THE PROVISION FOR THE INTELLECTUAL NATURE OF MAN.
Truth and reality stand for the same thing. Reality is truth out of the
mind, and truth is reality in the mind. Reality is objective truth, and
truth is subjective reality. But all reality is in relation to mind;
objective reality to the divine mind, and subjective reality to the
human mind. Objective reality is the realized thought of God; subjective
reality is the realized thought of man. The correspondence of thoughts to
things is called scientific truth. Objective reality is truth, because it
corresponds to the thought of God. Knowledge in the human mind is truth
when it corresponds to objective reality or the expressed thought of
God. When words and conduct correspond to knowledge, we have truth in the
domain of morals.
In saying that objective reality is the realized thought of God, we
denote its unity. This is not to destroy the particulars of which it is
composed, or to swamp their individuality in an inarticulate mass, but
simply to indicate their oneness.
When the observer looks out into the universe, which includes and shuts
him round, he is impressed by the infinite varieties and diversities
which everywhere meet his gaze. No two things are alike. No two leaves,
no two drops of water, no two snowflakes, no two apples, no two faces.
Every particular thing seems to be persistently determined to differ,
in some respect at least, from everything else. The history of true
knowledge begins, however, with the observation of resemblance and
similarity—just beneath the surface of difference and variety. The
lightning that appears on the bosom of the cloud, like the writing of
some awful fiend, is seen to be the same with the gentle sparks emitted
when a tag of silken ribbon is drawn briskly between the fingers. The
power that pulls the ball to the ground is seen to be the same as that
which keeps the sun in his place.
The plant lifts itself up as but a sum of organized varieties; but every
part, corolla, petal, and stamen, is known to be only modified leaf.
Keeping to their silent and lonely rounds since the dawn of time, are the
stars in the heavens, differing in color, orbit, and size, but we now
know that to understand the elements of which they are composed, we have
only to lift our foot and see what the constituent parts of the earth
beneath it are. Were objective reality one amorphous mass, it would not
be intelligible. It is one and many, particular and universal, singular
and manifold, concrete and discrete. All things cohere in a centrality
that includes and commands them.
So true is it that unity underlies all difference, that no single variety
can be understood, only as it is considered in relation with the whole of
which it forms a part.
No one could ever get a correct notion of a particular star by directing
his entire attention to the study of that star. To understand it, he
must study it through the system of which it forms a member, and in
connection with all laws and forces related to it. Oxygen separate and
distinct from other elements has no meaning. It gets its definition and
significance from the things to which it is related. What it is for rocks
and water and trees and globes, that it is in itself. But it must be seen
in connection with these before we can know what it is in itself. What
an acid is for an alkali and for other things, that it is in itself.
Alone, out of relation, we could know absolutely nothing of it. Society
is the organism that reveals to each person the nature of his own life.
Out of contact and touch with other human beings, no one would ever know
anything concerning himself.
Objective reality embraces manifold variety, but it is the unity that
presides over it that makes it intelligible. Difference provokes
questions and unity answers them.
In calling objective reality truth, we tacitly assume the laws and
relations constitutive of it. We could not speak of the truth of the
globe, had there been no method in its formation, no order in its
development, no system in its parts, and no relations between its
constituent elements. To speak of the truth of it, is to imply the
thought of it, the intelligibility of it. Were it not the expression of
mind, man’s reason could find no truth in it. Scholars have been able,
after long and painstaking study, to understand the meaning of Egyptian
and Assyrian hieroglyphics, but they never could have found thought in
them, had they contained no thought. The original elements which make
up the matter of the globe, have come into such relations with one
another as that they make up the soil, rocks, water, trees, and animals
we see. Thought, then, is the result of the internal relations of the
particles which compose it. These internal relations, too, constitute its
intelligibility. The globe that wheels on its axis is objective. This
may be taken into the mind, and by its synthesizing, organizing activity
converted into a subjective globe. The difference between the objective
and the subjective globe will be, that one will be thought and the other
will be thing. But the same internal relations found in the objective
globe will be preserved in the subjective, and the transcript of the
globe that is held in thought will be truth in exact proportion as it
corresponds to the material globe that rolls out of the mind. That an
objective globe, which is a thing, may become a subjective globe, which
is a thought and not a thing, implies that there is something in common
between thoughts and things; that is, the mind, by its constitution,
is capable of apprehending and taking into itself the constitution and
relations of things. This is its capacity for truth, and shows that truth
is not foreign to it, but one with itself.
The sides and angles of a right angle triangle have certain relations
to one another. The square described on the hypotenuse of such an angle
is equal to the squares described on the other two sides. This may be
demonstrated on a piece of blank paper, or the mind may conceive a right
angle triangle, and prove the proposition without making any marks at
all. The constitutional relations which were in the nature of a right
angle triangle are the same, whether it be drawn on paper or conceived
by the imagination. The relations of the triangle make it intelligible,
because they constitute its truth.
I.
To truth the intellect is related, as is the eye to light, and the ear
to sound. If the eye were destroyed, the sun would not cease to shine.
His light would still come upon hill and plain to feed the flowers and to
disclose their beauty, but without the organ of vision no creature in the
universe would be able to see the things which his light reveals. The ear
does not create sound. Let it be forever sealed, and the Niagaras would
still continue to fall and the thunders to shake the heavens, but they
would not be heard. The intellect does not create truth, but it is the
only faculty with which man is endowed by which he is able to discover it.
