I have never seen any thorough examination of the grounds of analogy.
The works on logic make but slight reference to them, yet the argument
from analogy is one of the most frequent forms of argument, and one
of the most convincing. It is so much easier to captivate the fancy
with a pretty or striking figure than to move the judgment with sound
reasons,--so much easier to be rhetorical than to be logical.
We say that seeing is believing; the rhetorician makes us see the
thing; his picture appeals to the mind’s visual sense, hence his power
over us, though his analogies are more apt to be false than true. We
love to see these agreements between thoughts and things, or between
the subjective and the objective worlds, and a favorite thought with
profound minds in all ages has been the identity or oneness which runs
through creation.
“A vast similitude interlocks all,” says Whitman, “spans all the
objects of the universe and compactly holds and encloses them.”
Everywhere in Nature Emerson said he saw the figure of a disguised
man. The method of the universe is intelligible to us because it is
akin to our own minds. Our minds are rather akin to it and are derived
from it. Emerson made much of this thought. The truth here indicated
is undoubtedly the basis of all true analogy--this unity, this oneness
of creation; but the analogies that “are constant and pervade Nature”
are probably not so numerous as Emerson seemed to fancy. Thus one can
hardly agree with him that there is “intent” of analogy between man’s
life and the seasons, because the seasons are not a universal fact of
the globe, and man’s life is. The four seasons are well defined in New
England, but not in Ecuador.
The agreement of appearances is one thing, the identity of law and
essence is another, and the agreement of man’s life with the seasons
must be considered accidental rather than intentional.
Language is full of symbols. We make the world without a symbol of the
world within. We describe thoughts, and emotions, in the terms of an
objective experience. Things furnish the moulds in which our ideas are
cast. Size, proportion, mass, vista, vastness, height, depth, darkness,
light, coarse, fine, centre, surface, order, chaos, and a thousand
other terms, we apply alike to the world without and to the world
within. We know a higher temperance than concerns the body, a finer
digestion and assimilation than go on in it.
Our daily conversation is full of pictures and parables, or the
emblematic use of things. From life looked at as a voyage, we get
the symbolic use of anchor, compass, pole-star, helm, haven; from
life considered as a battle, we read deep meanings in shield, armor,
fencing, captain, citadel, panic, onset. Life regarded under the figure
of husbandry gives us the expressive symbols of seedtime and harvest,
planting and watering, tares and brambles, pruning and training, the
chaff and the wheat. We talk in parables when we little suspect it.
What various applications we make of such words as dregs, gutter,
eclipse, satellite, hunger, thirst, kindle, brazen, echo, and hundreds
of others. We speak of the reins of government, the sinews of war,
the seeds of rebellion, the morning of youth, the evening of age, a
flood of emotion, the torch of truth, burning with resentment, the
veil of secrecy, the foundations of character, a ripple of laughter,
incrusted dogmas, corrosive criticism. We say his spirits drooped, his
mind soared, his heart softened, his brow darkened, his reputation was
stabbed, he clinched his argument. We say his course was beset with
pitfalls, his efforts were crowned with success, his eloquence was a
torrent that carried all before it, and so on.
Burke calls attention to the metaphors that are taken from the sense of
taste, as a sour temper, bitter curses, bitter fate; and, on the other
hand, a sweet person, a sweet experience, and the like. Other epithets
are derived from the sense of touch, as a soft answer, a polished
character, a cold reception, a sharp retort, a hard problem; or from
the sense of sight, as brilliant, dazzling, color, light, shade; others
from our sense of hearing, as discordant, echoing, reverberating,
booming, grumbling. All trades, pursuits, occupations, furnish types
or symbols for the mind. The word “whitewash” has become a very
useful one, especially to political parties. Thoreau said he would
not be as one who drives a nail into mere lath and plaster. Even the
railroad has contributed useful terms, as side-tracked, down brakes,
the red flag, way station, etc. Great men are like through trains
that connect far-distant points; others are merely locals. From the
builder we get the effective phrase and idea of scaffolding. So much
in the world is mere scaffolding, so much in society is mere varnish
and veneer. Life is said to have its “seamy side.” The lever and the
fulcrum have their supersensuous uses. The chemist with his solvents,
precipitants, crystallizations, attractions, and repulsions, and the
natural philosopher with his statics and dynamics and his correlation
of forces, have enlarged our powers of expression. The strata of
the geologist furnish useful symbols. What a significant symbol is
afforded by the wave! There is much in life, in history, and in all
nature that is typified by it. We have cold waves and hot waves, and
in the spring and fall migrations of the birds we have “bird waves.”
