IDEALISM.
THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of
the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of
sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.
A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not
the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly
exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the
World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the
receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call
sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter
impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to
know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with
outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up
there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of
the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the whole remaining
the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea interact, and
worlds revolve and intermingle without number or end,--deep
yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout
absolute space,--or, whether, without relations of time and space, the
same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man?
Whether nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in
the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to
me. Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the
accuracy of my senses.
The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its
consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature.
It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise
the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.
Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties
of man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein
is perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the
hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship
to be tossed, but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of
this structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over
the reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more
short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the
carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.
But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws,
the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It
is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our
faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water, azote;
but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a substance; to
attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature as an
accident and an effect.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view,
man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and
they never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars
this faith. The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of
the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and
shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher
agency intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy,
sharp outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens,
to outline and surface are at once added, grace and expression.
These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat
of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to
more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and
are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The
best moments of life are these delicious awakenings of the higher
powers, and the reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.
Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first
institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain
mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes
us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from
a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.
The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a
pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach
and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The
men, the women,--talking, running, bartering, fighting,--the earnest
mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized
at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer,
and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are
suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid
movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make
a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a
camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own
family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us.
Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it
any time these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference
between the observer and the spectacle,--between man and nature.
Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of
the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby
apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself
is stable.
2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By
a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the
camp, the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we
know them, but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye.
He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis
of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself
by a heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual
man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his
thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the other, as
fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world
is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and
makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagination may be
defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world.
Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating nature for the
purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses
the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, and uses it to embody
any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his mind. The remotest
spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are
brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection. We are made
aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects
shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his
sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to
be the _shadow_ of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is
his _chest_; the suspicion she has awakened, is her _ornament_;
The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.
His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a
city, or a state.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent
and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its
resemblance to morning.
Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes,--the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would
not be easy to match in literature.
This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the
passion of the poet,--this power which he exerts to dwarf the great,
to magnify the small,--might be illustrated by a thousand examples
from his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only
these few lines.
ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.
Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his
companions;
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again;
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say, of
_ideal_ affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet thus to
make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the
world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.
3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he
differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes
Beauty as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not
less than the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of
things to the empire of thought. "The problem of philosophy,"
according to Plato, "is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a
ground unconditioned and absolute." It proceeds on the faith that a
law determines all phenomena, which being known, the phenomena
can be predicted. That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty
is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet are one, and a
beauty, which is truth, and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of
both. Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions,
strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases,
that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid
seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a
thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses
of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their
harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained,
the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of
particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.
Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual.
The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis,
and disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler
on his law of arches, "This will be found contrary to all experience,
yet is true;" had already transferred nature into the mind, and left
matter like an outcast corpse.
4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a doubt
of the existence of matter. Turgot said, "He that has never doubted
the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for
metaphysical inquiries." It fastens the attention upon immortal
necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their
presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a
shade. Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as
an appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that
these are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. "These are they who
were set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth
was. When he prepared the heavens, they were there; when he
established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of
the deep. Then they were by him, as one brought up with him. Of
them took he counsel."
Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are
accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by
piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these
divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.
Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically
nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and
we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death,
in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of
change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth,
we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or
relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time,
_we exist_. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space
are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous
will, they have no affinity.
5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,--the
practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,--have an
analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein;
that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man;
the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God;
Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put
nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things
that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It
puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that
may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,
--"Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities,
dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The
devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain
hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and
Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these
flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they
might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty,
"it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which
he has called into time."
It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and
religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the
external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in
expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition,
that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to
nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like
corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones
at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to
indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to
establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to
attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with
nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the
mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real,
which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the
external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but
with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.
The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that
it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable
to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both speculative
and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For, seen in the
light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and virtue
subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It
beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events,
of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture,
which God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of
the soul. Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and
microscopic study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too
much, to immerse itself in the means. It sees something more
important in Christianity, than the scandals of ecclesiastical history,
or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons
or miracles, and not at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence,
it accepts from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and
awful form of religion in the world. It is not hot and passionate at
the appearance of what it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the
union or opposition of other persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts
whatsoever befalls, as part of its lesson. It is a watcher more than a
doer, and it is a doer, only that it may the better watch.