It was the error of the idealists that they made the order, laws, and
relations of things as so many principles projected out of the observer’s
own mind into the universe about him. What he seemed to see in things,
were but modifications of his own mental states. The only order things
had was in the observer’s own mind. It was regarded not only as the pivot
upon which the universe turned, but also as the creative principle from
which the universe took form. Apparently this was a great gain to mind,
but it was at the expense of any real world for the mind to contemplate.
It seemed to win a victory for the intelligence absolute and entire,
but it was by shutting it up to its own shadowy abstractions, and
abandoning it in a shoreless and bottomless void to its own vain musings.
The personal pronoun _I_ was extended perpendicularly and horizontally,
till topways and sideways the whole of space and time was filled with
it. No solid earth, no burning sun, no rolling orbs were left. A great,
illimitable, irresponsible ego became the sole occupant of all that is.
This extreme idealism is in direct contrast to the realism of the early
thinkers. They taught that things depended on man neither for their
existence nor their intelligibility. That each thing carried the real
intelligible essence as an ultimate fact in itself. Thought in man was
but the reflection of this intelligible essence in the thing, as the
light in the mirror is but the reflection of the light of the lamp.
Of the two systems, extreme idealism is preferable to extreme realism.
All mind and no matter, is better than all matter and no mind. Thought
with no place to stand, is better than a place to stand and no thought.
The eye with nothing to see, is better than something to see and no eye.
The solution which realism gave of the problem of existence, left no
place for mind, the solution which idealism gave of it left no place for
matter. But both the external world, upon which realism was founded,
and the intelligence, upon which idealism was founded, are expressions
of mind. The one as intelligible content, the other as combining active
capacity and the intelligibility of the content, exactly corresponds to
the active grasp of the capacity.
II.
But it must be remembered that the intellect which is the organ of truth,
and objective reality which is abstract truth, do not come together to
form knowledge in any accidental way.
A basket may be said to have capacity for holding potatoes, and potatoes
may lend themselves as content to fill up the basket. But the union of
potatoes and basket; the one as content, the other as capacity, is only
mechanical. The basket would serve as well to hold onions, or muskadines,
or chinquepins, as potatoes, and the potatoes could be carried as well in
a wooden box or in a tin pan, as in a basket. No necessity inheres in the
nature of a basket to contain potatoes, and no necessity is in the nature
of potatoes to get into a basket. Truth and the intellect, however, are
intended the one for the other. Truth is correlated to the intellect as
the bird’s wing is to the atmosphere. Nothing can take hold of the truth
but the intellect, and nothing can satisfy and furnish the intellect but
truth.
Abstract truth, or objective reality, is converted by the combining
organizing activity of the mind into knowledge, and when this knowledge
corresponds to the reality it is truth in the realm of thought.
Before knowledge is possible, then, there must be an intelligence capable
of knowing, and an object capable of being known.
How the intelligence and the knowable object get together to form
knowledge is the most important question in philosophy. Upon the right
settlement of it, everything depends. This has been the point about which
the battle of thought, in modern times, has been most fiercely waged. If
the mind firmly grasps the meaning of this problem and settles it right,
it is almost sure to think right on other questions. If it is wrong here,
it is sure to be wrong everywhere else. Mistake here is as fatal to the
correct solution of the question we are considering, as would be the
mistake that two and two make five to the correct solution of a sum in
arithmetic.
III.
The distance of a question from ordinary thought does not render it
any the less important, even for ordinary thinking. How the knowing
intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is
the most important problem to-day before the human mind. If writers
would only take their bearings from the only rational solution that can
be given to it, they would find half the books they are writing on the
inspiration of the Scriptures, the existence of God, the divinity of
Jesus Christ, agnosticism and materialism, unnecessary.
Agnosticism and materialism pass away with a correct theory of knowing.
Labor and painstaking thought are involved in the task of getting a
right theory of knowledge, but agnosticism and materialism are in line
with ignorance and indolence.
So, while few men ever ask themselves how the knowing intelligence and
the knowable object get together to form knowledge, millions of men are
affected, even in their practical life, by the answer which is given to
the question. Someone has said that not more than six men in any one age
ever read Plato or understand him. Yet for the six men Plato comes down
through the ages. The six men who understand him translate him into the
vernacular of the one hundred men who live on the next plane of thought
below them.
The one hundred translate him into the common language of one thousand
below them. These, in turn, translate Plato into the ordinary thought
of the millions below them. So it happens at length that Plato gets so
universally known, that not a laborer in the field but wears his hat
after one style, rather than another, because Plato wrote.
Doubtless it would have been considered a very unimportant question two
hundred years ago, as to whether heat were an igneous fluid or a mode of
motion. Perhaps not more than two or three men wrestled with the question
for centuries before it was settled. By the masses of the people they
were regarded as wasting their time in vain and idle speculation. By an
experiment made by Count Rumford, it was put beyond the possibility of
doubt that heat was not an igneous fluid, but a mode of motion. Was this
a question that concerned the multitudes, that two or three men spent a
hundred years talking about and torturing their brains to understand?
There is not a single human being in the civilized world to-day whose
interests and welfare have not been touched by the settlement of it.
