SOME SEQUENCES OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM.
Since Kant, we have said, "no philosophy, no rational theology, no
ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any
real basis in thought." It must be added that since the fulfilment of
Kant's _Critique_, especially by Hegel, there has not been one stone left
as a foundation for "materialism." It goes right on, however, in
multifarious forms, its defunct exponents still imagining they live.
Surgical psychology, in special, is still as active with scalpel and
microscope as if ours were the day of Coudillac and Erasmus Darwin. The
knife goes into the brain, and the eye peers after it, with the funny
expectation of seeing, with Dr. Cabanis, some spicule or plexus of matter,
there, "which secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." The work is
excellent as anatomy, and may have a plenty of important uses. But we,
here, if we have had the capacity and patience to grasp the findings of
Immanuel Kant, know that mind can never be derived from any physical
correspondence of its nature and action. We know that every possible
attempt at such derivation is merely a side-show of Parson Jasper's great
astronomical comedy, which Copernicus exploded four hundred years ago. We
know that every fiber, every solid or liquid, of the brain, with every
movement of every atom it contains, is a ready-made physical object in a
ready-made space and a ready-made time. But if we know Kant, we know,
without a misgiving, that space and time, with all things in them, are not
only dependencies but are literal creations and manufactures of a
universal principle named _mind_. We know it is this principle which
furnishes the form, the unity, and so the very existence of every
phenomenon. Hence we know, finally, that the first step in the
understanding of matter is the analysis of mind, through which all matter
_is_ and is _constructed_. Without this first step, all other steps are
simply a stumble in the dark--the blind-man's buff of children. Or we may
say, with a little more dignity, perhaps, that every material law of the
cosmos is subject to "The Law of Scientific Idealism."
Now scientific idealism, pursued to the end, merges in absolute idealism.
The source and substance of the universe is Intelligent Spirit; or, as the
Bible and its Theologians say, this is the All-In-All.
For fifty years--from the publication of Kant's _Critique_ in 1781, along
through Fichte, and Schelling, to the death of Hegel in 1831--the vast
illumination of thought that has been summed up as "German
Transcendentalism" strove to unify natural theology and practical science
in "Absolute Idealism." It will yet be seen that the work was done,
however ill-comprehended. The good old Kant still had his whole head with
him when he said, in 1787, "the danger, in this case, is not that of being
refuted, but of being misunderstood." The Comtes, the Hamiltons, the Mills
and Spencers--with no end, too, of their German brothers--are illustrious
examples in proof of Kant's remark, however greatly they may be respected
within the limits of their own work.
Once and for good, the history of philosophy, when understood, and the
history of science, when understood, have joined in the proof that the
principle of all life--we may say God if we like--is Spirit Principle.
Transcendentalism--a bulky word, but covering much more than the letter of
it--was naturally too high and too deep a result to get all at once into
the average human head. For thirty-odd years after the close of its epoch
in Germany--or until, in 1864, Dr. James Hutchison Stirling produced his
_Secret of Hegel_--not a man stood on the earth adequate to reproduce
transcendentalism in basis and system. But the practical gist of it,
without the full center or circumference, gradually became a part of the
world's literature. In Britain, most notably through Thomas Carlyle, the
new light penetrated biography, history, criticism, and even political
disquisition. In America, focused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same light,
whiter and purer if less flaming and burning, both vivified and purified
all things on which it was shed. There the Infinite Oversoul and the
finite undersoul seemed once again to meet in communion and evolution.
Meanwhile, Theodore Parker, with his vast scholarship and overpowering
courage, preached Jesus of Nazareth, the Sermon on the Mount, and the
Golden Rule, with little regard for any organized theology of his day,
whether its Unitarianism or its Calvinistic Orthodoxy. Back of all this,
as now appears, there was a plain, uncultured, but inquiring and
thoughtful man, in the byways of New England, who from the mechanism of
clocks turned to the workings of the human mind, and in his own way
reached the depth of knowledge and the mysteries of life. From a few
practical experiments, he, too, analyzed the things of matter, and found
them to be re-presentations, externalizations, of elemental spirit. And
then he drew the inference that spirit molds, directs, governs matter, and
so that health of mind materializes health of body.
But now, at once, the whole question at issue confronts us--what is the
true and full position and power _of mind in therapeutics_? This question
must be answered, here, not from the Quimby standpoint, and much less from
that of the shallow muddle termed Christian Science, but from the
standpoint of actual, accredited, established metaphysics, now
substantially bearing the concensus of religion, philosophy, and the
practical investigation of material phenomena.
By aid of Kant, with our short-cut to the logical and necessary end of his
achievement, we have grasped the elemental source and solvent of man and
his universe. It is Spirit in its evolution. But, in this evolution,
man--or say rather and always _the principle of sensation and
consciousness in which man inheres_--is merely the general form, diversely
individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of
self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body,
its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are
outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and
unity. The forms of matter, with no exception, are fabricated in this way.
