Chapter XX: Introduction: To Idealism

[From the German of SCHELLING. Translated by TOM DAVIDSON.]

I.—IDEA OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

1. All knowing is based upon the agreement of an objective with a subjective. For we _know_ only the true, and truth is universally held to be the agreement of representations with their objects.

2. The sum of all that is purely objective in our knowledge we may call Nature; while the sum of all that is subjective may be designated the _Ego_, or Intelligence. These two concepts are mutually opposed. Intelligence is originally conceived as that which solely represents—Nature as that which is merely capable of representation; the former as the conscious—the latter as the unconscious. There is, moreover, necessary in all knowledge a mutual agreement of the two—the conscious and the unconscious _per se_. The problem is to explain this agreement.

3. In knowledge itself, in my knowing, objective and subjective are so united that it is impossible to say to which of the two the priority belongs. There is here no first and no second—the two are contemporaneous and one. In my efforts to explain this identity, I must first have it undone. In order to explain it, inasmuch as nothing else is given me as a principle of explanation beyond these two factors of knowledge, I must of necessity place the one before the other—set out from the one in order from it to arrive at the other. From which of the two I am to set out is not determined by the problem.

4. There are, therefore, only two cases possible:

A. _Either the objective is made the first, and the question comes to be how a subjective agreeing with it is superinduced._

The idea of the subjective is not contained in the idea of the objective; they rather mutually exclude each other. The subjective, therefore, must be _superinduced_ upon the objective. It forms no part of the conception of Nature that there should be something intelligent to represent it. Nature, to all appearance, would exist even were there nothing to represent it. The problem may therefore likewise be expressed thus: How is the Intelligent superinduced upon Nature? or, How comes Nature to be represented?

The problem assumes Nature, or the objective, as first. It is, therefore, manifestly, a problem of natural science, which does the same. That natural science really, and without knowing it, approximates, at least, to the solution of this problem can be shown here only briefly.

If all knowledge has, as it were, two poles, which mutually suppose and demand each other, they must reciprocally be objects of search in all sciences. There must, therefore, of necessity, be two fundamental sciences; and it must be impossible to set out from the one pole without being driven to the other. The necessary tendency of all natural science, therefore, is to pass from Nature to the intelligent. This, and this alone, lies at the bottom of the effort to bring theory into natural phenomena. The final perfection of natural science would be the complete mentalization of all the laws of Nature into laws of thought. The phenomena, that is, the material, must vanish entirely, and leave only the laws—that is, the formal. Hence it is that the more the accordance with law is manifested in Nature itself, the more the wrappage disappears—the phenomena themselves become more mental, and at last entirely cease. Optical phenomena are nothing more than a geometry whose lines are drawn through the light; and even this light itself is of doubtful materiality. In the phenomena of magnetism all trace of matter has already disappeared, and of those of gravitation; which even physical philosophers believed could be attributed only to direct spiritual influence, there remains nothing but the law, whose action on a large scale is the mechanism of the heavenly motions. The complete theory of Nature would be that whereby the whole of Nature should be resolved into an intelligence. The dead and unconscious products of Nature are only unsuccessful attempts of Nature to reflect itself, and dead Nature, so-called, is merely an unripe Intelligence; hence in its phenomena the intelligent character peers through, though yet unconsciously. Its highest aim, namely, that of becoming completely self-objective, Nature reaches only in its highest and last reflection, which is nothing else than man, or, more generally, what we call reason, by means of which Nature turns completely back upon itself, and by which is manifested that Nature is originally identical with what in us is known as intelligent and conscious.

This may perhaps suffice to prove that natural science has a necessary tendency to render Nature intelligent. By this very tendency it is that it becomes natural philosophy, which is one of the two necessary fundamental sciences of philosophy.

B. _Or the subjective is made the first, and the problem is, how an objective is superinduced agreeing with it._

If all knowledge is based upon the agreement of these two, then the task of explaining this agreement is plainly the highest for all knowledge; and if, as is generally admitted, philosophy is the highest and loftiest of all sciences, it is certainly the main task of philosophy.