There are millions of peasants in Russia who never heard of Count
Rumford, or of an igneous fluid, or of caloric, who have this present
year been fed by flour sent them by the western millers and transported
on the strength of the conclusion that heat is not an igneous fluid,
but a mode of motion. Every steam-car that crosses the continent, and
every steamboat that crosses the ocean, moves in the wake of this same
conclusion. At first we see some algebraic formulas, an array of curves
and figures, that practical people said had nothing to do with everyday
life. After a while we see the abstract conclusions reached by aid of the
algebraic signs, and settled by the test of experiment, translated into
steam engines, and transporting even the peasants of India and Mexico
from one end of the country to the other. We see the abstract conclusions
of the few thinkers turned into steam to spin the people’s clothes and
grind the people’s bread.
In 1632 there was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, England, a boy,
who was educated at the University of Oxford. In the esteem of his
contemporaries he devoted his time to the consideration of subjects of
no practical value. In the course of events he put the results of his
study into a book known as “The Essay on the Human Understanding.” Few
people read it. But the few who did read it started the ideas of it
to circulating. They were translated into French and Latin, and were
soon potent influences in the intellectual life of Europe. Were they
practical and did they concern the ordinary affairs of men? They created
the Encyclopedists of France. These learned men were the authors of the
radical opinions which cut the people from the moorings of traditional
and age-long thought. The fire and the blood of the Revolution were the
legitimate expressions of the speculative essay of John Locke that not
one in ten thousand ever read. The persons whose heads were cut off in
the Reign of Terror must have thought the ideas exceedingly practical
that led to the destruction of social and political institutions, that
took form in a movement which respected neither law nor property nor
life. The speculative opinions of John Locke not only helped to create
the French Revolution, but they led to the idealism of Bishop Berkeley,
and this in turn to the skeptical philosophy of David Hume. The modern
successors of Hume are John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Leslie
Stephen, Frederic Harrison, and Professor Huxley, whose contributions
have been given to the popular reviews, and which have been read by all
intelligent people. Every man in Europe and America has been influenced
both in conduct and character by the speculative “Essay on the Human
Understanding.”
Locke’s speculative philosophy passed through Berkeley to Hume, and
through Hume reached Kant, the great German thinker, and resulted in the
“Critique of Pure Reason.” This led to Fichte and Schelling, and finally
to Hegel. This led to Heidelberg and the Tübingen school, to Bauer and
Dewette, to extreme idealism and rationalism, translated into books and
reviews and newspapers, and read by all the people, affecting their
thought and life.
Even people who never read, who never open a book or a newspaper, have
been influenced by the subtle piece of speculative reasoning given to
the world by the great sensational philosopher of England. The spirit
of utilitarianism and secularism prevalent throughout the world at the
present time is easily traceable to it.
IV.
Before we can possibly know that truth is the provision for the
intellectual nature of man, we must determine whether the knowing
faculties, which he finds himself to possess, are capable of grasping
truth and turning it into knowledge. The fight of skepticism in modern
times has been made upon the knowing faculties. It is useless to
talk about the existence of God, the inspiration of the Scriptures,
the divinity of Christ, or the immortality of the soul, if the human
intellect is, by its limitations, denied the possibility of knowing
anything whatsoever concerning these things. It is a waste of time for me
to attempt to dip water out of the ocean with a bucket with no bottom to
it. What is the relation of the intelligence to the outer world? Does the
outside world create knowledge in the mind by the impressions it makes
upon it, or does the mind bring something to the outside world which
converts this raw material into knowledge? Is knowledge a reflection of
the outer, or a creation of the inner? Does nature work it in us, or is
there some spontaneous, creative, organizing, mental activity within us
that takes the material presented by nature, turning it into a rational
system of knowledge? What is the relation between the being that knows
and the object known? How much of the creative factor of knowledge
does nature supply? How much does man supply? Can a man with deranged
faculties get order out of a rational world? Can a man of sane mind get
order out of an irrational world? If there is to be a rational system of
knowledge built up in the mind, must there not be reason in the thinker
and reason in the outside world, coming into organic relations, the one
with the other? As to how we regard this question will determine how we
regard truth, and whether or not it is possible for us to know it.
V.
The human mind has never been able to resist the conviction that there is
such a thing as truth. Though baffled and defeated a thousand times, in
every age, in its attempt to formulate truth, it has never been able to
consent to give up the search for it. Interest in truth has kept alive
and fostered the belief that the mind has power to understand it. The
mind’s passion for truth has deepened its confidence in the faculties
with which it is ever trying to discover it. The everlasting longing to
know truth has been taken as implicit capacity to find it. Philosophic
systems have been only so many devices and creations of the mind with
which to take hold of truth. The methods proposed, in the first stages
of philosophic thinking, for getting at the truth were crude, as the
first instruments devised for cultivating the soil and getting out of
it what there was in it for food, were crude. Thales, Pythagoras, and
Anaximander first attempted to penetrate objective reality, to know its
cause, to bring its multiplicity to unity, and to reduce its variety
to law. The ever-changing phenomena by which they were surrounded
necessarily eluded the meager theories with which they attempted to
reduce them to order. They prepared the way, however, for systems which
accommodated a greater number of facts. They made possible Plato and
Aristotle, who, with hypotheses more complicated and more consonant
with the reality they sought to grasp, found truth enough to keep the
human race thinking for two thousand years. The blocks of truth they
quarried from the mines of objective reality were used to carry up the
theological and speculative temples of the Middle Ages.
