A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what
object, nor whither it is bound. It is a secret Government expedition.
As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in
charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained.
When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he
must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the
deep by which he must steer. They provide for every stage of the way.
They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do
in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and
what acts to perform at certain opportunities. Each paper of the series
forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been
fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which
he is making.
The wide ocean is before that ship, and a wider mystery. But in the
passage of time, as the strange cruise proceeds, its course begins to
tell upon the chart. The zigzag line, like obscure chirography, has an
intelligible look, and seems to spell out intimations. As order after
order is opened, those sibyl leaves of the cabin commence to prophesy,
glimpses multiply, surmises come quick, and shortly the whole ship's
company more than suspect, from the accumulating _data_ behind them,
what must be their destination, and the mission they have been sent to
accomplish.
People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is
something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has
been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and
that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the
earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of
mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are
hid,--and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the
Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.
This commission is yet obscure. It has so far only gradually opened to
him, for he is sailing under sealed orders. He is still led on from
point to point. But the farther he goes, and the more his past gathers
behind him, the better is he able to imagine what must be before him.
His chart is every day getting more full of amazing indications. He is
beginning to feel about him the increasing press of some Providential
design that has been permeating and moulding age after age, and to
discover that be has been all along unconsciously prosecuting a secret
mission. And so it comes at last that everything new takes that look;
every evolution of mind, every addition to knowledge, every discovery of
truth, every novel achievement appearing like the breaking of seals and
opening of rolls, in the performance of an inexhaustible and mysterious
trust that has been committed to his hands.
It is the purpose of this paper to collect together some of these facts
and incidents of progress, in order to show that this is not a mere
dream, but a stupendous reality. History shall be the inspiration of our
prophecy.
There is a past to be recounted, a present to be described, and a future
to be foretold. An immense review for a magazine article, and it will
require some ingenuity to be brief and graphic at the same time. In the
attempt to get as much as possible into the smallest space, many things
will have to be omitted, and some most profound particulars merely
glanced at; but enough will be furnished, perhaps, to make the point we
have in view.
We may compare human progress to a tall tree which has reared itself,
slowly and imperceptibly, through century after century, hardly more
than a bare trunk, with here and there only the slight outshoot of some
temporary exploit of genius, but which in this age gives the signs of
that immense foliage and fruitage which shall in time embower the whole
earth. We see but its spring-time of leaf,--for it is only within fifty
years that this rich outburst of wonders began. We live in an era when
progress is so new as to be a matter of amazement. A hundred years
hence, perhaps it will have become so much a matter of course to
develop, to expand, and to discover, that it will excite no comment. But
it is yet novel, and we are yet fresh. Therefore we may gaze back at
what has been, and gaze forward at what is promised to be, with more
likelihood of being impressed than if we were a few centuries older.
If we look down at the roots out of which this tree has risen, and then
up at its spreading branches,--omitting its intermediate trunk of ages,
through which its processes have been secretly working,--perhaps we may
realize in a briefer space the wonder of it all.
In the beginning of history, according to received authority, there
was but a little tract of the earth occupied, and that by one family,
speaking but one tongue, and worshipping but one God,--all the rest of
the world being an uninhabited wild. At _this_ stage of history the
whole globe is explored, covered with races of every color, a host of
nations and languages, with every diversity of custom, development of
character, and form of religion. The physical bound from that to this is
equalled only by the leap which the world of mind has made.
Once upon a time a man hollowed a tree, and, launching it upon the
water, found that it would bear him up. After this a few little floats,
creeping cautiously near the land, were all on which men were wont to
venture. _Now_ there are sails fluttering on every sea, prodigious
steamers throbbing like leviathans against wind and wave; harbors are
built, and rocks and shoals removed; lighthouses gleam nightly from ten
thousand stations on the shore; the great deep itself is sounded by
plummet and diving-bell; the submarine world is disclosed; and man
is gathering into his hands the laws of the very winds that toss its
surface.
