SPECULATIVE
"Philosophy is one of the richest presents that man ever
received from heaven, being that which raises the mind into
the contemplation of eternal things, and is the science
which of all others affords the most agreeable
entertainment."--EVELYN.
I.
INSTRUMENTALITIES.
"The age, the present times, are not
To snudge in, and embrace a cot;
Action and blood now get the game,
Disdain treads on the peaceful name:
Who sits at home, too, bears a load
Greater than those that gad abroad."
HENRY VAUGHAN.
[Illustration: Decorative banner of two mythical animals among leaves]
INSTRUMENTALITIES.
I.--TENDENCIES.
Our time is revolutionary. It drifts strong and fast into unitarianism
and the empire of ideas. All things are undergoing reform and
reconstruction; the fellowship of all souls intent on laying broad and
deep the foundations of the new institutions. The firm of Globe Brothers
& Co., prospers in both hemispheres, every citizen being a partner in
the concern. The nations are leagued together on the basis of mutual
assistance, finding the old alliances founded on force and fear to be
insecure; the people seeing it best to be friends and copartners in
conducting the world's affairs;--trade the natural knot tying them
by the coarser wants only; world-politics their bond of union and
prosperity. No longer playing independent parts safely, they co-operate
and conspire for the common welfare, interposing such checks as
each individually requires for his security. Ruling is conducted
not by legislation nor diplomacy, but by social and commercial
inter-communication; every man opening out for himself the sphere suited
to his gifts, and taking his thinking and doing into head and hands as a
loyal man and citizen. Power is stealing with a speed and momentum
unprecedented from the few to the many; is played out on a theatre
world-wide, whole populations taking part in affairs; the distance once
separating extremes being bridged; middle men with human sympathies and
broad common-sense taking the lead and setting the old pretensions
aside. A daring realism overleaping the old barriers gives government
into the hands of the whole people, rulers being their servants, not
masters; presidents and kings the representatives of ideas and paying
loyal homage to these crowned heads; the old virtues of reverence for
man, fidelity to principle, so venerable and sacred in private stations,
seeking reappearance in public life.
If once the great, the wise, were in the minority, and none dreamed of
reason becoming popular, reason is fast becoming republicanized; from
being the exclusive property of the few is diffusing itself universally
as the common possession of the multitude.
Imperial thought now holds her powerful sway,
And drives the peoples on their prosperous way.
The freshest, best thoughts of the best minds of all times are claimed
by the community; itself the awakened critic and prompter of the best;
all thirsting for information,--world-wisdom,--and drinking off eagerly
the lore of centuries. Knowledge everywhere diffused is accessible to
all, rolls with the globe, dashes against the shores of every sea,
delves the caverns, climbs the hill-tops with sun and moon, for the
common benefit. If Hesiod wrote for his times that
"Riches are the soul of feeble men,"
our time is fast translating his line practically:
Riches are the hand of able men;
Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the
better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative
philanthropies the extremes--every man's needs being taken as drafts
drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight:
"Stewards of the gods alone
Are we; have nothing of our own
Save what to us the gods commit,
And take away when they see fit."
Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian
code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and
humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the
abolition of the death-penalty altogether.
The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no
longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon
to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the
cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with
irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with
the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks
received their Gods from Egypt and Phoenicia, Rome hers from Greece, and
we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are
ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races.
II.--METHOD.
Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in
facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without
symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of
mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye
beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and
symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock
of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable
spaces of which thought is royal ranger,--owner of domains far larger
and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind
can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are
shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron
and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and
limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let
loose by the Daedalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of
the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the
omnipresence, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land
by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our
painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter
on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored
regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern
instrumentality lends the outfit and means--facilities ample,
unprecedented--new instruments for the new discoveries--new eyes for the
new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the
old circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative
thought,--intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is
finely discriminated, a broader synthesis generalized from the materials
accumulated in the mind during the centuries, the globe's contents being
gathered in from all quarters, the Book of Creation illustrated anew,
and posted to date. The new calculus is ours. An organon alike
serviceable to metaphysician and naturalist--whereby things answer to
thought, facts are resolved into truths, images into ideas, matter into
mind, power into personality, man into God; the One soul in all souls
revealed as the Creative Spirit pulsating in all breasts, immanent in
all atoms, prompting all wills, and personally embosoming all persons in
one unbroken synthesis of Being.[E]
[Footnote E: "Truth can be known by the thinking reason. It
has been known by speculative thinkers scattered through the
ages. Their systems exist and may be mastered. Their
differences are not radical, but lie rather in the mode of
exposition--the point of departure, the various obstacles
overcome, and the character of the _technique_ used. Their
agreement is central and pervading. The method of
speculative cognition is to be distinguished from that of
sensuous certitude, and from the reflection of the
understanding by the exhaustive nature of its procedure. It
considers its subject in a universal manner and its steps
are void of all arbitrariness.