After the failure of scholasticism, which denotes a period in human
thought rather than a particular system of philosophy, Lord Bacon
proposed the method of material induction to bring the mind into
relations of knowledge with truth. He emphasized the study of the outward
facts, their classification and organization. In his esteem, truth was to
be reached by the consideration of actual, tangible things. Man was the
interpreter of nature, and not necessarily its interpretation.
Truth in the mind was the image of objective truth. It differed from
truth out of the mind, as the direct from the reflected ray. He failed
from lack of adequate recognition of one of the important factors in the
problem of truth. Descartes’ method was more successful, because larger
and completer recognition was taken of man.
He began by doubting everything that could be doubted. Heir to the
beliefs of all the ages, he determined to summon these, one by one,
before the bar of reason, and force them to show cause for their
existence. Everyone was to be called into court and put out that could
be doubted. The existence of a God was called up and doubted, condemned,
and put out. The existence of an external world was called up, doubted,
condemned, and put out. In the same summary and shorthand way, man and
mind were doubted and put out. All positive beliefs were doubted. After
his process of elimination, he found himself without God, without man,
without mind, without a permanent external world. All that remained after
emptying himself of all mental furnishments and beliefs was the fact
that he doubted. But he could not doubt without thinking. In the very
act of doubting, he thought. If one thinks, he must think something.
The nearest something to the thinking subject is his own personal being.
So he thought himself and concluded, “I think, therefore, I am.” But he
was not always; he began to be. So he must think of a being that caused
him. The being that caused him must himself be uncaused. Moreover, there
could not be an uncaused cause, without an effect. Creation, then, with
which he stood face to face, was the effect of the great first cause.
Thus Descartes’ method, based upon the thought underlying doubt, led
him, necessarily, to himself, the object of his thought; and to God,
the cause of himself; and to creation, the effect of the great first
cause or God. Through his process of coming at the problem, he was able,
rationally, to believe in the existence of himself, the outer world,
and God, the cause of both. Descartes, as a thinker, was affirmative,
positive, constructive. He only doubted down to the point where he could
doubt no longer, that he might have a sure foundation upon which to
build. His contribution gave fresh courage and inspiration to the human
mind. He failed to determine the boundary line between the self and the
not-self, between mind and matter, between the thinker and the creation
with which he stood face to face. This was the work Spinoza proposed for
himself, and in the celebrated Ethics, published to the world at the
peril of his life and soul, imagined the task mathematically performed.
The two poles of Descartes’ philosophy, the self and the not-self, he
united in Descartes’ cause, and named the whole sum substance. The self
and the not-self reappeared as attributes of substance, which Spinoza
named thought and extension. All the phenomena in the universe, mental
or material, were but modes of the infinite substance. The result of
his thinking was pure pantheism. He reached a sort of mechanical unity,
but he left no place for the affirmation of distinctions. His Ethics was
large enough to accommodate everything, but in such a way as to preserve
the individuality of nothing. A thought is valuable in proportion to its
capacity to take hold of things as they are. The old opinion that heat
was caloric, served as a working hypothesis for the mind a long time.
In the view of those who held it, it was satisfactory and adequate. But
it never really got hold of heat, because it contradicted the nature of
heat. The astronomers thought, for a long time, that they had come into
relations of knowledge with the stars through the Ptolemaic conception
of the heavenly bodies. They were mistaken, however. Their theory did
not fit the real celestial order at all. As a work of genius, Spinoza’s
Ethics is one of the most remarkable productions ever formulated by
the human intellect, but it conducted the mind away from truth, rather
than into relations with it. Locke began his work as a philosopher, as
Descartes began his, by looking into his own mind. Descartes began by
casting out everything that could be doubted. Locke began by making an
inventory of what his mind contained. Descartes wanted to find out how
much he could know, as measured by what remained after throwing out
everything that could be doubted. Locke sought to see how little he could
know, by putting the sensations and impressions he found in his mind on
the witness stand, and getting them to tell how they came to be there,
and where they came from. Descartes began by a study of the intelligence,
the instrument of knowledge. Locke began by a study of the facts which,
by some means or other, had found their way into his intelligence.
Descartes got rid of every belief that could be doubted. Locke ran every
idea out of his mind that had been imported from the outside world, in
order that he might see if the mind had any constitutional power to
produce any. Descartes, having dislodged all inherited beliefs, such as
took for granted the existence of God, man, mind, and outer world, found
some mental laws, capabilities, and tendencies left, which compelled a
man, if he thought at all, to think in a given way; and if he thought on
given lines, to think to a given conclusion. Not being able to get these
laws out of the mind, he called them innate ideas. They were in the mind
by structure and constitution.
After Locke had carefully examined the contents of his mind, he declared
they were all imported from an outside realm. Nothing he found in the
mind was indigenous to the soil. When all foreign importations were
removed, nothing remained but an empty vessel. The mind was nothing but
a receptacle, into which the senses dumped such objects as they happened
to find lying round loose in the outside world. It had no more power
to understand or turn into thought what was brought in than a piece of
white paper had to read and interpret what was written upon it; or than
a kettle to recognize the liquid making up its contents as water. It is
like a table of wax; any sort of letters may be graven upon it, but the
table cannot read them.
