The new courses of lectures at Harvard University are advertised by
the new President. They are a novelty in our college culture. A marked
peculiarity is the announcement of a course to be given by Emerson, on
the Natural History of Intellect; by Dr. Hedge, on Theism, Atheism, and
Pantheism; and by J. Eliot Cabot, on Kant. The course, or any part of
it, is open "to graduates, teachers, and other competent persons, men
or women."
It is hoped, also, that Hutchison Stirling may be added to the list of
lecturers,--an acquisition certainly that Harvard should be proud to
secure, both for its own and the credit of metaphysical studies on this
side of the Atlantic.
The English mind seems to have held aloof from pure metaphysics,--from
German Idealism, especially. Berkeley, its finest thinker since
Bacon, was for a long time misapprehended, if, indeed, he is
fairly appreciated as yet. Boehme, Kant, Schelling, were unknown
till Coleridge introduced their ideas to the notice of his
contemporaries--Carlyle those of Goethe, and the great scholars of
Germany.
* * * * *
"Great, indeed," says Coleridge, "are the obstacles which an English
metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and
intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention
exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring
with them to the perusal of philosophical systems, an habitual aversion
to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not
evident and immediate.
"There are others whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
which had been alarmed and shocked by the injurious and pernicious
tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French Fatalists, or
Necessitarians, some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings
to the denial of the mysteries, and, indeed, of all the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity; and others, to the subversion of all
distinctions between right and wrong.
"A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
system and terminology provided it be the method and nomenclature to
which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
Hartley, Condillac, or, perhaps, Dr. Reid and Professor Stewart.
"But the worst and widest impediment remains. It is the predominance of
a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and mortal enemy of all
true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption introduced
by certain immethodical aphorisming Eclectics, who, dismissing, not
only all system, but all logical consequence, pick and choose whatever
is most plausible and showy; who select whatever words can have
semblance of sense attached to them, without the least expenditure of
thought; in short, whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not
understand, with a careful avoidance of everything that might awaken
them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance."
* * * * *
Fifty years and more have passed since this criticism was written; and,
with slight change of names for similar things, it still holds for
the popular estimate put upon metaphysics by too many scholars of our
time. If Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel, and the rest, are still held in
disregard by persons in chairs of philosophy, we may infer the kind of
culture which the universities favor. What he also said of intellectual
culture in his country and time, holds scarcely less true as regards
ours; and this in a republic, too, which in theory educates all its
citizens.
* * * * *
"I am greatly deceived if one preliminary to an efficient popular
education be not the recurrence to a more manly discipline of the
intellect on the part of the learned themselves; in short, a thorough
recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the
characters of our future landowners, magistrates, and senators, are to
receive their shape and fashion. What treasures of practical wisdom
would be once more brought to open day by the solution of the problem.
Suffice it for the present to hint the master thought.
"The first man on whom the light of an Idea dawned, did in that
same moment receive the spirit and credentials of a lawgiver. And
as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession of that
antecedent--the maker and master of all profitable experience, which
exists in the power of an idea--be the one lawful qualification for
all dominion in the world of the senses. Without this, experience
itself is but a Cyclops walking backwards under the fascinations
of the past; and we are indebted to a lucky coincidence of outward
circumstances and contingencies, least of all to be calculated on in
a time like the present, if this one-eyed experience does not seduce
its worshippers into practical anachronisms. But, alas! the halls of
the old philosophers have been so long deserted, that we circle them at
shy distance, as the haunt of phantoms and chimeras. The sacred grave
of Academus is held in like regard with the unfruitful trees in the
shadowy world of Maro, that had a dream attached to every leaf. The
very terms of ancient wisdom are worn out; or, far worse, stamped as
baser metal; and whoever should have the hardihood to re-proclaim its
solemn truths, must commence with a glossary."
* * * * *
The Dialectic, or Method of the Mind, constitutes the basis of all
culture. Without a thorough discipline in this, our schools and
universities give but a showy and superficial training. The knowledge
of mind is the beginning of all knowledge; without this a theology is
baseless, the knowledge of God impossible. Modern education has not
dealt with these deeper questions of life and being. It has the future
in which to prove its power of conducting a Cultus, answering to the
discipline of the Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle.
As yet we deal with mind with far less certainty than with matter; the
realm of intellect having been less explored than the world of the
senses, and both are treated conjecturally rather than absolutely. When
we come to perceive that Intuition is the primary postulate of all
intelligence, most questions now perplexing and obscure will become
transparent; the lower imperfect methods then take rank where they
belong and are available. The soul leads the senses; the reason the
understanding; imagination the memory; instinct and intuition include
and prompt the Personality entire.
The categories of imagination are the poet's tools; those of the
reason, the implements of the naturalist. The dialectic philosopher is
master of both. The tools to those only who can handle them skilfully.
All others but gash themselves and their subject, at best. Ask not a
man of understanding to solve a problem in metaphysics. He has neither
wit, weights, nor scales for the task. But a man of reason or of
imagination solves readily the problems of understanding the moment
these are fairly stated. Ideas are solvents of all mysteries, whether
in matter or mind.
'Tis clear
Mind's sphere
Is not here;
The Ideal guest
In ceaseless quest
Pursues the Best:
The very Better
The while her fetter,
Her desire
Higher, still higher;
Ever is fleeing
Past Seeming to Being;
Nor doth the sight content itself with seeing,
As forms emerge they fast from sense are fleeing,
Things but appear to vanish into Being.
So the Greeks represented thought in their winged god, Hermes, as the
father of speech and messenger of intelligence; they conceiving the
visible world as a globe of forms, whereby objects of thought were
pictured to sense, and held forth to fancy,--a geometry of ideas, a
rhetoric of images.
Sallying forth into nature, the mind clothes its ideas in fitting
images, and thus reflects itself upon the understanding. Things are
symbols of thoughts, and nature the mind's dictionary.
Mind omnipresent is,
All round about us lies,
To fashion forth itself
In thought and ecstacy,
In fancy and surprise,
Things with ideas fraught,
And nature our dissolving thought.