Once the earth had a single rude, mud-built hamlet, in which human
dwellings were first clustered together. _Now_ it is studded with
splendid cities, strewn thick with towns and villages, diversified by
infinite varieties of architecture: sumptuous buildings, unlike in every
clime, each as if sprung from its own soil and made out of its air.
Once there were only the elementary discoveries of the lever, the wedge,
the bended bow, the wheel; Tubal worked in iron and copper, and Naamah
twisted threads. Since then what a jump the mechanical arts have made!
These primitive elements are now so intricately combined that we can
hardly recognize them; new forces have been added, new principles
evolved; ponderous engines, like moving mountains of iron, shake the
very earth; many-windowed factories, filled with complex machinery
driven by water or its vapor, clatter night and day, weaving the plain
garments of the poor man and the rich robes of the prince, the curtains
of the cottage and the upholstery of the palace.
Once there were but the spear and bow and shield, and hand-to-hand
conflicts of brute strength. See now the whole enginery of war, the art
of fortification, the terrific perfection of artillery, the mathematical
transfer of all from the body to the mind, till the battlefield is but
a chess-board, and the battle is really waged in the brains of the
generals. How astonishing was that last European field of Solferino,
ten miles in sweep,--with the balloon floating above it for its spy
and scout,--with the thread-like wire trailing in the grass, and
the lightning coursing back and forth, Napoleon's ubiquitous
aide-de-camp,--with railway-trains, bringing reinforcements into the
midst of the _melée_, and their steam-whistle shrieking amid the
thunders of battle! And what a picture of even greater magnificence, in
some respects, is before us to-day! A field not of ten, but ten
thousand miles in sweep! McClellan, standing on the eminence of present
scientific achievement, is able to overlook half the breadth of a
continent, and the widely scattered detachments of a host of six hundred
thousand men. The rail connects city with city; the wire hangs between
camp and camp, and reaches from army to army. Steam is hurling his
legions from one point to another; electricity brings him intelligence,
and carries his orders; the aëronaut in the sky is his field-glass
searching the horizon. It is practically but one great battle that is
raging beneath him, on the Potomac, in the mountains of Virginia,
down the valley of the Mississippi, in the interiors of Kentucky and
Tennessee, along the seaboard, and on the Gulf coast. The combatants are
hidden from each other, but under the chieftain's eye the dozen armies
are only the squadrons of a single host, their battles only the separate
conflicts of a single field, the movements of the whole campaign only
the evolutions of a prolonged engagement. The spectacle is a good
illustration of the day. Under the magic of progress, war in its essence
and vitality is really diminishing, even while increasing in _materiel_
and grandeur. Neither time nor space will permit the old and tedious
contests of history to be repeated. Military science has entered upon a
new era, nearer than ever to the period when wars shall cease.
But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present.
Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on
tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and
sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal,
wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection
of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and
wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away like
richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and
progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in
clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted
catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the
living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by
the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a
gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious
accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but
swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the
vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under
its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole
country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and
brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the
latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they
stimulate thought and activity everywhere.
Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and
sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only
equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands
from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,--or, if
modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in
countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day
that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of
artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the
celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every
generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up
to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the
burnished plate,--and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical
illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look as
into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled in
miniature.
Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they
realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once
they thought the sky was a solid blue concave, studded with blazing
points, an empire of fate, the gold-and-azure floor of the abode of
gods and spirits. Now all that is dissolved away; the wandering planets
become at will broad disks, like sisters of the moon; and countless
millions of stars are now mirrored in the same retina with which the
Magi saw the few thousands of the firmament that were visible from the
plains of Chaldea.
Once men were aware of nothing in the earth beneath its hills and
valleys and teeming soil. Now they walk consciously over the ruins
of old worlds; they can decipher the strange characters and read the
strange history graven on these gigantic tablets. The stony veil is
rent, and they can look inimitable periods back, and see the curious
animals which then moved up and down in the earth.