Locke proposed to find out what the mind could know by counting and
tabulating the things he found in his own intelligence. This is very
much like trying to understand the nature of light, by considering the
blue things and green things and red things the light discloses. All
bodies, it is said, which the light enables us to see, attract each other
in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the squares of their
distance. The law of gravity, which regulates the bodies light reveals
to us, is not the law of light. We can never understand the nature of
light, or the laws of light, by the study of things which light enables
us to see. If all knowledge is but the sum of the impressions which the
external world has made on the mind, then the cause of knowledge is
matter, and knowledge is but the image or reflection of material things.
Knowledge, then, would sustain the same relation to the outside world,
that the shadow of a tree does to the tree. One would come as near
lifting up the tree by its own shadow as lifting up the truth by Locke’s
system of sensational philosophy.
Impressions are simple, atomic. They come into the mind, one after
another. They cohere in no unity. They are held together by no necessary
relation. They are separate, one from the other. If there is no primary,
innate faculty; no abiding and indwelling mental activity, that lies
behind, and determines and co-ordinates the objects which nature supplies
through the senses, converting them into rational, orderly knowledge,
then we can never get hold of truth. We are shut up to hopeless ignorance.
VI.
Berkeley, in order to escape the materialism to which Locke’s philosophy
led, accepted his theory of knowledge, but destroyed his outward,
material world. In his view, there was no matter, nothing but ideas.
The impressions conveyed through the senses into our minds are but
reflections of the ideas of God.
In Hume, the empirical theory of knowing found a disciple who did not
hesitate to affirm all that was involved in it. Locke said there was an
outward world, and knowledge was its image. Berkeley said there was no
material world; that knowledge was the reflection of God’s ideas. Hume
said there was neither outer world nor inner; that there was nothing but
impressions, sensations, ideas, in perpetual flow and flux. He claimed
that all ideas which could not be resolved into impressions were false.
He declared we could have no ideas of substance, because, if perceived by
the eye, it must be a color; if by the ear, a sound; if by the palate,
a taste. And because we could not think of substance as a color or a
sound or a taste, we could therefore have no idea of it whatever. Belief
in a permanent external world was rendered irrational by his theory
of knowledge. Nothing is more vital and irrepressible than belief in
one’s own existence, but even this could not be retained in accordance
with the teachings of Hume’s philosophy. “Whence,” says he, “could
the impression of the idea of self be derived? What impression could
create this idea? This question it is impossible to answer without a
manifest contradiction and absurdity, and yet it is a question that must
necessarily be answered. For my part, when I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always stumble upon some perception or other; heat
or cold, light or shade, pain or pleasure. I cannot catch myself at any
time without a perception, or observe anything but a perception. When
my perceptions are removed at any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I
insensible of myself, and may be said truly not to exist.”
The sensational philosophy which promised so much, which appeared so
eminently practical, that took to itself such an air of common sense as
it got about obliterating innate ideas, was seen at length to be utterly
impotent. It corresponded with absolutely nothing in heaven or in earth.
The very impressions it admitted, passed through it like drops of water
out of a fisherman’s net. Where the impressions came from or where they
went to, it furnished no means of knowing. God and world and cause and
law and self might be, but the human mind could never know whether they
were or not. The human observer stood before a procession of images,
sensations, perceptions going by like an unending circus troupe.
In Hume may be traced the entire breakdown of empirical philosophy as
a method for getting at the truth. He recognized this himself. “When I
turn my eye inward,” he says, “I find nothing but doubt and ignorance.”
“The understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general
principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of
evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.” “We
have, therefore, no choice left, but betwixt a false reason and none at
all.”
VII.
The most remarkable thing in the whole search for truth, is that anybody
after Hume should have attempted to find it with Hume’s principles. Yet
the two best known writers who have lived in England since Hume’s day,
have rested their dogmatic doctrines on the foundations laid by the
sensational philosophers. Hume’s impressions and ideas became John Stuart
Mill’s permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling, and Herbert
Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable. In our time
Herbert Spencer has undertaken the herculean task of explaining matter
and mind, time and space, society and morals; of showing what they
are and what they are not, by the same principles which Hume himself
demonstrated to be incapable of explaining anything. Spencer’s units of
knowledge are vivid and faint manifestations of the Unknown. How the
unknowable remains unknown, after vividly and faintly manifesting itself,
we are not told. Mr. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the
unknown are old acquaintances with new names.
Locke knew them as impressions and sensations. Berkeley recognized them
as ideas of sense and imagination. John Stuart Mill was on speaking
terms with them as permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling. Mr.
Spencer gives them another baptism and another name. He calls them vivid
and faint manifestations of the unknowable. While they have been changed
in name, however, it must not be supposed that they have undergone any
change in nature or character. They stand apart, the one from the other,
just the same as ever. They are just as foreign to the mind, where they
vividly and faintly manifest themselves, as were the impressions of John
Locke. They flare and flicker, rise and fall, like the jack-o’-lantern
lights of legend and tale. One light is not of a piece with any other
light. The lights follow one another in such quick succession, first
vivid, then faint, that one cannot tell from the momentary flames and
flashes what is intended to be advertised. That something is trying, by
various pyrotechnic displays, to get itself revealed seems to be evident.
