceasingly, therefore they end in the total destruction of the frame.

In relation to pain, it is thus proved that it aims at the death of the

subject.

But, the motions of the nerves under pleasant sensations being so

harmonious to the continuance of the machinery that the condition of mind

which constitutes pleasure is that of the greatest bodily well-being,

should not rather, then, pleasant sensation prolong the bloom of the body

eternally? This inference is too hasty. In a certain stage of

moderation, these nervous motions are wholesome, and really a sign of

health. But if they outgrow this stage, they may be the highest

activity, the highest momentary perfection; but, thus, they are excess of

health, no longer health itself.

We only call that condition of the natural motions health in which the

root of similar ones for the future lies, viz., those which confirm the

perfection of succeeding motions; thus, the destiny of continuance is

essentially contained in the idea of health. Thus, for example, the body

of the most debilitated profligate attains to its greatest harmony at the

moment of excess; but it is only momentarily, and a so much deeper

abatement shows sufficiently that overstraining was not health.

Therefore one may justly accept that an overstrained vigor of physical

action hastens death as much as the greatest disorder or the worst

illness. Both pain and pleasure draw us towards an unavoidable death,

unless something be present which limits their advance.

S 26.--Excellence of this Abatement.

It is just this (the limit to their growth) which the abatement of the

animal nature causes. It must be no other than this limitation of our

fragile frame (that appeared to have lent to our opponents so strong a

proof against its perfection) which ameliorates all the evil consequences

that the mechanism otherwise makes unavoidable. It is exactly this

sinking, this lassitude of the organs, over which tinkers complain so

much, that prevents our own strength destroying us in a short time; that

does not permit our positions to be always increasing towards our

destruction. This limitation shows each passion the period of its

growth, its height and decline (if indeed the passion does not die out in

a total relaxation of the body), which leaves the excited spirits time to

resume their harmony, and the organs to recover. Hence, the highest

pitch of rapture, of fear, and of anger, are the same as weariness,

weakness, or fainting. But sleep vouchsafes more, for as Shakspeare

says:--

Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great Nature's sweet restorer.

--Macbeth.

During sleep, the vital forces restore themselves to that healthy

balance which the continuance of our being so much requires; all the

cramped ideas and feelings, the overstrained actions which have

troubled us through the day, are solved in the entire relaxation of the

sensorium; the harmony of the motions of the mind are resumed, and the

newly-awakened man greets the coming day more calmly.

In relation to the arrangement of the whole, also, we cannot sufficiently

admire the worth and importance of this limitation. The arrangement

necessarily causes many, who should be no less happy, to be sacrificed to

the general order and to bear the lot of oppression. Likewise, many,

whom we perhaps unjustly envy, must expend their mental and bodily

strength in restless exertion, so that the repose of the whole be

preserved. The same with sick persons, the same with unreasoning

animals. Sleep seals the eye of care, takes from the prince and

statesman the heavy weight of governing; pours new force into the veins

of the sick man, and rest into his harassed soul; the daylaborer no

longer hears the voice of the oppressor, and the ill-used beast escapes

from the tyranny of man. Sleep buries all cares and troubles, balances

everything, equips every one with new-born powers to bear the joys and

sorrows of the next day.

S 27.--Severing of the Connection.

At length arrived at the point in the circle where the mind has fulfilled

the aim of its being, an internal, unaccountable mechanism has, at the

same time, made the body incapable of being any longer its instrument.

All care for the well-being of the bodily state seems to reach but to

this epoch. It appears to me that, in the formation of our physical

nature, wisdom has shown such parsimony, that notwithstanding constant

compensations, decline must always keep in the ascendancy, so that

freedom misuses the mechanism, and death is germinated in life as out of

its seed. Matter dissolves again into its last elements, which travel

through the kingdom of nature in other forms and relations, to serve

other purposes. The mind continues to practise its thinking powers in

other circles, and to observe the universe from other sides.

We may truly say that it has not by any means exhausted this actual

sphere, that it might have left this sphere itself more perfect; but do

we know that this sphere is lost to it? We lay many a book aside which

we do not understand, but perhaps in a few years we shall understand it

better.