Thus, not figuratively, but literally and with exact knowledge, we may
repeat after St. John:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything
made that was made."
But the principle of animal apprehension and human apperception--or say
just the conscious and the sub-conscious--is not the Ultimately Creative
One, but is, in _us_, only a sub-creative power and agency. We simply
individualize it in endless degrees and variations, all of us framing the
same general world of objects, conceptions and feelings, but no one of us
being, seeing, or feeling, in all respects, exactly like any other
incarnation of our common identity.
But while the _form_--the unity, and thus the individuality--of all
things, is materialized from Spirit through sensation and consciousness in
subjectivity--while this is the secret and genesis of all creation--we
must ever hold fast to the equally basic and universal fact that the
_filling_ of the form--the infinite variety of impact on subjectivity
which furnishes the diversity of objects--all this comes from that
ultimate spirit-background crudely called "the unknown and unknowable."
Now this background of Absolute Spirit, the very withholding of which from
finite creatures constitutes them such, institutes their law of progress,
and gives movement of expression to the Infinite Itself, can only be
absorbed and mastered by human beings through study, work, and
experience. While genuine metaphysics, then, assures us of our
spirit-origin and relative oneness with God--of being God's children far
more directly and intimately than most of us have ever imagined--it
teaches us that for practical purposes, in our condition of existence
called "matter," it makes no difference _what_ we _call_ this condition.
'Tis something actual, something definite, something _fixed_, just as long
as we are in our earthly relation to it. From this point of view, Dr.
Johnson's kicking of the stone to refute Berkeley was a deserved kick, and
even Byron's fun was justified in his tipsy lines,
"When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said."
All things are spirit surely enough; but the phenomena of matter, as
transformed spirit, are related to each other under the laws of what we
necessarily designate as material nature. Little by little, through long
and hard exertion, we find out what these relations are, and how they are
fitted to the human center of them. Some things are good to eat and to
nourish us; others to poison and kill us. A cold or fever may be a
manifestation of spirit, and an herb or drug may be another; but if the
herb or drug counteracts and destroys the cold or the fever, and
experience proves it ten thousand times, who cares to analyze a dose of
aconite or a cup of saffron-tea into a draft of "mortal" or "immortal"
mind? The process is a mere fooling with ideals--hysterics jumping at the
moon. _On metaphysical grounds_--as far as anybody knows what metaphysics
really means--there is no need that our physicians, if they are "good
physicians," should trouble themselves much about a Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy. Esculapius came into the world long before her, and his followers
will stay in it long after her materialized divinity has risen into a more
spiritual and a more intelligent state.
The same may be said of our theologians. Their creeds have not come out of
nothing, however much the spirit of them may have grown thick and muddy
through crude understandings. The Christian Church, surely, can yet offer
to mankind something better than the Eddy "Church Scientist"; and if it
can, it is in no ultimate jeopardy from a few, or a few hundred,
congregations of half-educated faddists.
For a student of history--not in its moments, but in its decades and
centuries--it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of
the fact and _the spread of it_, in its being a protest against the
depressing materialism around it--a materialism which, though rationally
decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever
since the execution.
The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible
for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark,
and butting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took
about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer
names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing
in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending
"mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular
physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has
long been settled in the public mind--such part of the public mind, at
least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.
Has the pulpit itself--orthodox and not so orthodox--contributed to the
success of Eddy "Science"? We must say it has. The practise, among the
sects, of twisting the Bible out of its straight, historical, natural
significance, and fitting its texts to every sort of whim, folly, and
malefaction--this general practise has at last culminated in Mrs. Eddy's
_Key to the Scriptures_, with pretty nearly the dissolution of them in the
abomination of interpretation.
But "Christian Science"--the Eddy misfit for a specious name--has had its
rise, and it has probably risen about as high as it can reach,
notwithstanding its rapid extension for the moment. Only its protrusion
from insignificance and non-attention was needed to uncover its foundation
on the sands of ignorance, its strength in the perennial weakness and
credulity of mankind, and its business success in ordinary, or more than
ordinary, business cupidity. Has it done no good in the world, then? Ah,
that is another question. Whatever may have been the chief motive of its
founder, and whatever may have been its "comedy of errors," it has forced
the inception of a movement that, as a whole, may have vast results for
the human mind and the human body. Whatever material medicines may be
necessary to mankind while they themselves are in a material condition,
psychic forces in the cure of disease can no longer be ignored. What is
the extent, and what the limit, of these forces, is a problem that must be
examined. As conditionally--here and now--man is _both spiritual and
corporeal_--it would seem to be a self-evident conclusion that he must
have both material and spiritual aids to health. That we can "jump" our
condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever
presented to the human mind; but the sequences--even physical--of
systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be
incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of
healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pass some
fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded,
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If the spirit of evil--of hypocrisy, selfishness
and avarice--has entered into the movement of mental healing through
another source, the frequent necessity of very human means to divine ends
is once more illustrated.