But the problem demands only the explanation of that agreement generally, and leaves it entirely undecided where the explanation shall begin, what it shall make its first, and what its second. Moreover, as the two opposites are mutually necessary to each other, the result of the operation must be the same, from whichever point it sets out.

To make the objective the first, and derive the subjective from it, is, as has just been shown, the task of natural philosophy.

If, therefore, there is a transcendental philosophy, the only course that remains for it is the opposite one, namely: to set out from the subjective as the first and the absolute, and deduce the origin of the objective from it.

Into these two possible directions of philosophy, therefore, natural and transcendental philosophy have separated themselves; and if all philosophy must have for its aim to make either an Intelligence out of Nature or a Nature out of Intelligence, then transcendental philosophy, to which the latter task belongs, is the other necessary fundamental science of philosophy.

II.—COROLLARIES.

In the foregoing we have not only deduced the idea of transcendental philosophy, but have also afforded the reader a glance into the whole system of philosophy, composed, as has been shown, of two principal sciences, which, though opposed in principle and direction, are counter-parts and complements of each other. Not the whole system of philosophy, but only one of the principal sciences of it, is to be here discussed, and, in the first place, to be more clearly characterized in accordance with the idea already deduced.

1. If, for transcendental philosophy, the subjective is the starting point, the only ground of all reality, and the sole principle of explanation for everything else, it necessarily begins with universal doubt regarding the reality of the objective.

As the natural philosopher, wholly intent upon the objective, seeks, above all things, to exclude every admixture of the subjective from his knowledge, so, on the other hand, the transcendental philosopher seeks nothing so much as the entire exclusion of the objective from the purely subjective principle of knowledge. The instrument of separation is absolute scepticism—not that half-scepticism which is directed merely against the vulgar prejudices of mankind and never sees the foundation—but a thorough-going scepticism, which aims not at individual prejudices, but at the fundamental prejudice, with which all others must stand or fall. For over and above the artificial and conventional prejudices of man, there are others of far deeper origin, which have been placed in him, not by art or education, but by Nature itself, and which pass with all other men, except the philosopher, as the principles of knowledge, and with the mere self-thinker as the test of all truth.

The one fundamental prejudice to which all others are reducible, is this: that there are things outside of us; an opinion which, while it rests neither on proofs nor on conclusions (for there is not a single irrefragable proof of it), and yet cannot be uprooted by any opposite proof (_naturam furcâ expellas, tamen usque redibit_), lays claim to immediate certainty; whereas, inasmuch as it refers to something quite different from us—yea, opposed to us—and of which there is no evidence how it can come into immediate consciousness, it must be regarded as nothing more than a prejudice—a natural and original one, to be sure, but nevertheless a prejudice.

The contradiction lying in the fact that a conclusion which in its nature cannot be immediately certain, is, nevertheless, blindly and without grounds, accepted as such, cannot be solved by transcendental philosophy, except on the assumption that this conclusion is implicitly, and in a manner hitherto not manifest, not founded upon, but identical, and one and the same with an affirmation which is immediately certain; and to demonstrate this identity will really be the task of transcendental philosophy.

2. Now, even for the ordinary use of reason, there is nothing immediately certain except the affirmation _I am_, which, as it loses all meaning outside of immediate consciousness, is the most individual of all truths, and the absolute prejudice, which must be assumed if anything else is to be made certain. The affirmation _There are things outside of us_, will therefore be certain for the transcendental philosopher, only through its identity with the affirmation _I am_, and its certainty will be only equal to the certainty of the affirmation from which it derives it.

According to this view, transcendental knowledge would be distinguished from ordinary knowledge in two particulars.

_First_—That for it the certainty of the existence of external objects is a mere prejudice, which it oversteps, in order to find the grounds of it. (It can never be the business of the transcendental philosopher to prove the existence of things in themselves, but only to show that it is a natural and necessary prejudice to assume external objects as real.)