Once a glass bubble was a wonder for magnifying power. Now the lenses of
the microscope bring an inverted universe to light. Men can look into a
drop and discover an ocean crowded with millions of living creatures,
monsters untypified in the visible world, playing about as in a great
deep.
Once a Roman emperor prized a mysterious jewel because it brought the
gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy. Now
observatories, with their revolving domes, crown the heights at every
centre of civilization, and the mighty telescope, poised on exquisite
mechanism, turns infinite space into a Coliseum, brings its invisible
luminaries close to the astronomer's seat, and reveals the harmonies and
splendors of those distant works of God.
Once the supposed elements were fire, and water, and earth, and air;
once the amber was unique in its peculiar property, and the loadstone
in its singular power. Now chemistry holds in solution the elements and
secrets of creation; now electricity would seem to be the veil which
hangs before the soul; now the magnetic needle, true to the loadstar,
trembles on the sea, to make the mariner brave and the haven sure.
We have by no means exhausted the wonders that have accumulated upon
man, in being accumulated by man. Their enumeration would be almost
endless. But we leave all to mention one, with which there is nothing of
old time to compare. It had no beginning then,--not even a germ. It is
the peculiar leap and development of the age in which we live. Many
things have combined to bring it to pass.
A spirit that had been hid, since the world began, in a coffer of metal
and acid,--the genie of the lightning,--shut down, as by the seal of
Solomon in the Arabian tale, was let loose but the other day, and
commenced to do the bidding of man. Every one found that he could
transport his thought to the ends of the earth in the twinkling of an
eye. That spirit, with its electric wings, soon flew from city to city,
and whithersoever the magnetic wire could be traced through the air,
till the nations of all Europe stood as face to face, and the States
of this great Union gazed one upon another. It made a continent like a
household,--a cluster of peoples like members of a family,--each within
hearing of the other's voice.
But one achievement remained to be performed before the whole world
could become one. The ocean had hitherto hopelessly severed the globe
into two hemispheres. Could man make it a single sphere? Could man, like
Moses, smite the waves with his electric rod, and lead the legions of
human thought across dry shod? He could,--and he did. We all remember
it well. A range of submarine mountains was discovered, stretching from
America to Europe. Their top formed a plateau, which, lying within two
miles of the surface, offered an undulating shoal within human reach. A
fleet of steamers, wary of storms, one day cautiously assembled midway
over it. They caught the monster asleep, safely uncoiled the wire, and
laid it from shore to shore. The treacherous, dreadful, omnipotent ocean
was conquered and bound!
How the heart of the two worlds leaped when the news came! Then, more
than at any time before, were most of us startled into a conviction of
how _real_ progress was,--how tremendous, and limitless, apparently, the
power which God had put into man. Not that this, in itself, was greater
than that which had preceded it, but it was the climax of all. The
mechanical feat awoke more enthusiasm than even the scientific
achievement which was its living soul,--not because it was more
wonderful, but because it dispelled our last doubt. We all began to form
a more definite idea of something great to come, that was yet lying
stored away in the brain,--laid there from the beginning. Like the
Magian on the heights of Moab, as he saw the tents of Israel and the
tabernacle of God in the distance, we grew big with an involuntary
vision, and were surprised into prophecies.
It was wonderful to see the Queen of England, on one side of that chasm
of three thousand miles, wave a greeting to the President, and the
President wave back a greeting to the Queen. But it was glorious to see
that chord quiver with the music and the truth of the angelic song:--
"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace,
Good-will toward men!"
Soon, however, came a check to the excitement. For above a score of days
was that mysterious highway kept open from Valentia to Trinity Bay. But
then the spell was lost, the waves flowed back, old ocean rolled on as
before, and the crossing messages perished, like the hosts of Pharaoh in
the sea.
That the miracle is ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated.