Earthquake shocks go in waves and circles; how often our views and
conceptions of things are expressed by the circle! It is a symbol of
most profound meaning. It helps us to understand how the universe is
finally inexplicable; that there is neither beginning nor end, and that
it retreats forever into itself.
We speak of currents of thought, of opinion, of influence, and of tides
in the affairs of men. We can conceive of these things under no better
figure. Fire and all that pertains to it give us symbols, as heat,
light, flame, sparks, smoke.
The words juicy, unctuous, fluid, have obvious appropriateness when
applied to the mind and its products. Running water gives us the
delightful epithets limpid and lucid. Youth is plastic, ductile,
impressible--neither the mind nor the body has yet hardened. The
analogy is vital. A habit gets deeper and deeper hold of us; we fall
into a rut--these figures convey the exact truth.
When used as a symbol how expressive is the dawn, the twilight, the
sunset! The likeness is not accidental but fundamental.
The calm that comes after the storm in human life as in nature--how
true the analogy. To give vent to things, how significant. To give vent
to angry feelings in words, how like giving vent to smothered fire; or
to any suppressed and confined force: the words come faster and hotter,
the passion of anger mounts and there is a “blow out” indeed. Deny
yourself the first word, and the conflagration is avoided. A passion
can be smothered as literally as a fire.
The use of metaphor, comparison, analogy is twofold--to enliven and to
convince; to illustrate and enforce an accepted truth, and to press
home and clinch one in dispute. An apt figure will put a new face
upon an old and much worn truism, and a vital analogy may reach and
move the reason. Thus when Renan, referring to the decay of the old
religious beliefs, says that people are no poorer for being robbed
of false bank notes and bogus shares, his comparison has a logical
validity,--as has also Herbert Spencer’s figure when he says, “The
illusion that great men and great events came oftener in early times
than now is partly due to historical perspective. As in a range
of equidistant columns the farthest off look the closest, so the
conspicuous objects of the past seem more thickly clustered the more
remote they are.” We seem to see the identity of law in both these
cases. We are treated to a pictorial argument.
We are using analogy in a legitimate and forceful way when we speak of
our fund or capital of bodily health and strength, and of squandering
or impairing it, or of investing it poorly.
The accidental analogies or likenesses are limitless and are the great
stock in trade of most writers and speakers. They tickle the fancy and
enliven the page or the discourse. But essential analogies, or those
that spring from unity of law, are more rare. These have the force of
logic; they shed a steady light.
St. Paul’s famous comparison of the body dead and buried with the seed
in the soil, which, he says, dies before it can grow, is used with
logical intent. But will it bear examination? Is the germinating seed
dead in any sense that the body is dead? It is no more dead than the
egg buried beneath the mother hen is dead. When the egg really dies
we know the result, as we know the result when the corn rots in the
ground. It is not dissolution that the seed experiences, but evolution.
The illustration of the eloquent apostle may captivate the fancy, but
as argument designed to convince the understanding it has no force.
There might be force in the argument for immortality drawn from the
metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly, if the chrysalis really
were a shroud and held a dead body. But it is not, any more than an
egg is; it is quick, and capable of movement. The analogy between it
and the dead body will not hold. A much more sound analogy, based upon
the chrysalis, is that which takes it as the type of a mind or soul
undeveloped,--slumbering, gestating,--and the winged creature as the
developed, emancipated mind.
Analogy means an agreement of relations or an equality of ratios.
When we speak of the body as a tenement and the soul as the tenant, we
mean or aver that the relation of the soul to the body is the same as
that of the man to the house he occupies. In either case the occupant
can move out or in, and is entirely distinct from the structure that
shelters him. But if we know anything about the relations of the mind
and the body, we know that they are not like this; we know that they
are not truthfully expressed in this comparison.
Bishop Butler’s “analogy from nature,” upon which he built his famous
work, will not any better bear close examination. What analogy is
there between death and sleep or a swoon? what agreement of ratios?