_Second_—That the two affirmations, _I am_ and _There are things outside of me_, which in the ordinary consciousness run together, are, in the former, separated and the one placed before the other, with a view to demonstrate as a fact their identity, and that immediate connection which in the other is only felt. By the act of this separation, when it is complete, the philosopher transports himself to the transcendental point of view, which is by no means a natural, but an artificial one.

3. If, for the transcendental philosopher, the subjective alone has original reality, he will also make the subjective alone in knowledge directly his object; the objective will only become an object indirectly to him, and, whereas, in ordinary knowledge, knowledge itself—the act of knowing—vanishes in the object, in transcendental knowledge, on the contrary, the object, as such, will vanish in the act of knowing. Transcendental knowledge is a knowledge of knowing, in so far as it is purely subjective.

Thus, for example, in intuition, it is only the objective that reaches the ordinary consciousness; the act of intuition itself is lost in the object; whereas the transcendental mode of intuition rather gets only a glimpse of the object of intuition through the act. Ordinary thought, therefore, is a mechanism in which ideas prevail, without, however, being distinguished as ideas; whereas transcendental thought interrupts this mechanism, and in becoming conscious of the idea as an act, rises to the idea of the idea. In ordinary action, the acting itself is forgotten in the object of the action; philosophizing is also an action, but not an action only. It is likewise a continued self-intuition in this action.

The nature of the transcendental mode of thought consists, therefore, generally in this: that, in it, that which in all other thinking, knowing, or acting escapes the consciousness, and is absolutely non-objective, is brought into consciousness, and becomes objective; in short, it consists in a continuous act of becoming an object to itself on the part of the subjective.

The transcendental art will therefore consist in a readiness to maintain one’s self continuously in this duplicity of thinking and acting.

III.—PRELIMINARY ARRANGEMENT OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

This arrangement is preliminary, inasmuch as the principles of arrangement can be arrived at only in the science itself.

We return to the idea of science.

Transcendental philosophy has to explain how knowledge is possible at all, supposing that the subjective in it is assumed as the chief or first element.

It is not, therefore, any single part, or any particular object of knowledge, but knowledge itself, and knowledge generally, that it takes for its object.

Now all knowledge is reducible to certain original convictions or original fore-judgments; these different convictions transcendental philosophy must reduce to one original conviction; this one, from which all others are derived, is expressed in the first principle of this philosophy, and the task of finding such is no other than that of finding the absolutely certain, by which all other certainty is arrived at.

The arrangement of transcendental philosophy itself is determined by those original convictions, whose validity it asserts. Those convictions must, in the first place, be sought in the common understanding. If, therefore, we fall back upon the standpoint of the ordinary view, we find the following convictions deeply engraven in the human understanding:

A. That there not only exists outside of us a world of things independent of us, but also that our representations agree with them in such a manner that there is nothing else in the things beyond what they present to us. The necessity which prevails in our objective representations is explained by saying that the things are unalterably determined, and that, by this determination of the things, our ideas are also indirectly determined. By this first and most original conviction, the first problem of the philosophy is determined, _viz._: to explain how representations can absolutely agree with objects existing altogether independently of them. Since it is upon the assumption that things are exactly as we represent them—that we certainly, therefore, know things as they are in themselves—that the possibility of all experience rests, (for what would experience be, and where would physics, for example, wander to, but for the supposition of the absolute identity of being and seeming?) the solution of this problem is identical with theoretical philosophy, which has to examine the possibility of experience.

B. The second equally original conviction is, that ideas which spring up in us freely and without necessity are capable of passing from the world of thought into the real world, and of arriving at objective reality.

This conviction stands in opposition to the first. According to the first, it is assumed that objects are unalterably determined, and our ideas by them; according to the other, that objects are alterable, and that, too, by the causality of ideas in us. According to the first, there takes place a transition from the real world into the world of ideas, or a determining of ideas by something objective; according to the second, a transition from the world of ideas into the real world, or a determining of the objective by a (freely produced) idea in us.

By this second conviction, a second problem is determined, _viz._: how, by something merely thought, an objective is alterable, so as completely to correspond with that something thought.