For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an
infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will
soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of
civilization, its minister of flaming fire! No one should abate a jot
from the high hope excited then. No imagination should suffer a cloud on
the picture it then painted. Governments and capitalists have not
been idle, and will not be discouraged. Already Europe and Africa are
connected by an electric tunnel under the sea, five hundred miles in
length; already Malta and Alexandria speak to each other through a tube
lying under thirteen hundred miles of Mediterranean waters; already
Britain bound to Holland and Hanover and Denmark by a triple cord of
sympathy which all the tempests of the German Ocean cannot sever. And if
we come nearer home, we shall find a project matured which will carry a
fiery cordon around the entire coast of our country, linking fortress to
fortress, and providing that last, desperate resource of unity, an outer
girdle and jointed chain of force, to bind together and save a nation
whose inner bonds of peace and love are broken.
Such energy and such success are enough to revive the expectation and to
guaranty the coming of the day when we shall behold the electric light
playing round the world unquenched by the seas, illuminating the land,
revealing nation to nation, and mingling language with language, as if
the "cloven tongues like as of fire" had appeared again, and "sat upon
each of them."
It will be a strange period, and yet we shall see it. The word spoken
here under the sun of mid-day, when it speaks at the antipodes, will be
heard under the stars of midnight. Of the world of commerce it may be
written, "There shall be no night there!" and of the ancient clock of
the sun and stars, "There shall be time no longer!"
When the electric wire shall stretch from Pekin, by successive India
stations, to London, and from India, by leaps from island to island, to
Australia, and from New York westward to San Francisco, (as has been
already accomplished,) and southward to Cape Horn, and across the
Atlantic, or over the Strait to St. Petersburg,--when the endless
circle is formed, and the magic net-work binds continent, and city, and
village, and the isles of the sea, in one,--then who will know the world
we live in, for the change that shall come upon it?
Time no more! Space no more! Mankind brought into one vast neighborhood!
Prophesy the greater union of all hearts in this interblending of all
minds. Prophesy the boundless spread of civilization, when all barriers
are swept away. Prophesy the catholicity of that religion in which as
many phases of a common faith shall be endured as there are climes for
the common human constitution and countries in a common world!
In those days men will carry a watch, not with a single face, as now,
telling only the time of their own region, but a dial-plate subdivided
into the disks of a dozen timepieces, announcing at a glance the hour of
as many meridian stations on the globe. It will be the fair type of
the man who wears it. When human skill shall find itself under this
necessity, and mechanism shall reach this perfection, then the soul
of that man will become also many-disked. He will be alive with the
perpetual consciousness of many zeniths and horizons beside his own, of
many nations far different from his own, of many customs, manners, and
ideas, which he could not share, but is able to account for and respect.
We can peer as far as this into the future; for what we predict is only
a reasonable deduction from certain given circumstances that are nearly
around us now. We do not lay all the stress upon the telegraph, as if to
attribute everything to it, but because that invention, and its recent
crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and
because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous
discoveries and achievements of man to its aid. It is their last-born
child,--the greater for its many parents. There is hardly a science, or
an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is
not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.
This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive. As it was begotten
itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything
else in the world of progress. Every scientific or mechanical idea,
every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more
antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men. There is a kith and
kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain. They have
their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without
father, without mother. Every one is a link in a regular order of
generations. Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no
longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and
produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this
day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the
history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an
intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in
genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate
lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original
Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.
There is a period between us and these first parents of our present
progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in
which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind,
and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone
would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and
left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to
account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances
out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science,
wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or support from a
wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of
old, dying out with their day.
It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in
its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is
not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each
new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive
picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been
done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied.
It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be
extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing
but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of
the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of
intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention
could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the
constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable,
and what we are to obtain as illimitable.
We come now to another suggestive characteristic of the time,--another
of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and
strength,--making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It
has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on with
breathless _rapidity_. The reason is, that, the farther it has gone, the
more it has multiplied its agents. The present generation is not only
carried forward, but is excited in every quarter. The activity and
versatility of the intellect would appear to be inexhaustible. Instead
of getting overstrained, or becoming lethargic, it never was so
powerful, never had so many resources, never was so wide-awake. Men
are busy turning over every stone in their way, in the hope of finding
something new. Nothing would seem too small for human attention, nothing
too great for human undertaking. The government Patent-Office, with
its countless chambers, is not so large a museum of inventions as the
capacious brain of to-day.