In order to detect a speculative system, ask the following
questions of it: 1. "Is the highest principle regarded as a
fixed, abstract, and rigid one, or as a concrete and
self-moving one?" 2. "Is the starting point of the system
regarded as the highest principle, and the onward movement
of the same merely a result deduced analytically; or is the
beginning treated as the most abstract and deficient, while
the final result is the basis of all?" In other words, "Is
the system a descent from a first principle or an ascent to
one?" This will detect a defect of the method, while the
former question, (1,) will detect defects in the content or
subject matter of the system."--WILLIAM T. HARRIS.]
"It has hitherto, unhappily, been the misfortune of the mere
materialist, in his mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas
on the other, to invert this creative order, and thus hang the world's
picture as a man with his heels upwards"--a process conducting of
necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature's author.
Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of
thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance,
piles his atom atop of atom, cements cell on cell, in constructing his
column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of
gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape's glorified effigy, as
Nature's frontispiece and head--life's atomy with life omitted
altogether, man wanting. Contrarywise reads the ideal naturalist the
book of lives. Opening at Spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas, he
finds their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs,
faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its
connections and interpendencies appear in series and degrees as he
traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man connexus,
archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth
abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos,--the primeval
Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and
survivor.[F]
[Footnote F: "There are four modes of knowledge which we are
able to acquire in the present life:
1. The first of these results from opinion, by which we
learn that a thing is, without knowing the why; and this
constitutes that part of knowledge which was called by
Aristotle and Plato, erudition; and which consists in moral
instructions for the purpose of purifying ourselves from
immoderate desires.
2. But the second is produced by the sciences, which from
establishing certain principles as hypotheses, conduct to
necessary conclusions whereby we arrive at the knowledge of
the why, as in the mathematical sciences, but at the same
time are ignorant with respect to the principles of these
conclusions, because they are merely hypothetical.
3. The third species of knowledge is that which results from
Plato's dialectic; in which by a progression through ideas,
we arrive at the first principles of things, and at that
which is no longer hypothetical, and thus dividing some
things and analyzing others, by producing many things from
one, and one from many.
4. But the fourth species is still more simple than this;
because it no longer uses analyses or compositions, but
whole things themselves by intuition, and becomes one with
the object of its perception; and this energy is the Divine
Reason, which Plato speaks of, and which far transcends
other modes of knowledge."--THOMAS TAYLOR.]
III.--MAN.
"Imago Dei in animo; mundi, in corpore."
Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image.
His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him
stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are
conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and
treads under foot, the planet he spins.
He omnipresent is,
All round himself he lies,
Osiris spread abroad,
Upstaring in all eyes:
Nature his globed thought,
Without him she were not,
Cosmos from chaos were not spoken,
And God bereft of visible token.
A theometer--an instrument of instruments--he gathers in himself all
forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the Spirit's
acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator
between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of
souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and
wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental,
essential, he generates elements and forces, perpetually replenishing
his waste;--the final conflagration a current fact of his existence.
Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous
and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze
refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life,
its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born
Phoenix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its
resolvent emblem.[G]
[Footnote G: "Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the
materials from the atmosphere and compounding them for his
food. Even life itself, as we know it, is but a process of
combustion, of which decomposition is the final conclusion.
Through this combustion all the constituents return back
into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence
they came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames
arise into regions where our science has no longer any
value."--SCHLEIDEN.]
"Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not,
By thy male force is all we have, begot."
"This kindles the fire which exists in every thing, is received by every
thing. While it sheds a full light, it is itself hidden. Its presence is
unknown, unless some material be given to induce the exertion of its
power. It is invisible, as well as unquenchable; and it has the faculty
of transforming into itself every thing it touches. It renovates every
thing by its vital heat, it illumines every thing by its flashing beams;
it can neither be confined nor intermingled; it divides and yet is
immutable. It always ascends, it is constantly in motion; it moves by
its own will and power, and sets in motion every thing around it. It has
the power of seizing, but cannot itself be grasped. It needs no aid. It
increases silently and breaks forth in majesty upon all. It generates,
it is powerful, invisible, and omnipotent. If neglected, its existence
might be forgotten, but on friction being applied, it flashes out again
like the sword from its scabbard, shines resplendently by its own
natural properties, and soars into the air. Many other powers may yet be
noticed as belonging to it. For this reason theologians have asserted
that all substances being formed of fire, are thus created as nearly as
possible in the image of God."
[Illustration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]
II.
MIND.
"But all the Gods we have are in The Mind,
By whose proportions only we redeem
Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find
The measure of ourselves and of our powers,
And that all happiness remains confined
Within the kingdom of this breast of ours,
Without whose bounds all that we look on lies
In others' jurisdiction, others' powers,
Out of the circuit of our liberties."
DANIEL.
[Illustration: Decorative banner of a grasshopper among greenery]
MIND.
I.--IDEAS.
The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its
Powers. They fabled these as gods celestial, mundane, infernal,
according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal
metaphysic has not as yet been surpassed or superseded altogether, as
the classic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and
the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought
is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his
metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the
world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion
falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary
mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall.
Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea
or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow--these distribute mankind
into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in
harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is
a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist,
grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the
visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts
as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears
to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind
is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.
"Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely,
But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."
Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the
flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose
current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following
particle of the passing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the
flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality
which to slower wits seems fixed in space and apart from thought,
subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming,
not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible
gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by
its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our
thought.
So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the
word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing
life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of
meaning.[H] Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense.
They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark;
at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the
lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we
tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing
shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the
world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The
world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both.
Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable
only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and
originals of words.
[Footnote H: CATEGORIES OF SPEECH,
BEING:
_Flowing_, _Fixed_,
Subjective. Objective.
I. III. II.
_Actions_, _Participles_, _Things_,
Verbs. Nouns.
IV.
_Qualities_,
Adverbs, Adjectives.
V.
_Relations_,
Prepositions, Conjunctions, Pronouns.]
Thought's winged hand,
Marshals in trope and tone
The ideal band.
Genius alone
Holds fast in eye
The fleeing God--
Brings Beauty nigh--
Senses descry
Footsteps he trod,
Figures he drew,
Shapes old and new,
The fair, the true,
In soul and sod.
Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed
from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to
the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as
seen by poet and plowman. It stands for material benefit to the one,
immaterial to the other. The artist's point of view is one of uses seen
as means of beauty, that being the complement of uses. His faculties
handle his organs; the hands, like somnambulists, playing their under
parts to ideas; these, again, serving uses still higher. The poet,
awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form,
being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.
The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker
views men as troglodytes--like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the
sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights--they in
turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an
unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes
the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents.
Nor can thought, from its nature, at once become popular. It is the
property and delight of the few fitted by genius and culture for
discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth in
its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored.
Apart by pursuit from the mass of mankind, or at most taking a separate
and subordinate part in affairs that engage their sole attention, the
thinker seems useless to all save those who can apprehend and avail
themselves of his immediate labors; and the less is he known and
appreciated as his studies are of lasting importance to his race. Yet
time is just, and brings all men to the side of thought as they become
familiar with its practical benefits, else the victory were not gained
for philosophy, and wisdom justified in him of her chosen children.
Ideas alone supplement nature and complement mind. Our senses neither
satisfy our sensibility nor intellect. The mind's objects are mind
itself; imagination the mind's eye, memory the ear, ideas of the one
imaging the other, and the mind thus rounding its history. And hence the
pleasurable perspective experienced in surveying our personality from
obverse sides in the landscape of existence--culture, in its inclusive
sense, making the tour of our gifts, and acquainting us with ourselves
and the world we live in. All men gain a residence in the senses and the
family of natural things; few come into possession of their better
inheritance and home in the mind--the Palace of Power and Personality.
Sons of earth rather by preference, and chiefly emulous for their little
while of its occupancy, its honors, emoluments, they here pitch their
tents, here plant fast their hopes, and roll through life they know not
whither.
II.--THE GIFTS.
Instinct is the fountain of Personal power, and mother of the Gifts.
With instinct there may be an embryo, but sense must be superinduced to
constitute an animal--memory, moral sentiment, reason, imagination,
personality, to constitute the man. The mind is the man, not the outward
shape: all is in the Will. The animal may mount to fancy in the grade of
gifts; but reason, imagination, conscience, choice--the mediating,
creative, ruling powers--the personality--belong to man alone. But not
to all men, save in essence and possibility. Man properly traverses the
hierarchy of Powers--spiritual, intellectual, moral, natural,
animal--their full possession and interplay enabling him to hold free
colloquy with all, giving the whole mind voice in the dialogue. Thus:
Asking for
The Who? Will responds, The Person.
The Ought? Conscience " The Right.
The How? Imagination " The Idea.
The Why? Reason " The Truth.
The Thus? Fancy " The Image.
The Where? Understanding " The Fact.
The When? Memory " The Event.
The Which? Sense " The Thing.
The What? Instinct " The Life.
In accordance with this gradation of gifts, man and animals may be
classified as to their measures of intelligence respectively; instinct
being taken as the initial gift and prompter of the rest in their order
of genesis, growth and adaptability: man alone, when fully unfolded in
harmony, being capable of ranging throughout the entire scale.[I]
[Footnote I: "One would think nothing were easier for us
than to know our own mind, discern what was our main scope
and drift, and what we proposed to ourselves as our end in
the several occurrences of our lives. But our thoughts have
such an obscure, implicit language, that it is the hardest
thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly; and
for this reason the right method is to give them voice and
accent. And this, in our default, is what the philosophers
endeavor to do to our hand, when, holding out a kind of
vocal looking-glass, they draw sound out of our breast, and
instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest
manner."--LORD SHAFTESBURY.]
Thus:
[Illustration: Sketch of human head marked with Instinct, Sense, Memory,
Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience, Personality]
CLASS
I. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
Imagination, Conscience, Personality.
II. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
Imagination, Conscience.
III. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason,
Imagination.
IV. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason.
V. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding, Fancy.
VI. Instinct, Sense, Memory, Understanding.
VII. Instinct, Sense, Memory.
VIII. Instinct, Sense.
MAN IS
Spiritual as he experiences, Personality, Thought
Moral " Choice, Conscience.
Intellectual " Imagination, Reason.
Natural " Fancy, Understanding.
Brute " Memory, Sense.
Demonic " Appetite, Passion.
Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute
omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the
Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the
race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man,
the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from
germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine
and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in
personality.
Pure mind alone is face,
Brute matter surface all;
As souls immersed in space,
Ideal rise, or idol fall.
III.--PERSON.
The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime
part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But
rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity,
triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal
Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we
claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the
mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom
throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is
divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so
deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the
comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind
makes upon the senses,--these inclining always to idolatry,--is it
surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure
thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable
number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any
school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force,
law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending
logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality,
free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for
man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and
worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is
disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.[J]
[Footnote J: "The first principle of all things is Living
Goodness, armed with Wisdom and all-powerful Love. But if a
man's soul be once sunk by evil fate or desert, from the
sense of this high and heavenly truth into the cold conceit
that the original of all lies either in shuffling chance or
in the stark root of unknowing nature and brute necessity,
all the subtle cords of reason, without the timely recovery
of that divine torch within the hidden spirit of his heart,
will never be able to draw him out of that abhorred pit of
atheism and infidelity. So much better is innocency and
piety than subtle argument, and sincere devotion than
curious dispute. But contemplations concerning the dry
essence of the Godhead have for the most part been most
confusing and unsatisfactory. Far better is it to drink of
the blood of the grape than to bite the root of the grape,
to smell the rose than to chew the stalk. And blessed be
God, the meanest of men are capable of the former, very few
successful in the latter; and the less, because the reports
of those that have busied themselves that way have not only
seemed strange to most men, but even repugnant to one
another. But we should in charity refer this to the nature
of the _pigeon's neck_ than to mistake and contradiction.
One and the same object in nature affords many different
aspects. And God is infinitely various and simple; like a
circle, indifferent whether you suppose it of one uniform
line, or an infinite number of angles. Wherefore it is more
safe to admit all possible perfections of God than rashly to
deny what appears not to us from our particular
posture."--HENRY MORE.]
"Make us a god," said man:
Power first the voice obeyed,
And soon a monstrous form
Its worshippers dismayed;
Uncouth and huge, by nations rude adored,
With savage rites and sacrifice abhorred.
"Make us a god," said man:
Art next the voice obeyed,
Lovely, serene, and grand,
Uprose the Athenian maid:
The perfect statue, Greece with wreathed brows,
Adores in festal rites and lyric vows.
"Make us a god," said man:
Religion followed art,
And answered, "Look within;
Find God in thine own heart--
His noblest image there, and holiest shrine,
Silent revere--and be thyself divine."
IV.--CHOICE.
Heaven hell's pit copes:
Nor fathoms any sin's abyss, or clambers out,
Save by the steps his choice hath delved.
The gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the
man into their Personal likeness. Descending below himself he debases
and disfigures this image; as by choice he leaps upwards, so by choice
he lapses downwards. Yet, while free to choose, he sinks himself never
beneath himself absolutely, his _beneath_ subsisting by his election
only. His choices free or fetter, elevate or debase, deify or demonize
his humanity. Superior to all forces is the Spirit within, doing or
defying his determinations, ever holding him fast to the consequences.
Obeying its dictates or disobeying, frees or binds. It has golden chains
for the good, for others iron. Love is its soft, yet mighty curb;
freedom its easy yoke; fate its fetter.
Nor man in evil willingly doth rest,
Nor God in good unwillingly is blest.
There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the
breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret
the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape
the consequences of his election. The deed decides. Nor is the
Conscience appeased till sooner or later our deserts are pronounced--The
welcome "well done," or the dread "depart."
"'Tis vain to flee till gentle mercy show
Her better eye. The further off we go
The swing of justice deals the mightier blow."
Only the repenting consciousness of freedom abused restores the lost
holiness, redeems from the guilty lapse--the sin that in separating us
from the One, revealed the fearful Doubleness within, opening the
yawning pit down which we stumbled, to become the prey of the undying
worm.
"Meek love alone doth wash our ills away."
And with love enough, knowledge were useless. It comes in defect of
love. Exhaustless in its sources, love supersedes knowledge, being the
proper intellect of spirit and spring of intuition--God being very God,
because his love absorbs all knowledge and contains his Godhead. Knowing
without loving is decease from love, and lapse from pure intellect into
sense. Knowledge is not enough. The more knowledge, the deeper the
depths left unsounded, the more exacting our faith in the certainty of
knowing. Our faith feels after its objects, if haply by groping in the
darkness of our ignorance we may fathom its depths, and find ourselves
in Him who is ever seeking us. "Although no man knoweth the spirit of a
man save The Spirit within him, yet is there something in him that not
even man's spirit knoweth."