Since upon this assumption the possibility of all free action rests, the solution of this problem is practical philosophy.

C. But with these two problems we find ourselves involved in a contradiction. According to B, there is demanded the dominion of thought (the ideal) over the world of sense; but how is this conceivable, if (according to A) the idea, in its origin, is already only the slave of the objective? On the other hand, if the real world is something quite independent of us, and in accordance with which, as their pattern, our ideas must shape themselves (by A), then it is inconceivable how the real world, on the other hand, can shape itself after ideas in us (by B). In a word, in the theoretical certainty we lose the practical; in the practical we lose the theoretical. It is impossible that there should be at once truth in our knowledge and reality in our volition.

This contradiction must be solved, if there is to be a philosophy at all; and the solution of this problem, or the answering of the question: How can ideas be conceived as shaping themselves according to objects, and at the same time objects as shaping themselves to ideas?—is not the first, but the highest, task of transcendental philosophy.

It is not difficult to see that this problem is not to be solved either in theoretical or in practical philosophy, but in a higher one, which is the connecting link between the two, neither theoretical nor practical, but both at once.

How at once the objective world conforms itself to ideas in us, and ideas in us conform themselves to the objective world, it is impossible to conceive, unless there exists, between the two worlds—the ideal and the real—a preëstablished harmony. But this preëstablished harmony itself is not conceivable, unless the activity, whereby the objective world is produced, is originally identical with that which displays itself in volition, and _vice versa_.

Now it is undoubtedly a _productive_ activity that displays itself in volition; all free action is productive and productive only with consciousness. If, then, we suppose, since the two activities are one only in their principle, that the same activity which is productive _with_ consciousness in free action, is productive _without_ consciousness in the production of the world, this preëstablished harmony is a reality, and the contradiction is solved.

If we suppose that all this is really the case, then that original identity of the activity, which is busy in the production of the world, with that which displays itself in volition, will exhibit itself in the productions of the former, and these will necessarily appear as the productions of an activity at once conscious and unconscious.

Nature, as a whole, no less than in its different productions, will, of necessity, appear as a work produced with consciousness, and, at the same time, as a production of the blindest mechanism. It is the result of purpose, without being demonstrable as such. The philosophy of the aims of Nature, or teleology, is therefore the required point of union between theoretical and practical philosophy.

D. Hitherto, we have postulated only in general terms the identity of the unconscious activity, which has produced Nature, and the conscious activity, which exhibits itself in volition, without having decided where the principle of this activity lies—whether in Nature or in us.

Now, the system of knowledge can be regarded as complete only when it reverts to its principle. Transcendental philosophy, therefore, could be complete only when that identity—the highest solution of its whole problem—could be demonstrated in its principle, the _Ego_.

It is therefore postulated that, in the subjective—in the consciousness itself—that activity, at once conscious and unconscious, can be shown.

Such an activity can be no other than the _æsthetic_, and every work of art can be conceived only as the product of such. The ideal work of art and the real world of objects are therefore products of one and the same activity; the meeting of the two (the conscious and the unconscious) _without_ consciousness, gives the real—_with_ consciousness, the æsthetic world.

The objective world is only the primal, still unconscious, poetry of the mind; the universal _organum_ of philosophy, the key-stone of its whole arch, is the philosophy of art.

IV.—ORGAN OF TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

1. The only immediate object of transcendental consideration is the subjective (II.); the only organ for philosophizing in this manner is the _inner sense_, and its object is such that, unlike that of mathematics, it can never become the object of external intuition. The object of mathematics, to be sure, exists as little outside of knowledge, as that of philosophy. The whole existence of mathematics rests on intuition; it exists, therefore, only in intuition; and this intuition itself is an external one. In addition to this, the mathematician never has to deal immediately with the intuition—the construction itself—but only with the thing constructed, which, of course, can be exhibited outwardly; whereas the philosopher looks only at the act of construction itself, which is purely an internal one.