One man is engrossed over an apple-parer; another snatches the needle
from the weary fingers of the seamstress, and offers her in return the
sewing-machine. That man yonder has turned himself into an armory, and
he brings out the deadliest instrument he can produce, something perhaps
that can shoot you at sight, even though you be a speck in the horizon.
His next-door neighbor is an iron workshop, and is forging an armor of
proof for a vessel of war, from which the mightiest balls shall bound
as lightly as the arrows from an old-time breastplate. There is another
searching for that new motive power which shall keep pace with the
telegraph, and hurl the bodies of men through space as fast as their
thoughts are hurled; there is another seeking that electro-magnetic
battery which shall speak instantly and distinctly to the ends of
the earth. The mind of that astronomer is a telescope, through whose
increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist
is a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and
pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of almost
infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible, in
which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the true
philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician is a
maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher toward the heaven
of truth.
The ambition is everywhere,--in every breast; the power is
everywhere,--in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active
in seeking out and finding out many inventions. And in this very
universality of effort and result we discover another guaranty of the
great future. The river of Progress multiplies its tributaries the
farther it flows, and even now, unknown ages from its mouth, we already
see that magnificent widening of its channel, in which, like the Amazon,
it long anticipates the sea.
Man, the great achiever! the marvellous magician! Look at him! A head
hardly six feet above the ground out of which he was taken. His "dome
of thought and palace of the soul" scarce twenty-two inches in
circumference; and within it, a little, gray, oval mass of "convoluted
albumen and fibre, of some four pounds' weight," and there sits the
intelligence which has worked all these wonders! An intelligence, say,
six thousand years old next century. How many thousand years more will
it think, and think, and wave the wand, and raise new spirits out of
Nature, open her sealed-up mysteries, scale the stars, and uncover a
universe at home? How long will it be before this inherent power, laid
in it at the beginning by the Almighty, shall be exhausted, and reach
its limit? Yes, how long? We cannot begin to know. We cannot imagine
where the stopping-place could be. Perhaps there is none.
To take up the nautical figure which has furnished our title,--we are in
the midst of an infinite sea, sailing on to a destination we know not
of, but of which the vague and splendid fancies we have formed hang
before our prow like illusions in the sky. We are meeting on every hand
great opportunities which must not be lost, new achievements which must
be wrought, and strange adventures which must be undertaken: every day
wondering more to what our commission shall bring us at last, full of
magnificent hopes and a growing faith,--the inscrutable bundle of orders
not nearly exhausted: whole continents of knowledge yet to be discovered
and explored; the gates of yet distant sciences to be sought and
unlocked; the fortresses of yet undreamed necessities to be taken;
Arcadias of beauty to be visited and their treasures garnered by the
imagination; an intricate course to be followed amid all future nations
and governments, and their winding histories, as if threading the
devious channels of endless archipelagoes; the spoils of all ages to
be gathered, and treaties of commerce with all generations to be made,
before the mysterious voyage is done.
And now, before we leave this fascinating theme, or suffer another
dream, let us stop where we are, in order to see where we are. Let us
take our bearings. What says our chart? What do we find in the horizon
of the present, which may give us the wherewithal to hope, to doubt, or
to fear?
The era in which we live presents some remarkable characteristics,
which have been brought into it by this immense material success. It
is preeminently an age of _reality:_ an age in which a host of
unrealities--queer and strange old notions--have been destroyed forever.