But there is such hurry on the part of the something that makes the
manifestations, such a disorderly whirl and changing of lights, that the
observer is totally bewildered; and, being under the necessity of making
some account to himself as to their meaning, concludes that they are
vivid and faint illuminations of the unknowable. Hume’s procession of
sensations and ideas has by Spencer been converted into the fire-works
of the unknowable. With Hume’s physiological theory, the mind could know
nothing but its own sensations. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations
of the unknowable are equally as incapable of furnishing any rational
basis for belief in mind or matter, law or cause, self or God. To ask the
human mind to believe the encyclopedic, dogmatic system of philosophy he
addressed to it, after insisting that all our knowledge is but the sum
of vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable, is as irrational as
trying to build a cathedral on a London fog bank. Underneath every one of
Spencer’s general terms, the indestructibility of matter, the continuity
of motion, the persistence of force, there is nothing but sensations,
vivid or faint manifestations of the unknown.
“The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter,” he says, “has now
become a commonplace.” “Matter never either comes into existence,
or ceases to exist.” How are we to know this, with minds incapable
of any other knowledge except such as is made up of vivid and
faint manifestations of the unknown? Who ever had a sensation or a
manifestation of the indestructibility of matter? This is an idea
involving all past time and all future time, and all the laws and forces
by which matter is regulated and conserved. How could an image of the
indestructibility of matter be photographed on the sensitive plate of
the mind? To do this it would be necessary to compress all past time and
all future time into one moment, and all matter into one single square
inch or square yard of space, so that the impression of it could be
made. To believe in the indestructibility of matter, with Mr. Spencer’s
theory of the mind’s capacity to know, is delirium and insanity. It is
to believe in something that the mind, by its very nature, cannot even
get an impression of. It is believing that the ocean can be carried in
a thimble without any bottom. Any man who should utter this publicly,
and sincerely, would be put in the insane asylum. He says again, “the
very nature of the intelligence negatives the supposition that motion
can be conceived (much less known) either to commence or to cease.” The
nature of the intelligence is such that all the knowledge it possesses
is made up of sensations and manifestations of the unknown. How can the
continuity of motion be conceived? To do this, we must have a conception
of all past time and all future time. It is an idea as transcendent as
the idea of God.
Mr. Spencer claims that the power the universe manifests to us is utterly
inscrutable; that space and time are wholly incomprehensible; that
matter, in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as
space and time; that all efforts to understand the essential nature of
motion do but bring us to alternative absurdities of thought; that it is
impossible to form any idea of force in itself, and equally impossible to
comprehend either its mode of exercise or its law of variation; that we
are unable to believe or to conceive that the duration of consciousness
is infinite, and equally unable to know it as finite, or to conceive
it as finite; and that the personality of which we are each conscious,
and of which the existence is to each a fact beyond all others the
most certain, yet is a thing which cannot truthfully be known at all:
knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of thought. All this is
perfectly consistent with his theory of knowledge. This is the point to
which David Hume, his master, conducted the human mind in its search
for truth. But Spencer is not logical; he had a theory of being that
contradicted his theory of knowing. So he reasons first one way and then
another. He says, elsewhere in his First Principles, that common sense
asserts the existence of a reality; that objective science proves that
this reality cannot be what we think it; that subjective science shows
why we cannot think of it as it is, and yet are compelled to think of it
as existing; and that in this assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable
in nature, religion finds an assertion essentially coinciding with her
own. That we are compelled to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation
of some power by which we are acted upon. That though omnipresence is
unthinkable, yet as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion
of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of
this power, while the criticisms of science teach us that this power
is incomprehensible. Analyzing the above declarations, we find that
Mr. Spencer knows there is an ultimate reality. Then it has being. It
acts upon us. Then it has the attribute of action. All phenomena are
manifestations of it. Then it has power. All phenomena are manifestations
of an inscrutable power, by which we are acted upon. Then it has causal
energy. We are unable to think of limits to the presence of this power.
Then it is omnipresent. So the unknowable, inscrutable something has
being, power, activity, causal energy, and omnipresence. But how are we
to grasp these universal, transcendental attributes of the unknowable,
with an intelligence incapable of receiving anything but simple,
separate, unrelated, broken impressions and manifestations? It takes as
much mind to believe in the unknowable, with the attributes of power,
activity, being, causal energy, and omnipresence, as to believe in a
self-existent God, with the attributes of power, wisdom, justice, truth,
and love.
Spencer’s theory of knowing is destructive, while his theory of being is
constructive and transcendental.
VIII.
The intelligence, as the organ of truth, must be large enough to find
truth and contain truth. No sane man would undertake to dig down a
mountain with a toothpick. Mr. Spencer devoted page after page to the
discussion of cause, time, space, force, and ultimate reality, while
holding a theory of knowledge that made the very thought of these
inconceivable. The very things that he labeled as knowable contained a
substrate the mind could never get at. Knowable things, then, could not
be known as they were; hence if they were known at all, must be known
as they were not, which made the mind’s knowledge error. All who accept
Mr. Spencer’s theory of knowledge are shut up to absolute ignorance or
absolute error. If we are to know the truth of reality, of mind, of
external existence, we must have knowing faculties up to the style of the
truth we are to know. If we are to know light, we must have eyes capable
of taking in the light, of analyzing it, and turning it into vision. The
disposition to limit our power to know, by telling us, on the strength
of Mansel and Hamilton and Kant, that all our knowledge is relative, is
innocent enough when stripped of its seeming wisdom. It is true that we
can know no more than our knowing faculties permit us.