2. Moreover, the objects of the transcendental philosopher have no existence, except in so far as they are freely produced. Nothing can compel to this production, any more than the external describing of a figure can compel one to regard it internally. Just as the existence of a mathematical figure rests on the outer sense, so the whole reality of a philosophical idea rests upon the inner sense. The whole object of this philosophy is no other than the action of Intelligence according to fixed laws. This action can be conceived only by means of a peculiar, direct, inner intuition, and this again is possible only by production. But this is not enough. In philosophizing, one is not only the object considered, but always at the same time the subject considering. To the understanding of philosophy, therefore, there are two conditions indispensable: first, that the philosopher shall be engaged in a continuous internal activity, in a continuous production of those primal actions of the intelligence; second, that he shall be engaged in continuous reflection upon the productive action;—in a word, that he shall be at once the contemplated (producing) and the contemplating.

3. By this continuous duplicity of production and intuition, that must become an object which is otherwise reflected by nothing. It cannot be shown here, but will be shown in the sequel, that this becoming-reflected on the part of the absolutely unconscious and non-objective, is possible only by an æsthetic act of the imagination. Meanwhile, so much is plain from what has already been proved, that all philosophy is productive. Philosophy, therefore, no less than art, rests upon the productive faculty, and the difference between the two, upon the different direction of the productive power. For whereas production in art is directed outward, in order to reflect the unconscious by products, philosophical production is directed immediately inward, in order to reflect it in intellectual intuition. The real sense by which this kind of philosophy must be grasped, is therefore the æsthetic sense, and hence it is that the philosophy of art is the true organum of philosophy (III.)

Out of the vulgar reality there are only two means of exit—poetry, which transports us into an ideal world, and philosophy, which makes the real world vanish before us. It is not plain why the sense for philosophy should be more generally diffused than that for poetry, especially among that class of men, who, whether by memory-work (nothing destroys more directly the productive) or by dead speculation (ruinous to all imaginative power), have completely lost the æsthetic organ.

4. It is unnecessary to occupy time with common-places about the sense of truth, and about utter unconcern in regard to results, although it might be asked, what other conviction can yet be sacred to him who lays hands upon the most certain of all—that there are things outside of us? We may rather take one glance more at the so-called claims of the common understanding.

The common understanding in matters of philosophy has no claims whatsoever, except those which every object of examination has, _viz._, to be completely explained.

It is not, therefore, any part of our business to prove that what it considers true, is true, but only to exhibit the unavoidable character of its illusions. This implies that the objective world belongs only to the necessary limitations which render self-consciousness (which is I) possible; it is enough for the common understanding, if from this view again the necessity of its view is derived.

For this purpose it is necessary, not only that the inner works of the mental activity should be laid open, and the mechanism of necessary ideas revealed, but also that it should be shown by what peculiarity of our nature it is, that what has reality only in our intuition, is reflected to us as something existing outside of us.

As natural science produces idealism out of realism, by mentalizing the laws of Nature into laws of intelligence, or super-inducing the formal upon the material (I.), so transcendental philosophy produces realism out of idealism, by materializing the laws of Nature, or introducing the material into the formal.

GENESIS.
By A. BRONSON ALCOTT.

“God is the constant and immutable Good; the world is Good in a
state of becoming, and the human soul is that in and by which the
Good in the world is consummated.”—PLATO.

I.—VESTIGES.

Behmen, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Plato, conceives that Nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present existence, being the struggle to recover from Nature’s lapse, is embarrassed with double difficulties by deflection from rectitude on his part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively conspiring, to account for Nature’s mishaps, or Man’s. Since, assuming man to be Nature’s ancestor, and Nature man’s ruins rather, himself is the impediment he seeks to remove; and, moreover, conceiving Nature as corresponding in large—or macrocosmically—to his intents, for whatsoever embarrassments he finds therein, himself, and none other, takes the blame. Eldest of creatures, and progenitor of all below him, personally one and imperishable in essence, it follows that if debased forms appear in Nature, it must be consequent on Man’s degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal kingdom—these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.