Never were the vaulted spaces in this grand old temple of a world swept
so clean of cobwebs before. The mind has not gone forth working outside
wonders, without effecting equal inside changes. In achieving abroad, it
has been ennobling at home. At no time was it so free from superstition
as now, and from the absurdities which have for centuries beset and
filled it. What numberless delusions, what ghosts, what mysteries, what
fables, what curious ideas, have disappeared before the besom of the
day! The old author long ago foretasted this, who wrote,--"The divine
arts of printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin Goodfellow,
and all the fairies." It is told of Kepler, that he believed the planets
were borne through the skies in the arms of angels; but science shortly
took a wider sweep, killed off the angels, and showed that the wandering
luminaries had been accustomed from infancy to take care of themselves.
And so has the firmament of all knowledge been cleared of its vapors and
fictions, and been revealed in its solid and shining facts.
Here, then, lies the great distinction of the time: the accumulation of
_Truth_, and the growing appetite for the true and the real. The year
whirls round like the toothed cylinder in a threshing-machine, blowing
out the chaff in clouds, but quietly dropping the rich kernels within
our reach. And it will always be so. Men will sow their notions and reap
harvests, but the inexorable age will winnow out the truth, and scatter
to the winds whatsoever is error.
Now we see how that impalpable something has been produced which we call
the "Spirit of the Age,"--that peculiar atmosphere in which we live,
which fills the lungs of the human spirit, and gives vitality and
character to all that men at present think and say and feel and do. It
is this identical spirit of courageous inquiry, honest reality, and
intense activity, wrought up into a kind of universal inspiration,
moving with the same disposition, the same taste, the same thought,
persons whole regions apart and unknown to each other. We are frequently
surprised by coincidences which prove this novel, yet common _afflatus_.
Two astronomers, with the ocean between them, calculate at the same
moment, in the same direction, and simultaneously light upon the same
new orb. Two inventors, falling in with the same necessity, think of the
same contrivance, and meet for the first time in a newspaper war, or
a duel of pamphlets, for the credit of its authorship. A dozen widely
scattered philosophers as quickly hit upon the self-same idea as if
they were in council together. A more rational development of some old
doctrine in divinity springs up in a hundred places at once, as if a
theological epidemic were abroad, or a synod of all the churches were in
session. It has also another peculiarity. The thought which may occur at
first to but one mind seems to have an affinity to all minds; and if
it be a free and generous thought, it is instantly caught, intuitively
comprehended, and received with acclamations all over the world. Such a
spirit as this is rapidly bringing all sections and classes of mankind
into sympathy with one another, and producing a supreme caste in human
nature, which, as it increases in numbers, will mould the character and
control the destinies of the race.
So far we speak of the upper air of the day. But there is no denying the
prevalence of a lower and baser spirit. We are uncomfortably aware that
there is another extreme to the freaks of the imagination. There are
superstitions of the reason and of realism,--the grotesque fancies,
mysticisms, and vagaries which prevail, and the diseased gusto for
something ultra and outlandish which affects many raw and undisciplined
minds. Yet even these are, in their way, indications of the pervading
disposition,--the unhealthy exhalations to be expected from hitherto
stagnant regions, stirred up by the active and regenerating thought of
the time. There is promise even in them, and they serve to distinguish
the more that purer and higher spirit of honesty and reality, which
clarifies the intellect, and invigorates the faculties that apprehend
and grasp the noble and the true.
We glory in this triumph of the reason over the imagination, and in this
predominance of the real over the ideal. We prefer that common sense
should lead the van, and that mere fancy, like the tinselled conjurer
behind his hollow table and hollow apparatus, should be taken for what
it is, and that its tricks and surprises should cease to bamboozle,
however much they may amuse mankind. Nothing, in the course of
Providence, conveys so much encouragement as this recent and growing
development of reality in thought and pursuit. In its presence the
future of the world looks substantial and sure. We dream of an immense
change in the tone of the human spirit, and in the character of the
civilization which shall in time embower the earth.
But, as it has always been, the greater the good, the nearer the evil;
Satan is next-door neighbor to the saint; Eden had a lurking-hole for
the serpent. Just here the voyaging is most dangerous; just here we drop
the plummet and strike upon a shoal; we lift up our eyes, and discover a
lee-shore.