"WHO placed thee here, did something then infuse
Which now can tell thee news."
[Illustration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]
III.
GENESIS.
"Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have
been born one from another in the same way that Adam--i. e.,
mankind--was, namely, in the image of God; for that which
proceeds from the Eternal has eternal manner of
birth."--BEHMEN.
[Illustration: Decorative banner of a beetle among flowers and leaves]
GENESIS.
I.--VESTIGES.
Boehme, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Moses, conceives that
nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man
rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present
existence, being the struggle to recover from nature's lapse, is
embarrassed with double difficulties by defection from rectitude on his
part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively
conspiring, to account for nature's mishaps, or man's, since, assuming
man to be nature's ancestor, and nature man's ruins rather, himself were
the impediment he seeks to remove; nature being the child of his
choices, corresponding in large--or macrocosmically--to his intents.
Eldest of creatures, the progenitor of all below him, personally one and
imperishable in essence, if debased forms appear in nature, these are
consequent on man's degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as
he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs
his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal
kingdom--these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and
shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere
the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.
"Most happy he who hath fit place assigned
To his beasts, and disafforested his mind;
Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
And is not ape himself to all the rest."
It is man alone who conceives and brings forth the beast in him that
swerves and dies. Perversion of will by mis-choice precipitates him into
serpentine form, duplicated in sex,
"Parts of that Part which once was all."
'Tis but one and the same soul in him, entertaining a dialogue with
himself, that is symbolized in the Serpent, Adam, and the woman; nor
needs there fabulous "Paradises Lost or Regained," for setting in relief
this serpent symbol of temptation, this Lord or Lucifer in our spiritual
Eden:
"First state of human kind,
Which one remains while man doth find
Joy in his partner's company;
When two, alas! adulterate joined,
The serpent made the three."
II.--SERPENT SYMBOL.
Better is he who is above temptation, than he who, being tempted,
overcomes, since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination stirring
in his breast which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far
sinned as to entertain the tempting lust within, betraying his lapse
from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, are virtuous by
choice; the holy, being one, deliberate not--their volitions answering
spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or _other_
within, which seduces the Will, and is the Adversary and Deuce we become
individually, and impersonate in the Snake.
Chaste love's a maid,
Though shapen as a man.
But one were an OEdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is
symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man's
parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the
symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in
the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday
dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent
symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that
it became associated with those "traditionary teachers of mankind whose
genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors." An early Christian sect,
called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge.
So the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves,"
becomes the more significant when we learn that _seraph_ in the original
means a serpent; _cherub_, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in
osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the
vertebrated cranium,[K] which view Nature as ophiomorphous--a series of
spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure--set erect,
prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man,
holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or
losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity--hereby debasing his
form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed
throughout nature's kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy,
he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance,
speech,--thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods,
and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal
arts.
[Footnote K: "Spix, in his 'Cephalogenesis,' aids Oken's
theory of the spinal cranium in endowing the artist's symbol
of the cherub with all that it seemed to want before that
discovery; namely: with a thorax, abdomen and pelvis, arms,
legs, hands and feet."--OWEN.]
"Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man."
III.--EMBRYONS.
"The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work,
in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."
As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and
fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in
embryo; the egg a genesis and seminary of forms, the kingdoms of
animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk, and awaiting the quickening
magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds
in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be
fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into
filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, "that were it
physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body,
there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is
this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments,
that, physically speaking, is the man."[L] The mind contains him
spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every
creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative
and craving form.
[Footnote L: "Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast
covered me in my mother's womb. My substance was not hid
from thee when I was made in a secret place, and there
curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth: there
thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and in
thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance
were fashioned when as yet there was none of them."--PSALM
cxxxix: 13, 15, 16.]
"The creature ever delights in the image of the Creator;
And the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself;
Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated of God;
For she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists."
Throughout the domain of spirit desire creates substance wherein all
creatures seek conjunction, lodging and nurture. Nor is there anything
in nature save desire holding substances together, all things being
dissolvable and recombinable in this spiritual menstruum.
"'Tis the blossom whence there blows
Everything that lives and grows;
It doth make the heavens to move
And the sun to burn in love:
The strong to weak it seeks to yoke,
And makes the ivy climb the oak,
Under whose shadows lions wild,
Softened thereby grow tame and mild.
It all medicine doth appease,
It burns the fishes in the seas,
Not all the skill its wounds can stanch,
Not all the sea its thirst can quench:
It did make the bloody spear
Once a leafy coat to wear,
While in his leaves there shrouded lay
Sweet birds for love that sing and play;
And of all the joyful flame,
Bud and blossom this we name."
IV.--TEMPERAMENT.
Temperament is a fate, oftentimes, from whose jurisdiction its victims
hardly escape, but do its bidding herein, be it murder or martyrdom.
Virtues and crimes are mixed in one's cup of nativity, with the lesser
or larger margin of choice. Unless of chaste extraction, his
regeneration shall be wrought with difficulty through the struggling
kingdom of evil into the peaceful realm of good. Blood is a destiny.