The resemblance is entirely superficial. Or how can we predict another
sphere of existence for man because another sphere awaits the unborn
infant? But another sphere does not await the unborn infant; only new
and different relations to the same physical sphere. An embryo implies
a future; but what is there embryonic about the mature man?
This breakdown of Butler’s argument in regard to a future life was
pointed out by Matthew Arnold; the very point in dispute, namely, a
future life, is assumed. If there is a future life, if there is another
world, it doubtless bears some analogy to this. In like manner, if
there are fairies and nymphs and demigods, it is not improbable to
suppose that they bear some resemblance to human beings, but shall we
assume their actual existence upon such a probability?
That the unborn child starting as a bit of protoplasmic jelly should
become a man, a Napoleon, or a Shakespeare, may be quite as startling
a fact as the assumption of a future existence; yet the former is a
matter of experience, which lends no color to the truth of the latter.
It is not a matter of reason that babes become men, but a matter of
observation and experience. Indeed, in Butler’s famous argument, the
analogy of nature is everywhere forced and falsified. In every case he
puts the words into her mouth that he would have her speak. His faith
supplies him with the belief in a future life, and in a moral governor
of the universe, and then he seeks to confirm or to demonstrate the
truth of this faith by an appeal to the analogy of nature.
Out of this whirling, seething, bubbling universe of warring and
clashing forces man has emerged. How impossible it all seems to reason!
Experience alone tells us that it is true. Upon the past history of
the earth and of the race of man we may predict astonishing changes
and transformations for the future of both, because the continuity of
cause and effect is not broken; but the perpetuity of the “me” and the
“you” is not implied. All that is implied is the perpetuity of the sum
of physical forces. But as to the future of the individual, standing
upon the past or upon the present, what are we safe in affirming?
Only this--that as we had a beginning we shall have an ending; that
as yesterday we were not, so to-morrow we shall not be. A man is like
the electric spark that glows and crackles for an instant between two
dark, silent, inscrutable eternities. The fluid is not lost, but that
tiny bolt has come and gone. Darkness and silence before; darkness
and silence after. I do not say this is the summing up of the whole
question of immortality. I only mean to say that this is where the
argument from analogy lands us.
We can argue from the known to the unknown in a restricted way. We do
this in life and in science continually. We do not know that the fixed
stars have worlds revolving about them; yet the presumption, based
upon our own solar system, is that they have. But could we infer other
suns, from the existence of our own, were no others visible? Could
we predict the future of the earth did we not know its past, or read
aright its past did we not know its present state? From an arc we can
complete a circle. We can read the big in the little. The motion of a
top throws light upon the motion of the earth. An ingenious mind finds
types everywhere, but real analogies are not so common.
The likeness of one thing with another may be valid and real, but the
likeness of a thought with a thing is often merely fanciful. We very
frequently unconsciously counterfeit external objects and laws in the
region of mind and morals. Out of a physical fact or condition we
fabricate a mental or spiritual condition or experience to correspond.
Thus a current journal takes the fact that the sun obscures but does
not put out the light of the moon and the stars, and from it draws the
inference that the light of science may dim but cannot blot out the
objects of faith. It counterfeits this fact and seeks to give it equal
force and value in the spiritual realm. The objects of faith may be
as real and as unquenchable as the stars, but this is the very point
in dispute, and the analogy used assumes the thing to be proved. If
the objects of faith are real, then the light of science will not put
them out any more than the sun puts out the stars; but the fact that
the stars are there, notwithstanding the sunlight, proves nothing with
regard to the reality of the objects of faith. The only real analogy
that exists in the case is between the darkness and the daylight of the
world within and the darkness and the daylight of the world without.
Science, or knowledge, is light; ignorance is darkness; there are no
other symbols that so fully and exactly express these things. The mind
sees, science lets in the light, and the darkness flees.
If there is anything in our inward life and experience that corresponds
or is analogous to the night with its stars, it is to be found in that
withdrawal from the noise and bustle of the world into the atmosphere
of secluded contemplation. If there are any stars in your firmament,
you will find them then. But, after all, how far the stars of religion
and philosophy are subjective, or of our own creation, is always a
question.