The mind that is not profound enough to perceive and believe even what
it cannot comprehend,--that is the shoal. Unless the reason will permit
the sounding-lead to fall illimitably down into a submarine world
of mystery, too deep for the diver, and yet a true and living
world,--unless there is admitted to be a fathomless gulf, called
_faith_, underlying the surface-sea of demonstration, the race will
surely ground in time, and go to pieces. There is the peril of this
all-prevailing love of the real. It may become such an infatuation that
nothing will appear actual which is not visible or demonstrable, which
the hand cannot handle or the intellect weigh and measure. Even to this
extreme may the reason run. Its vulnerable point is pride. It is easily
encouraged by success, easily incited to conceit, readily inclined to
overestimate its power. It has a Chinese weakness for throwing up a wall
on its involuntary boundary-line, and for despising and defying all
that is beyond its jurisdiction. The reason may be the greatest or the
meanest faculty in the soul. It may be the most wise or the most foolish
of active things. It may be so profound as to acknowledge a whole
infinitude of truth which it cannot comprehend, or it may be so
superficial as to suspect everything it is asked to believe, and refuse
to trust a fact out of its sight. There is the danger of the day. There
is the lee-shore upon which the tendencies of the age are blowing our
bark: a gross and destructive materialism, which is the horrid and
treacherous development of a shallow realism.
In the midst of this splendid era there is a fast-increasing class who
are disposed to make the earth the absolute All,--to deny any outlet
from it,--to deny any capacity in man for another sphere,--to deny any
attribute in God which interests Him in man,--to shut out, therefore,
all faith, all that is mysterious, all that is spiritual, all that is
immortal, all that is Divine.
"There live, alas! of heaven-directed mien,
Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene,
Who hail thee Man!--the pilgrim of a day,
Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay,
Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower,
Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower,
A friendless slave, a child without a sire.
* * * * *
Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim,
Lights of the world, and demigods of Fame?
Is this your triumph, this your proud applause,
Children of Truth, and champions of her cause?
For this hath Science searched on weary wing,
By shore and sea, each mute and living thing?
Launched with Iberia's pilot from the steep,
To worlds unknown, and isles beyond the deep?
Or round the cope her living chariot driven,
And wheeled in triumph through the signs of heaven?
O star-eyed Science, hast thou wandered there,
To waft us home the message of despair?"
Is shipwreck, after all, to be the end of the mysterious voyage? Yes,
unless there is something else beside materialism in the world. Unless
there is another spirit blowing _off_ that dreadful shore, unless the
chart opens a farther sea, unless the needle points to the same distant
star, unless there are other orders, yet sealed and secret, there is no
further destiny for the race, no further development for the soul. The
intellect, however grand, is not the whole of man. Material progress,
however magnificent, is not the guaranty, not even the cardinal element,
of civilization. And civilization, in the highest possible meaning of
that most expressive word, is that great and final and all-embosoming
harbor toward which all these achievements and changes dimly, but
directly, point. Upon that we have fixed our eyes, but we cannot imagine
how it can be attained by intellectual and material force alone.
In order to indicate this more vividly, let us suppose that there is
no other condition necessary to the glory of human nature and the
world,--let us suppose that no other provision has been made, and that
the age is to go on developing only in this one direction,--what a
dreary grandeur would soon surround us! As icebergs floating in an
Arctic sea are splendid, so would be these ponderous and glistering
works. As the gilded and crimsoned cliffs of snow beautify the Polar
day, so would these achievements beautify the present day. But expect no
life, no joy, no soul, amid such ice-bound circumstances as these. The
tropical heart must congeal and die; its luxuriant fruits can never
spring up. The earth must lie sepulchred under its own magnificence; and
the divinest feelings of the spirit, floating upward in the instinct of
a higher life, but benumbed by the frigid air, and rebuked by the leaden
sky, must fall back like clouds of frozen vapor upon the soul: and "so
shall its thoughts perish."