One's genius descends in the stream from long lines of ancestry, from
fountains whence rose Adam the first and his Eve. The oldest and most
persistent of forces, if once ennobled by virtue and refined by culture,
it resists base mixtures long, preserving its purity and power for
generations. All gifts descend in the torrent; all are mingled in the
ecstasy, as purity or passion prevail; genius being the fruit of chaste
conjunctions, brute force of adulterous--the virgin complexions or the
mixed.[M]
[Footnote M: Boehme thus classifies and describes the
temperaments:
"Lapsing out of her innocency, man's soul enters into a
strange inn or lodging, wherein he is held sometime captive
as in a dungeon, wherein are four chambers or stories, in
one of which she is fated to remain, though not without
instincts of the upper wards (if her place be the lowest)
and hope of finding the keys by which she may ascend into
these also. These chambers are the elements of his
constitution, and characterized as the four temperaments or
complexions, namely:
I. The melancholic or earthy.
II. The phlegmatic oraqueous.
III. The choleric or fiery.
IV. The sanguine or ethereal.
I. The splenetic or melancholic partakes of the properties
of the earth, being cold, dark, and hungry for the light. It
is timid, incredulous, empty, consuming itself in corrosive
cares, anxieties and sorrows, being sad when the sun shines,
and needs perpetual encouragement. Its color is dark.
II. The phlegmatic being nourished from the earth's
moisture, is inclined to heaviness; is gross, effeminate,
dull of apprehension, careless, indifferent. It has but
faint glimpses of the light, and needs much inculcation from
without. Its color is brown.
III. The choleric is of the fiery temper, inclined to
violence, wrath, obstinacy, irreverence, ambition. It is
impulsive, contentious, aspires for power, and authority. It
is greedy of the sun, and glories in its blazing beams. Its
color is florid.
IV. The sanguine, being tempered of ether, and the least
imprisoned, is cheerful, gentle, genial, versatile,
naturally chaste, insinuating, searching into the secret of
things natural and spiritual, and capable of divining the
deepest mysteries. It loves the light, and aspires toward
the sun. Its complexion is fair."]
"Our generation moulds our state,
Its virtues, vices, fix our fate;
Nor otherwise experience proves,
The unseen hands make all the moves,
If some are great, and some are small,
Some climb to good, some from good fortune fall,--
Not figures these of speech,--forefathers sway us all.
Me from the womb the midnight muse did take,
She clothed me, nourished, and mine head
With her own hands she fashioned;
She did a cov'nant with me make,
And circumcised my tender soul, and thus she spake:
'Thou of my church shalt be,
Hate and renounce (said she)
Wealth, honour, pleasure, all the world for me.
Thou neither great at court, nor in the war,
Nor at th' exchange shalt be, nor at the wrangling bar,
Content thyself with the small barren praise,
That neglected verse does raise.'
She spake, and all my years to come
Took their determined doom:
Their several ways of life, let others choose,
Their several pleasures let them use,
But I was born for love and for a muse.
With fate what boots it to contend?
Such I began, such am, and so shall end:
The star that did my being frame
Was but a lambent flame;
Some light indeed it did dispense,
But less of heat and influence.
No matter, poet, let proud fortune see
That thou canst her despise no less than she does thee;
Why grieve thyself or blush to be
As all the inspired tuneful seers,
And all thy great forefathers were from Shakspeare to thy peers."
Yet, biassed by temperament as we may be, whether for good or for evil,
such measure of freedom is ours, nevertheless, as enables us to free
ourselves from its tendencies and temptations. In the breast of each is
a liberating angel, at whose touch, when we will it persistently, the
doors of our dungeon fly open and loose their prisoner.
IV.
METAMORPHOSES.
"Generation is not a creation of life, but a production of
things to sense, and making them manifest. Neither is change
death, but a hiding of that which was."--HERMES TRISMEGISTUS.
[Illustration: Decorative banner of two birds among leaves and flowers]
METAMORPHOSES.
I.--SLEEP.
Life is a current of spiritual forces. In perpetual tides, the stream
traverses its vessels to vary its pulsations and perspectives of things,
receding from forehead and face into cerebellum and spine, to be
replenished night by night from these springs of vigor. The Genius trims
our lamps while we sleep. It plumbs us by day and levels us by night.
Here recumbent as at nature's navel, her energies flood the spirits with
puissance, restoring tone and tension for the coming day's occupations.
Then what varying scenes rise to fancy's eye, while the mind lapses out
of the globe of thought, the house of the senses, into the palaces of
memory through the gate of dreams! Under the sway of occult forces we
partake of preternatural insights, having access to sources of
information unopened to us in our wakeful hours. Vast systems of
sympathies, antedating and extending beyond our mundane experiences,
absorb us within their sphere, relating us to other worlds of life and
light; as if stirred by the nocturnal impulse we climbed the empyrean,
still crediting the superstition of our affinities with the starry
orbs--
"Eternal fathers of whate'er exists below."