I recently met with the same fallacy in a leading article in one of
the magazines. “The fact revealed by the spectroscope,” says the
writer, “that the physical elements of the earth exist also in the
stars, supports the faith that a moral nature like our own inhabits the
universe.” A tremendous leap--a leap from the physical to the moral.
We know that these earth elements are found in the stars by actual
observation and experience. We see them as truly as we see the stars
themselves; but a moral nature like our own--this is assumed and is
not supported at all by analogy. The only legitimate inference from
the analogy is, that as our sun has planets and that these planets,
or one of them at least, is the abode of life, so these other suns
in composition like our own, and governed by laws like our own, have
planets revolving around them which are or may be the abode of beings
like ourselves. If this “moral nature like our own” pervades our
system, then the inference is just that it also pervades the other
systems. But to argue from physical elements to moral causes is to
throw upon analogy more than it will bear.
Analogy is a kind of rule of three: we must have three terms to find
the fourth. We argue from the past to the present and from the present
to the future. Things that begin must end. If man’s life has been
continuous in the past, then we may infer that it will be continuous in
the future.
Our earth has a moon; it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that some
of the other planets have moons. It is reasonable to suppose that there
are other planets and suns and systems, myriads of them. It may be
reasonable to think with Sir Robert Ball that the extinct or dark and
burnt-out bodies in the sky exceed in numbers the luminous ones, as the
non-luminous bodies exceed the luminous ones upon the earth. No man has
seen live steam; when it can be seen it is dead; yet we know that it
exists.
We may complete a circle from a small segment of it. If we have two
sides of a triangle, we may add the third. To find the value of
an unknown quantity, we must have a complete equation and as many
equations as we have unknown quantities. We can argue from this life to
the future life only after proof that there is a future life.
Professor Drummond was able to show the continuity of natural law in
the spiritual world by assuming that a spiritual world which was the
counterpart of the physical world actually existed. That Calvinism in
its main tenets tallies, or seems to tally, with science is no more
proof of the literal truth of those tenets than the ascribing of human
form and features to the man in the moon is proof of the existence of
such a man. Our minds, our spirits, are no doubt in a way under the
same law as are our bodies, because they are the outcome of our bodies
and our bodies are the outcome of material nature; but to base upon
that fact the existence of a corresponding world and life after death
is to leap beyond the bounds of all possible analogy.
Many of the dogmas of theology have a grain of natural truth in them.
This does not prove their truth, as applicable to some hypothetical
other world, but as applied to this world. The kingdom of heaven, as
the founder of Christianity taught, is not yonder and of to-morrow, but
is now and here.
Tolstoi, I think, is guilty of false analogy when, in attempting to get
rid of the idea of pleasure as the aim and purpose of art, he makes
the comparison with food, and says that pleasure is no more the end
in eating than it is in painting, or poetry, or music. The analogy is
false because the necessities of our bodies are not to be compared with
the luxuries, so to speak, of our minds. We cannot live without food,
but we can and do live without art. And yet, do we not eat because the
food tastes good? Is not the satisfaction of appetite the prime motive
in eating? If dining gave us no pleasure, we should probably soon learn
to swallow our food in a highly concentrated form, in capsules, and
thus make short work of it. Nature, of course, conceals her own purpose
in the pleasure we take in our food, just as she does in the pleasure
of the sexes; but of this purpose we take little thought, except in
the latter case how to defeat it. We do not have conscious pleasure in
breathing; hence our breathing is involuntary. We do have conscious
pleasure in food; hence our elaborate and ingenious cookery--often
to the detriment of our bodies. Take away the pleasures of life, the
innocent natural pleasure, take away the pleasures of art, and few of
us would care for either.
Man is a microcosm, an epitome of the universe, and its laws and
processes are repeated dimly or plainly in him. Then there are, of
course, real analogies and homologies between different parts of
nature, as between fluids and gases, and fluids and solids, between the
organic and the inorganic, between the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms.
When we strike the great vital currents or laws,--the law of growth, of
decay, of health and disease, of reproduction, of evolution,--we strike
the region of true analogy. These laws must be continuous throughout
nature. All phases of development must be analogous. The mind grows
with the body and is under the same law. Exercise is the same to
both. Each has its appetites. Each has its tonics and stimulants. All
beginnings are the same; that is, from a germ. Language must have
begun in the most rudimentary sounds. Art, we know, began in the most
rude and simple marks and signs; science in the crudest, simplest
facts; religion in childish superstition; and so on through the whole
scope of human development. Development is always from the simple to
the complex.