“Most happy he who hath fit place assigned
To his beasts, and disaforestered his mind;
Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,
And is not ape himself to all the rest.”[11]

It is man alone who conceives and brings forth the beast in him, that swerves and dies; perversion of will by mis-choice being the fate that precipitates him into serpentine form, clothed in duplicity, cleft into sex,

“Parts of that Part which once was all.”

It is but one and the same soul in him, entertaining a dialogue with himself, that is symbolized in The Serpent, Adam, and the Woman; nor need there be fabulous “Paradises Lost or Regained,” for setting in relief this serpent symbol of temptation, this Lord or Lucifer in our spiritual Eden:

“First state of human kind,
Which one remains while man doth find
Joy in his partner’s company;
When two, alas! adulterate joined,
The serpent made the three.”

II.—THE DEUCE.

“I inquired what iniquity was, and found it to be no substance, but
perversion of the Will from the Supreme One towards lower
things.”—_St. Augustine._

Better is he who is above temptation than he who, being tempted, overcomes; since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination in his breast, which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far sinned as to entertain the tempting lust stirring within him, and betraying his lapse from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, and are virtuous by choice; while the holy, being one, are above all need of deliberating, their volitions answering spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or _other_ within, that confronts and seduces the Will; the Adversary and Deuce we become individually, and thus impersonate in the Snake.[12]

III.—SERPENT SYMBOL.

One were an Œdipus to expound this serpent mythology; yet failing this, were to miss finding the keys to the mysteries of Genesis, and Nature were the chaos and abyss; since hereby the one rejoins man’s parted personality, and recreates lost mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist, a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our May-day dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those “traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors.” An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” becomes the more significant when we learn that _seraph_ in the original means a serpent; _cherub_, a dove; these again symbolizing facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the invertebrated cranium accepted by eminent naturalists, and so substantiating the symbol in nature; this being ophiomorphous, a series of spires, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure, set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, supreme in personal uprightness, and holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as he lapses from his integrity, thus debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout Nature’s kingdoms; or, again, aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplifts and crowns his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech, thereby liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts.[13]

“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.”

IV.—EMBRYONS.

“The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work, in the
divine mind before it exists in the creature.”—_Leibnitz._

As the male impregnates the female, so mind charges matter with form and fecundity; the spermatic world being life in transmission and body in embryo. So the egg is a genesis and seminary of forms, (the kingdoms of animated nature sleeping coiled in its yolk) and awaits the quickening magnetism that ushers them into light. Herein the human embryon unfolds in series the lineaments of all forms in the living hierarchy, to be fixed at last in its microcosm, unreeling therefrom its faculties into filamental organs, spinning so minutely the threads, “that were it physically possible to dissolve away all other members of the body, there would still remain the full and perfect figure of a man. And it is this perfect cerebro-spinal axis, this statue-like tissue of filaments, that, physically speaking, is the man.“ The mind above contains him spiritually, and reveals him physically to himself and his kind. Every creature assists in its own formation, souls being essentially creative and craving form.

“For the creature delights in the image of the Creator; and the soul of man will in a manner clasp God to herself. Having nothing mortal, she is wholly inebriated from God; for she glories in the harmony under which the human body exists.”[14]

V.—PROMETHEUS.

“Imago Dei in animo; mundi, in corpore.”

Man is a soul, informed by divine ideas, and bodying forth their image. His mind is the unit and measure of things visible and invisible. In him stir the creatures potentially, and through his personal volitions are conceived and brought forth in matter whatsoever he sees, touches, and treads under foot. The planet he spins.

He omnipresent is,
All round himself he lies,
Osiris spread abroad;
Upstaring in all eyes.
Nature his globed thought,
Without him she were not,
Cosmos from chaos were not spoken,
And God bereft of visible token.

A theosmeter—an instrument of instruments—he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being spirit’s acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental, essential, he generates elements and forces, expiring while consuming, and perpetually replenishing his waste; the final conflagration a current fact of his existence. Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is ablaze, refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phœnix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light its resolvent emblem.[15]

“Thee, Eye of Heaven, the great soul envies not,
By thy male force is all we have, begot.”