It would be a gloomy picture to paint, if one could for a moment imagine
that intellectual power and material success were all that enter into
the development of the race. For if there is no other capacity, and no
other field in which at least an equal commission to achieve is given,
and for which equal arrangements have been made by the Providence that
orders all, then the soul must soon be smothered, society dismembered,
and human nature ruined.
But this very fact, which we purposely put in these strong colors,
proves that there must be another and greater element, another and
higher faculty, another and wider department, likewise under express and
secret conditions of success. It shall come to pass, as the development
goes on, that this other will become the foremost and all-important,
--the relation between them will be reversed,--this must increase, that
decrease,--the Material, although the first in time, the first in the
world's interest, and the first in the world's effort, will be found to
be only an ordained forerunner, preparing the way for Something Else,
the latchet of whose shoes it is not worthy to unloose.
There is that in man--also wrapt up and sealed within his inscrutable
brain--which provides for his inner as well as outer life; which
insures his highest development; which shall protect, cherish, warm, and
fertilize his nature now, and perpetuate and exalt his soul forever.
It is a commission which begins, but does not end, in time. It is a
commission which makes him the agent and builder of an immense moral
work on the earth. Under its instructions he shall add improvement to
improvement in that social fabric which is already his shelter and
habitation. He has found it of brick,--he shall leave it of marble. He
shall seek out every contrivance, and perfect every plan, and exhaust
every scheme, which will bring a greater prosperity and a nobler
happiness to mankind. He shall quarry out each human spirit, and carve
it into the beauty and symmetry of a living stone that shall be worthy
to take its place in the rising structure. This is the work which is
given him to do. He must develop those conditions of virtue, and peace,
and faith, and truth, and love, by which the race shall be lifted
nearer its Creator, and the individual ascend into a more conscious
neighborhood and stronger affinity to the world which shall receive him
at last. All this must that other department be, and this other capacity
achieve or there is a fatal disproportion in the progress of man.
The beauty of this as a dream perhaps all men will admit; but they
question its possibility. "It is the old Utopia," they say, "the
impracticable enterprise that has always baffled the world." Some will
doubt whether the Spiritual has an existence at all. Others will doubt,
if it does exist, whether man can accomplish anything in it. It is
invisible, impalpable, unknown. It cannot be substantial, it cannot
be real,--at least to man as at present constituted. Its elements and
conditions cannot be controlled by his spirit. That spirit cannot
control itself,--how much less go forth and work solid wonders in that
phantom realm! There can be no success in this that will be coequal with
the other; nor a coequal grandeur. There is no such thing as keeping
pace with it. The heart cannot grow better, society cannot be built
higher, mankind cannot become happier, God will not draw nearer, the
hidden truth of all that universe will never be more ascertained than
it is,--can never be accumulated and stored away among other human
acquisitions. It is utterly, gloomily impracticable. In this respect we
shall forever remain as we are, and where we are. So they think.
And now we venture to contradict it all, and to assert that there
is, there must be, just such a corresponding field, and just such a
corresponding progress, or else (we say it reverently) God's ways are
not equal. So great is our faith. Like Columbus, therefore, we dream
of the golden Indies, and of that "unknown residue" which must yet be
found, and be taken possession of by mankind.
We look far out to where the horizon dips its vapory veil into the sea,
and beyond which lies that other hemisphere, and ask,--Is there no world
there to be a counterpoise to the world that is here? Has the Creator
made no provision for the equilibrium of the soul? Is all that infinite
area a shoreless waste, over which the fleets of speculation may sail
forever, and discover nothing? Or is there not, rather, a broad
and solid continent of spiritual truth, eternally rooted in that
ocean,--prepared, from the beginning, for the occupation of man, when
the fulness of time shall have come,--ordained to take its place in the
historic evolution of the race, and to give the last and definite shape
to its wondrous destinies?
Is there, or is there not, another region of truth, of enterprise, of
progress,--to finish, to balance, to consummate the world?
Such is the Problem.
* * * * *