Or, pursuing our peregrinations, we plunge suddenly into the abyss of
origins, transformed for the moment into slumbering umbilici, skirting
the shores of our nativity; or, ascending spine-wise, traverse the
hierarchy of gifts. How we grope strangely! Seeking the One amidst the
many, we lose ourselves in finding the One we lost. We enter bodies of
our bodies, souls of our soul, successively; each organ our prisoner, we
in turn the prisoner of each, till by chance the bewildered occupant
recover the key to the wards of his apartments, and forth issues into
the haunts of his consciousness, the world of natural things. For never
is the sleep so profound, the dream so distracting, as to obliterate all
sense of the personality,--despite these vagaries of the night, these
opiates of the senses, memory sometime dispels the oblivious slumber,
and recovers for the mind recollections of its descent and destiny. Some
reliques of the ancient consciousness survive, recalling our previous
history and experiences.[N]
[Footnote N: "'Tis well known that according to the sense of
antiquity, these two considerations were always included in
that one opinion of the soul's immortality--namely; its
pre-existence as well as its post existence. Neither were
there ever any of the ancients before christianity, that
held the soul's future permanency after death, who did not
likewise assert its pre-existence,--they clearly perceiving
that if it was once granted that the soul was generated, it
could never be proved but that it might be also corrupted.
And therefore the asserters of its immortality commonly
began here--first, to prove its pre-existence, proceeding
thence afterwards to establish its permanency after
death."--CUDWORTH.]
II.--REMINISCENCE.
"Heaven's exile straying from the orb of light."
And but for our surface and distracted lives,--lived here for the most
part in the senses,--we should have never lost the consciousness of our
descent into mortality, nor have questioned our resurrection and
longevity. But as in descending, all drink of oblivion--some more, some
less--it happens that while all are conscious of life, by defect of
memory, our recollections are various concerning it; those discerning
most vividly who have drank least of oblivion, they more easily
recalling the memory of their past existence. Ancients of days, we
hardly are persuaded to believe that our souls are no older than our
bodies, and to date our nativity from our family registers, as if time
and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind by its advent
into the flesh and decease out of it.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
Nor yet in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home."
None of us remember when we did not remember, when memory was nought,
and ourselves were unborn. Memory is the premise of our sensations, it
dates our immortality. Nestling ever in the twilight of our earliest
recollections, it cradles our nativity, canopies our hopes, and bears us
babes, out of our bodies as into them; opening vistas alike into our
past and coming existence. The thread of our experiences, it cannot be
severed by any accidents of our mortality; time and space, earliest
found and last to leave us, fading and falling away as we pass into
recollections which these can neither date nor confine--the smiles that
welcomed, the tears that dismiss us, being of no age, nor place nor
time.
"O love! thou makest all things even
In earth and heaven:
Finding thy way through prison bars
Up to the stars:
That out of dust created man,
Thou lookest in a grave, to see
Thine immortality."
III.--IMMORTALITY.
If immortality inhere in objects known by us, these surely are persons;
the ties of kindred being the liveliest, most abiding of any; our faith
in the impossibility of being sundered forever, remaining unshaken to
the last, and surviving all changes that our bodies may undergo.
"Deep love, the godlike in us, still believes
Its objects are immortal as itself."
'Tis not our bodies that contain us but our souls. None beholds with
bodily eyes the apparition of his person, sees and survives the ghost he
provokes. The perturbed spirits alone linger about the tombs--dead
before they die, dead burying their dead--comfortless because these are
bereft of bodies, flesh being all of them they ever knew.[O]
[Footnote O: Let us remember that immortality signifies a
negative, or not having of mortality, and that a positive
term is required by which to express a change, since nature
teaches that whatever is, will abide with the being it is,
unless forced out of it by something positive. And as it
appears that man's soul has these grounds in her which make
all visible things to be perishable, it is obvious that his
soul is immortal and the cause of mortality itself.--SIR
KENELM DIGBY.]
Moreover, the insatiableness of our desires asserts our personal
imperishableness. Yearning for full satisfactions while balked of these
perpetually, we still prosecute our search for them, our faith in their
attainment remaining unshaken under every disappointment. Our hope is
eternal as ourselves--a never ending, still beginning quest of our
divinity. Infinite in essence, we crave it in potence. The boundlessness
and elasticity of the mind, its power of self-recovery, uprise from
temporary obstructions self-imposed, or from temperament, are assurances
made doubly sure of our soul's infinitude and longevity. So the lives of
empires, of men of genius and sanctity, are grand illustrations of its
heroic strife for the largest freedom, the widest sway,--of instincts
striving within, which these pent confines of time and space can neither
subjugate nor appease.
"Take this, my child," the father said,
"This globe I give thy mind for bread;"
Eager we seize the proffered store,
The bait devour--then ask for more.