There is, no doubt, a deep-seated analogy between the growth of the
individual and the growth of the state or nation; between revolutions
in history, and storms and convulsions in nature.
We speak of the root of the matter; everything really has its root, its
obscure beginning, its hidden underground processes.
There are types and suggestions everywhere--fresh fuel checks the fire;
the soft stone cuts the steel the fastest; the first big drops of the
shower raise the dust.
The analogy between the development of animal life upon the earth and
the growth of organized communities seems complete. In the lower forms
of life, there is no specialization, or division of functions. The
amœba can move, feel, digest, reproduce in every part of its structure;
it is not differentiated or specialized; so in the rudest tribes, there
is little division of labor. As animal life develops, each part of the
body has a function of its own; and as communities develop, extreme
specialization takes place. Organic life goes from the simple to the
complex, as does progress in human affairs. This is the law of all
growth.
When Schopenhauer says “riches are like sea water; the more you drink
the thirstier you become,” the mind is instantly pleased by the force
and aptness of the comparison, and for the moment we look upon riches
as something to be avoided. But is the analogy entirely true? Sea water
is to be avoided altogether, even a single mouthful of it; but even
Schopenhauer defends riches and the pursuit of riches. “People are
often reproached for wishing for money above all things, and for loving
it more than anything else; but it is natural and even inevitable for
people to love that which, like an unwearied Proteus, is always ready
to turn itself into whatever object their wandering wishes or manifold
desires may for the moment fix upon.” Here the comparison will bear a
closer scrutiny. Wealth is indeed a Proteus that will take any form
your fancy may choose. “Other things are only relatively good,” the
great pessimist further says; “money alone is absolutely good, because
it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is
an abstract satisfaction of all.” What, then, becomes of its analogy to
sea water, which so mocks and inflames our thirst? Even the resemblance
in the one particular that Schopenhauer had in mind is not true. To the
great majority of people wealth brings a degree of satisfaction; they
give over its pursuit and seek the enjoyment of it. When a man enters
into the race for wealth, he is unflagging in seeking it as long as his
cup of life is full; but when the limits of his powers are reached,
he begins to lose interest, and the appetite for gold, as for other
things, declines.
When the same philosopher says that to measure a man’s happiness
only by what he gets, and not also by what he expects to get, is as
futile as to try to express a fraction which shall have a numerator
but no denominator, he uses a figure that conveys the truth much more
fully. It may be open to the objection of being too technical, but
it expresses a real relation for all that. When you increase your
expectations, you increase your denominator; and as most men expect
or want more than they have, human happiness is nearly always a
fraction--rarely is it a whole number. With many it is a very small
fraction indeed. Blessed is he who expects little. The man who expects
ten and gets but five is more to be envied than he who expects a
thousand and gets but fifty. He is nearer the sum of his wishes. Hence
the truth of the old saying that it is our wants that make us poor.
When a piece of good fortune that he did not expect comes to a man, his
happiness or satisfaction is no longer a fraction; it is more than a
unit.
Quintilian says that the early blossom of talent is rarely followed by
the fruit of great achievement, but the early works of a man or a youth
are just as much fruit as his later ones. There is really no analogy
between the early works of an author and the blossoms of a tree. The
dreams, the visions, the aspirations of youth are more like blossoms.
Probably no great man has been without them; but how they wither and
fall, and how much more sober the aspect which life puts on before any
solid achievements can be pointed to! There is usually something more
fresh and pristine about the earlier works of a man--more buoyancy,
more unction, more of the “fluid and attaching character;” but the
ripest wisdom always goes with age.
There are, no doubt, many strict and striking analogies between the
mind and the body, their growth and decay, their health and disease,
their assimilative, digestive, and reproductive processes.
The mind is only a finer body. It is hardly a figure of speech to speak
of wounded feelings, of a wounded spirit. How acute at first, and how
surely healing with time. But the scar remains. Then there are real
analogies, real parallels, between the mind and outward nature, in the
laws of growth and decay, nutrition and reproduction. “The mind of
Otho,” says Tacitus, “was not, like his body, soft and effeminate.”