We cannot know more than we can know. We are not absolute and omniscient
as to our capacity to know. All we can see is what we can see with our
eyes. We cannot see with our fingers or with the back of our heads. All
we can hear is what we can hear with our ears. We have no other organs
with which to hear. All sounds that vibrate at the rate of sixteen times
to the second up to thirty-eight thousand times to the second, we can
hear. Whatsoever sounds vibrate at a lower rate than sixteen times to
the second or at a higher rate than thirty-eight thousand times to the
second, we cannot hear, because such sounds are not related to the ear.
But the eye, being adjusted to and related to much finer wave lengths
than the ear, can see waves that vibrate up as high as seven hundred
and twenty-seven trillion times to the second. The eye cannot see waves
shorter than seven hundred and twenty-seven trillion vibrations to the
second, because such waves are not adjusted to the eye. The waves the ear
cannot hear are not sound waves. The waves the eye cannot see are not
light waves. There are no sound waves in the universe the ear cannot
hear, provided they are near enough to come into contact with it. There
are no light waves in the universe that the eye cannot turn into vision,
if they strike the retina. Are we going to fall out with the eye, and
discredit the beauty it does see, because it is not as large as the rim
of immensity, and cannot see everything disclosed by the light of suns
and stars at once? Are we to hold the ear in contempt after it takes in
the harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart, because it cannot hear all the
music the stars are making as they move through the heavens?
Whatever is real and true the mind can know, because the mind is
correlated to the real and the true. It cannot know what is unreal and
untrue. It cannot know that two and two make five, because that is unreal
and untrue. It cannot know that a crooked line is the shortest distance
between two points, because that is unknowable. It cannot know that it
is more rational to tell a lie than to tell the truth, because that is
unknowable and untrue. There is much that is unknowable, but whatever
is, we may be sure is irrational and unreal. Whatever is true in being,
cause, time, space, mind, matter, force, motion may be known. The finite
mind cannot know it at once, and can never, throughout all infinite time,
directly take it into the intelligence; but it is knowable, because
the underlying, fundamental, prior thing in the universe is mind, the
mind of the absolute and eternal One. All things are set in order and
reason. The external universe is the expression of mind, and is therefore
intelligible. The human intelligence is the expression of the same
mind, and is therefore capable of grasping and turning into thought the
intelligible order without.
According to the theory of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, and Spencer,
any knowledge whatsoever is impossible. If the knowing subject and the
knowable object, the two factors of knowledge, can only come together in
a mechanical way, as basket and potatoes, kettle and water, paper and
letters, then the very conditions of knowledge are denied, and we are
shut up to blank, square ignorance.
Things come together to form knowledge, as things come together to form
a tree, and not as house, calico, pins, lace, shoes, and blankets come
together to form a store. An acorn is a living something. It is not a
tree, but within itself are the germs of a tree. When grown, it may be
said to have forms, as root, trunk, and branches. These were potentially
and ideally contained in the acorn. But their realization and active
expression involved a process, in which the ideal forms, tendencies, and
forces contained in germ in the acorn met and united with the elements
of the outside world. Suppose we consider the acorn the subject, and the
particles in soil and rain and atmosphere capable of making a tree as
the object. What happens when an oak with all its beauty stands out upon
the hillside? This subject and object have come together in unity, in an
organism. Suppose Locke should have undertaken the work of understanding
how a tree came to be, instead of how knowledge came to be. We will say
he began by analyzing a full grown tree. After thorough examination of
its contents, he finds that all the parts of the tree, carbon, water,
etc., are found outside of it in the external world.
He finds that the tree is composed of various atoms, all of which may
be found in the soil and in the atmosphere. He concludes, then, that
these atoms from soil and atmosphere, began to move up to and down to
the acorn. The acorn, passive meanwhile, lets them fall on it. So, of
their own free will and accord, the atoms kept piling themselves upon
the acorn, until in the process of a hundred years there was a tree.
Now a brick column might be carried up after this fashion, but not a
tree. The prior and fundamental thing in an oak tree is the acorn. It
contains an active, organizing life principle. Falling into the soil,
this folded life power begins to stir. It lays hold upon the elements
about it, digests them, assimilates them, and turns them into an oak. The
mind is to the raw material of knowledge, what the acorn is to the raw
material of oak. Through the senses the raw material is conveyed into
the mind. It is then appropriated, assimilated, digested, and turned
into knowledge. The active, organizing, combining power that turns the
raw material presented by the senses into knowledge, does not come from
the outside world. It is constitutional, fundamental, original. Just as
the organic forces of the plant take up the elements from the outside
environment upon which it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power of
the mind takes the matter of sensation and turns it into the whole called
knowledge. Knowledge is a unifying process. It combines the manifold into
one. It reduces multiplicity to unity. All that is real and all that is
true in the heavens above or in the earth below, in mind or in matter,
in time or in space, in man or in external world, are capable of being
reduced to unity in knowledge.
Knowledge is the subjective unity in the finite mind that corresponds
to the objective unity that lies within the infinite mind. Nothing less
than a universal synthesis satisfies the finite mind, because it is a
copy of the infinite mind. The finite self-consciousness is a copy of
the infinite self-consciousness. The infinite mind knows all things at
once; the finite mind comes to knowledge through a gradual process. It
can never, through all eternity, know all the infinite mind knows, but it
can eternally advance in knowledge, and comfort itself at every stage of
the process with the thought that nothing in the mind of the infinite and
absolute one is foreign to it, or in contradiction with its capacity to
know. In thinking, the finite mind is at home in its father’s realm, and
because this realm stretches out illimitably every way should not oppress
us or discourage us. For this the finite mind can know, that throughout
the limitless domain of God there is order and truth and reality.