"Everything aspires to its own perfection and is restless till it attain
it, as the trembling needle till it find its beloved north. And the
knowledge of this is innate as is the desire, else the last had been a
torment and needless importunity. Nature shoots not at rovers. Even
inanimate things, while ignorant of their perfection, are carried
towards it by a blind impulse. But that which conducts them knows. The
next order of beings have some sight of it, and man most perfectly till
he touch the apple." Our delights suckle us life long, our desires being
memories of past satisfactions, and we here but sip pleasures once
tasted to satiety. The more exquisite our enjoyments, the more
transient; the more eagerly sought, the more elusive. We cannot come out
of our paradise, nor stay in it contentedly, the gates of bliss closing
on opening.
"E'en as the amorous needle joys to bend
To her magnetic friend,
Or as the greedy lover's eyeballs fly
At his fair mistress' eye,
Eager we kindle life's illumined stuff,
Can tire, nor tease, nor kindle it enough."
Still heaven is, our hearts affirm against every disappointment; and
whether behind or before us, as memory or as hope, 'tis to be ours,--our
port and resting place sometime in the stream of ages.
"All before us lies the way;
Give the past unto the wind;
All before us is the day,
Night and darkness are behind.
Eden with its angels bold,
Love and flowers and coolest sea,
Is less an ancient story told
Than a glowing prophecy.
In the spirit's perfect air,
In the passions tame and kind,
Innocence from selfish care,
The real Eden we shall find.
When the soul to sin hath died,
True and beautiful and sound,
Then all earth is sanctified,
Upsprings paradise around.
From the spirit-land, afar
All disturbing force shall flee;
Stir, nor toil, nor hope shall mar
Its immortal unity."
_Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications._
THE LAYMAN'S BREVIARY. A Selection for Every Day in the Year. Translated
from the German of LEOPOLD SCHEFER, by Charles T. Brooks. In one square
16mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price, $2.50. A cheaper
edition. Price, $1.50.
"The 'Layman's Breviary' will adorn drawing-room
centre-tables, boudoirs, library nooks; it will be a
favorite travelling companion, and be carried on summer
excursions to read under trees and on verandas. For every
day of the year there are thoughts, counsels,
aspirations--many of them Oriental in tone, or patriarchal
in spirit; there are delineations of nature, pure utterances
of faith; each page contains fresh and earnest expressions
of a poetic, believing, humane soul--often clad in exquisite
language. It is eminently a household book, and one to be
taken up and enjoyed at intervals."--_Boston Transcript._
"Each poem is in itself a sermon; not of dry, theological
dogmas, but the love and care of the Infinite, the yearning
and outreaching of the human to grasp the divine. It is a
book not to be lightly read and carelessly tossed aside, but
to be studied daily until the lessons it conveys are
learned, and its comforting words written on every heart. Of
the author's religious opinions we know nothing; what creed
he subscribes to we cannot tell; but we do know that he is a
true worshipper of God, and lover of his fellow-men. This
book should be on every table; all households should possess
it; we cannot too highly recommend it to the notice of all.
It has been truly said, that 'these blooming pictures of
Nature, praising the love, the goodness, the wisdom of the
Creator and His work, form in truth a poetical book of
devotion for the layman whom the dogma does not satisfy--a
_breviary_ for man.'"--_The Wide World._
MY PRISONS. Memoirs of SILVIO PELLICO. With an Introduction by Epes
Sargent, and embellished with fifty Illustrations from drawings by
Billings. One square 12mo. volume, bevelled cloth, gilt edges. Price,
$3.50. A cheaper edition. Price, $2.00.
"Some thirty-five years ago the publication of "My Prisons,
Memoirs of Silvio Pellico," first appealed to the sympathies
of the Italian people. The history of a martyr to freedom is
always entertaining, and the pathos and beauty which
surround the narrative in question have always kept alive
the interest of all intelligent nations. It ranks,
therefore, deservedly high in biographical literature. The
present edition is a very superior one, and is introduced by
Epes Sargent, who vigorously reviews the despotism of
Austria in the incarceration of Pellico, and the changes
which have since occurred in European politics."--_Chicago
Evening Journal._
"The story is simply told, for adventures like those of the
author need no graces of style or highly wrought figures.
The book has a charm which few novels possess; indeed, one
can hardly believe that it is true, and that so few years
have passed since men of noble birth and fine culture were
condemned to suffer for years in prison on account of their
political opinions."--_Boston Transcript._
_Mailed, post paid, to any address, on receipt of the price, by the
Publishers._
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Descriptions of illustrations were added for the convenience of readers.
In the Table of Contents, section titles are in Arabic numbers, while in
the text of the book, Roman numerals are used. Each is retained as
printed.
Footnotes are indented and placed following the paragraph to which they
pertain.
Alternate and obsolete spelling was retained.
Other changes:
Added hyphen to self-respect, for consistency with remaining text.
... without loss of self-respect....
"falcony" changed to "falconry"
... for the falconry, archery, the hunting,...
"educuated" changed to "educated"
... A boy was to be so educated and fed ...
"T'is" changed to "'Tis"
... 'Tis but one and the same soul ...
Added close quote mark to end of Footnote M.
Footnote N, "acccording" changed to "according"
... according to the sense of antiquity,...