VI.—IDEAL METHOD.

“It has ever been the misfortune of the mere materialist, in his
mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas on the other, to
invert nature’s order, and thus hang the world’s picture as a man
with his heels upwards.”—_Cudworth._

This inverse order of thought conducts of necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature’s author. Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance, and must needs pile his atom atop of atom, cement cell on cell, in constructing his column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape’s glorified effigy, as Nature’s frontispiece and head. Life’s atomy with life omitted altogether, man wanting. Not thus reads the ideal naturalist the Book of lives. But opening at spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas and finding their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs, faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its connections and inter-dependencies appear in series and degrees as he traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man the connexus, archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos,—the primeval Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and survivor.

VII.—DIALOGIC.

If the age of iron and brass be hard upon us, fast welding its fetters and chains about our foreheads and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean fire of thought to liberate letters, science, art, philosophy, using the new agencies let loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention and discovery, in the service of the soul, as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipresence in nature, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of atom and solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, thought is pushing its inquiries into the unexplored regions of man’s personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrument lends the outlay and means—facilities ample and unprecedented—new instruments for the new discoverers. Using no longer contentedly the eyes of a toiling circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative thought, intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is finely disseminated, a broader synthesis accurately generalized from the materials accumulated on the mind during the centuries, the globe’s contents being gathered in from all quarters: the book of creation, newly illustrated and posted to date. The new Calculus is ours: an organon alike serviceable to naturalist and metaphysician: a Dialogic for resolving things into thoughts, matter into mind, power into personality, man into God, many into one; soul in souls seen as the creative controlling spirit, pulsating in all bodies, inspiring, animating, organizing, immanent in the atoms, circulating at centre and circumference, willing in all wills, personally embosoming all persons an unbroken synthesis of Being.

Footnote 11:

“Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have been born one
from another in the same way that Adam—i. e. mankind—was, namely, in
the image of God; for that which proceeds from the Eternal has eternal
manner of birth.”—_Behmen._

Footnote 12:

“It is a miserable thing to have been happy; and a self-contracted
wretchedness is a double one. Had felicity always been a stranger to
humanity, our present misery had been none; and had not ourselves been
the authors of our ruins, less. We might have been made unhappy, but,
since we are miserable, we chose it. He that gave our outward
enjoyments might have taken them from us, but none could have robbed
us of innocence but ourselves. While man knew no sin, he was ignorant
of nothing that it imported humanity to know; but when he had sinned,
the same transgression that opened his eyes to see his own shame, shut
them against most things else but it and the newly purchased misery.
With the nakedness of his body, he saw that of his soul, and the
blindness and dismay of his faculties to which his former innocence
was a stranger, and that which showed them to him made them. We are
not now like the creatures we were made, having not only lost our
Maker’s image but our own; and do not much more transcend the
creatures placed at our feet, than we come short of our ancient
selves.”—_Glanvill._

Footnote 13:

“I maintain that the different types of the human family have an
independent origin, one from the other, and are not descended from
common ancestors. In fact, I believe that men were created in nations,
not in individuals; but not in nations in the present sense of the
word; on the contrary, in such crowds as exhibited slight, if any,
diversity among themselves, except that of sex.”—_Agassiz._

Footnote 14:

“Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast covered me in my mother’s
womb. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in a secret
place, and there curiously wrought as in the lowest parts of the
earth: there thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and
in thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance were
fashioned when as yet there was none of them.”—PSALM cxxxix: 13, 15,
16.

Footnote 15:

“Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the materials from the
atmosphere and compounding them for his food. Even life itself, as we
know it, is but a process of combustion, of which decomposition is the
final conclusion; through this combustion all the constituents return
back into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence they
came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames, arise into
regions where our science has no longer any value.”—_Schleiden._

ANALYSIS OF HEGEL’S ÆSTHETICS.
Translated from the French of CH. BENARD, by J. A. MARTLING.