There are minds that are best described by the word masculine, and
others by the word feminine. There are dull, sluggish minds, just as
there are heavy, sluggish bodies, and the two usually go together.
There are dry, lean minds, and there are minds full of unction and
juice. We even use the phrase “mental dyspepsia,” but the analogy
here implied is probably purely fanciful, though mental dissipation
and mental intemperance are no idle words. Some persons acquire the
same craze for highly exciting and stimulating mental food that others
have for strong drink, or for pepper and other condiments. They lose
their taste for simple, natural, healthful things,--for good sound
literature,--and crave sensational novels and the Sunday newspapers.
Doubtless a large part of the reading of the American people to-day
is sheer mental dissipation, and is directed by an abnormal craving
for mental excitement. There is degeneration in the physical world,
and there is degeneration, strictly so called, in the intellectual
world. There are proportion, relation, cause and effect, health and
disease, in one as in the other. Logic is but the natural relation
of parts as we see them in the organic world. In fact, logic is but
health and proportion. The mind cannot fly any more than the body can;
it progresses from one fact or consideration to another, step by step,
though often, or perhaps generally, we are not conscious of the steps.
A large view of truth may be suddenly revealed to the mind, as of a
landscape from a hill-top; but the mind did not fly to the vantage
ground; it reached it by a slow and maybe obscure process.
The world is simpler than we think. The modes and processes of things
widely dissimilar are more likely to be identical than we suspect.
There are homologies where we see apparent contradiction. There is but
one protoplasm for animal and vegetable. A little more or less heat
makes the gaseous, makes the liquid, makes the solid. Lava crystallizes
or freezes at a high temperature; water, at a low one; mercury, at
a still lower. Charcoal and the diamond are one; the same law of
gravitation which makes the cloud float makes the rain fall. The law
that spheres a tear spheres a globe. These facts warrant us in looking
for real homologies, vital correspondences, in nature. Only such
correspondences give logical and scientific value to analogy. If the
likeness means identity of law, or is the same principle in another
disguise, then it is an instrument of truth. We might expect to find
many analogies between air and water, the atmosphere being but a finer
ocean; also between ice and water, and between ice and the stratified
rocks. If water flows, then will ice flow; if ice bends, then will the
rocky strata bend. If cross fertilization is good in the vegetable
world, we should expect to find it good in the animal world.
There is thought to be a strict analogy between the succession of
plants in different months of the year and the prevalence of different
diseases at different seasons. The germ theory of disease gives force
to the comparison. The different species of germs no doubt find some
periods of the year more favorable to their development than others.
If on this planet men walk about while trees are rooted to the ground,
we may reasonably expect that the same is true--provided that on them
there are men and trees--of all other planets. If the law of variation,
and the survival of the fittest, are the laws of one species, then
they will prove to be the laws of all. The bud is a kind of seed;
the fruit is a kind of leaf. High culture has the same effect upon
man and animals that it has upon plants,--it lessens the powers of
reproduction. The lowest organisms multiply by myriads; the higher
barely keep from retrograding. A wild apple is full of seeds; in a
choice pippin the seeds are largely abortive. Indeed, all weeds and
parasites seem bent on filling the world with their progeny, while
the higher forms fall off and tend to extinction. Such agreements and
correspondences point to identity of law. The analogy is vital.
In the animal economy there are analogies with outward nature. Thus
respiration is a kind of combustion. Life itself is a kind of fire
which goes out when it has no fuel to feed upon. The foliage of a tree
has functions like those of the lungs of an animal. Darwin has noted
the sleep of plants and their diurnal motions. Dr. Holmes had a bold
fancy that trees are animals, with their tails in the air and their
heads in the ground; but there is nothing in the trunk and branches
of a tree analogous to a tail, though there is a sort of rudimentary
intelligence in the root, as Darwin has shown. We use the tree as a
symbol of the branching of a family; hence the family tree. But the
analogy is not a true one. The branches of a family multiply and
diverge when traced backward the same as forward. You had two parents,
they had four, these four had eight, and so on. If the human race
sprang from one pair, then are its branchings more a kind of network,
an endless multiplication of meshes. All the past appears to centre in
you, and all the future to spring from you. We get the family tree
only by cutting out a fragment of this network.