Thus standing face to face with truth, and being endowed with
intellectual capacities capable of recognizing it, grasping it, in its
unity and in its particulars, it is proper to inquire the object and
the purpose of it. It is the revelation which the infinite mind has made
to the finite. It is the language of God, in which he has embodied his
thought. It is the word of the universal spirit. Man is a spirit, and
he is to grow and come to the full realization of himself by partaking
of the word of God. Truth has been revealed for no other purpose than
to make men. Sir William Hamilton represents truth as game, and the
method of getting truth to a chase. He says the exercise of our powers
involved in the process of getting truth is better than the game we seek.
Lessings says, “If the Almighty, holding in one hand truth, and in the
other search after truth, presented them to me and asked me which I would
choose, with all humility, but without hesitation, I should say, give me
search after truth.”
Mallbranche says: “If I held truth captive, like a bird in my hand, I
would let it go again, that I might chase and capture it.” Müller says:
“Truth is the property of God alone. Search after truth belongs to man.”
Such sentiments indicate that the men who uttered them had no correct
idea of the real nature of truth, or of man’s intellectual nature, the
necessary food of which is truth. It is true that the search after truth
gives exercise and pleasure to the intellectual faculties, as search
after bread gives exercise and health to the physical powers. But an
eternal search for bread is not sufficient to keep man’s body robust and
strong. The very condition upon which he will be able to keep up the
search for it is, that he regularly and steadily partake of it. A tree,
had it intelligence and emotion, would, doubtless, enjoy wrestling with
the storms, and throwing its roots into the earth and its branches into
the heavens, making levies upon earth and sky for its own nourishment;
but if it did not constantly turn the elements it found into its trunk
and branches, it would not be able to wrestle long with the storms, or
forage long upon the earth and sky.
To claim that the intellectual faculties are always to search for truth,
and that the search is better than the truth, is tacitly to assume that
truth is not for them; or, if for them, and should ever be found, would
be as useless as a poor, tired, half-dead fox overtaken by the hunters in
the chase. Searching for truth is doing; partaking of truth is being. The
search gives agility and skill; the partaking of truth gives wealth of
character. To hunt game with no other object than that which comes from
the sport of the chase is degrading. To shoot birds only for the purpose
of seeing them fall is mean and wicked. So, to search for truth with no
other purpose than that which comes from the exercise of the search, is
unworthy the intellect that was given, not only to find truth, but to
grow rich and God-like by partaking of the truth.
Man’s need for bread, we saw, led to the establishment of commerce, and
commerce did far more than secure to man food and clothing and shelter.
It brought men together and discovered themselves to themselves. Power
lent itself to the uses of man’s social nature, awakened and developed
by commerce, and made it possible for men to come into relations with
one another, not simply in states and nations, but on all the earth. The
need for bread helped to the formation of society, the nature of power
and the applications to which it lent itself widened the social domain
into a universal brotherhood, to which man, as a spirit, was correlated.
But many saw bread only in its relations to hunger, and power only in
its relations to wealth and worldly dominion. So, many see in truth no
purpose except the practical and material ends to which it can be put.
In the esteem of the utilitarians, it was well enough that learned men
consecrated their genius and their industry to the study of the subtle
subject of heat. It was well that they discovered the real nature of
heat, and saw that it was not caloric, but a mode of motion. Because
this opened the way for our railroads and steamboats and quick methods
of transportation, which have contributed so much to the world’s wealth.
It was well that the impracticable and theoretical men, who had nothing
better to do, spent ages studying the nature of electricity, and finally
discovered that there were certain metals for which it had affinity,
and that it had speed equal to thought itself. For these studies have
enabled the practical and substantial men to order their corn and meat
by telegraph, and the practical housewives to order their roast beef by
telephone. It is well that people who had no practical turn of mind spent
years in considering the structure of the human frame, and the plants and
minerals capable of ministering to it, for in this way the doctors have
got ideas by which they are enabled to keep us practical men alive, so
that we can trade longer, and build more factories and eat more victuals.
Now it is true that the knowledge the intelligence comes to by insight
into the relations and nature and truth of things, can be turned to
practical account. But the truth the mind finds by study was not
primarily intended to open the way for steam cars and telegraphs and the
production of wealth. These things are incidental. Truth is the provision
God has made for the intellect. The knowledge of the stars has helped man
to sail the sea and to take his bearings on any part of its surface. But
the practical account to which this knowledge has been turned is not to
be compared, in value, to the effect it was intended to have on the human
mind, strengthening it, ennobling it, and harmonizing it with the divine
mind.
_RIGHTEOUSNESS._
“While smitten with the fatal wanness of approaching doom, the
flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence descends the steep
slope to the gulf of devouring time: lo! at the other extremity
of space, when the last cloud has but now faded in the deep
sky of the future, azure forevermore, rises resplendent the
sacred galaxy of the true stars—Orpheus, Hermes, Job, Homer,
Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Phidias, Socrates,
Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras,
Lucretius, Plautus, Juvenal, Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of
Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc,
Christopher Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus,
Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakspere, Rembrandt,
Kepler, Milton, Molière, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Piranesi,
Beccari, Diderot, Beethoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington:
and the marvelous constellations, brighter from moment to
moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shine in the
clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends, with the boundless
dawn of Jesus Christ.”