There is little doubt that certain natural laws pervade alike both mind
and matter. The law of evolution is universally operative, and is the
key to development in the moral and intellectual world no less than in
the physical. We are probably, in all our thoughts and purposes, much
more under the dominion of universal natural laws than we suspect.
The will reaches but a little way. I have no doubt that the race of
man bears a definite relation to the life of the globe,--that is, to
its age, its store of vitality; that it will culminate as the vital
power of the earth culminates, and decline as it declines. Like man,
the earth has had its youth,--its nebulous, fiery, molten youth; then
its turbulent, luxuriant, copious, riotous middle period; then its
placid, temperate, ripe later age, when the higher forms emerge upon
the scene. The analogy is deep and radical. The vital energy of the
globe was once much more rampant and overflowing than it is now; the
time will come when the pulse of the planet will be much feebler than
it is now. Youth and age, growth and decay, are universal conditions.
The heavens themselves shall wax old as doth a garment. Life and death
are universal conditions, and to fancy a place where death is not is to
fancy one’s self entirely outside of this universe and of all possible
universes.
Men in communities and assemblages are under laws that do not reach or
affect the single individual, just as vast bodies of water respond to
attractions and planetary perturbations that do not affect the lesser
bodies. Men kindle one another as do firebrands, and beget a collective
heat and an enthusiasm that tyrannize over the individual purposes and
wills. We say things are in the air, that a spirit is abroad; that is,
that influences are at work above the wills and below the consciousness
of the people. There are changes or movements in the world and in the
communities that seem strictly analogous to drifting; it is as when a
ship is carried out of its course by unsuspected currents, or as when
arctic explorers, with their faces set northward, are unconsciously
carried in the opposite direction by the ice floe beneath them. The
spirit of the age, or the time-spirit, is always at work, and takes us
with it, whether we know it or not. For instance, the whole religious
world is now drifting away from the old theology, and drifting faster
than we suspect. Certain zealots have their faces very strongly set
against it, but, like Commodore Parry on the ice floe, they are going
south faster than their efforts are carrying them north. Indeed, the
whole sentiment of the race is moving into a more genial and temperate
theological climate, away from purgatorial fires rather than toward
them.
The political sentiment of a country also drifts. That of our own may
be said to have been drifting for some time now in the direction of
freer commercial intercourse with other nations.
A man’s life may stagnate as literally as water may stagnate, and
just as motion and direction are the remedy for one, so purpose and
activity are the remedy for the other. Movement is the condition of
life, anyway. Set the currents going in the air, in the water, in the
body, in the mind, in the community, and a healthier condition will
follow. Change, diversity, activity, are the prime conditions of life
and health everywhere. Persons with doubts and perplexities about life
go to work to ameliorate some of its conditions, and their doubts and
perplexities vanish--not because their problems are solved, as they
think they are, but because their energies have found an outlet, the
currents have been set going. Persons of strong will have few doubts
and uncertainties. They do not solve the problems, but they break the
spell of their enchantment. Nothing relieves and ventilates the mind
like a resolution.
A true work of art is analogous to a living organism. “The essential
condition of art creations,” says Renan, “is to form a living system
every portion of which answers and demands every other.... The intimate
laws of life, of the development of organic products, and of the toning
down of shades must be considered at every step.” Works such as certain
of Victor Hugo’s, which have no organic unity and proportion, are,
according to this dictum, monstrosities.
When Matthew Arnold insisted upon it that in all vital prose there is
a process of evolution, he enunciated the same principle as did Renan.
We all know well that which is organic in books as distinguished from
the inorganic, the vital as distinguished from the mechanical. Read the
learned address of the president of some local scientific or literary
society, and then turn to one of Professor Huxley’s trenchant papers.
The difference is just that between weapons in an armory and weapons
in the hands of trained soldiers. Huxley’s will and purpose, or his
personality, pervade and vitalize his material and make it his own,
while the learned president sustains only an accidental and mechanical
relation to what he has to say. Happy is the writer who can lop off or
cut out from his page everything to which he sustains only a secondary
and mechanical relation.
The summing up of the matter would then seem to be, that there is an
analogy of rhetoric and an analogy of science; a likeness that is
momentary and accidental, giving rise to metaphor and parable; and a
correspondence that is fundamental, arising from the universality of
law.