Tablets Part 10

If once the great, the wise, were in the minority, and none dreamed of reason becoming popular, reason is fast becoming republicanized; from being the exclusive property of the few is diffusing itself universally as the common possession of the mult.i.tude.

Imperial thought now holds her powerful sway, And drives the peoples on their prosperous way.

The freshest, best thoughts of the best minds of all times are claimed by the community; itself the awakened critic and prompter of the best; all thirsting for information,--world-wisdom,--and drinking off eagerly the lore of centuries. Knowledge everywhere diffused is accessible to all, rolls with the globe, dashes against the sh.o.r.es of every sea, delves the caverns, climbs the hill-tops with sun and moon, for the common benefit. If Hesiod wrote for his times that

"Riches are the soul of feeble men,"

our time is fast translating his line practically:

Riches are the hand of able men;

Capitalists holding kings and presidents in check while playing the better game of civilization, equalizing indirectly by legislative philanthropies the extremes--every man's needs being taken as drafts drawn by Providence on opulence, to be honored at sight:

"Stewards of the G.o.ds alone Are we; have nothing of our own Save what to us the G.o.ds commit, And take away when they see fit."

Once all crimes were capital and punished with death. Now this Draconian code has been so meliorated and softened by the diffusion of mercy and humanity as to take life for life only; is pleading powerfully for the abolition of the death-penalty altogether.

The sects are losing their monopoly in the heavenly luminary, closing no longer their brazen cope of darkening doctrines on the religious horizon to vitiate the social and political morals of mankind. The faiths of the cultivated nations are being revised, Christendom itself drifting with irresistible speed and momentum into a world-religion, commensurate with the advancing thought of advancing minds everywhere. As the Greeks received their G.o.ds from Egypt and Phoenicia, Rome hers from Greece, and we ours from Rome, Judea and Britain, by the law of interfusion we are ripening into a cosmopolitan faith, with its Pantheon for all races.

II.--METHOD.

Ours were a trivial time if busied in building solely from the senses in facts of understanding, having nothing ideal to enshrine. Without symbols, peoples perish. Things must be exalted into some fair image of mind, the senses and gifts magnetized to body forth thoughts; the eye beholding these in what the hands fashion. Ideas supplement and symbolize facts: the field of realities lying behind unseen; the paddock of the common sense being but an enclosure within the immeasurable s.p.a.ces of which thought is royal ranger,--owner of domains far larger and richer than these confine or survey, ideal estates which only mind can claim; quarries out of which nature itself is hewn, eye and hand are shapen. Head and hand should go abreast with thought. If the age of iron and bronze has been welding chains and fetters about the forehead and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean thought, using the new agencies let loose by the Daedalus of mechanic invention in the service of soul as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipotence in nature, the omnipresence, graded s.p.a.ce, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of the solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, discovered the polar axis, set matter on fire, thought is pushing its inquiries into the hitherto unexplored regions of man's personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrumentality lends the outfit and means--facilities ample, unprecedented--new instruments for the new discoveries--new eyes for the new spectacles. Using no longer contentedly the fumbling fingers of the old circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative thought,--intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler a.n.a.lysis is finely discriminated, a broader synthesis generalized from the materials acc.u.mulated in the mind during the centuries, the globe's contents being gathered in from all quarters, the Book of Creation ill.u.s.trated anew, and posted to date. The new calculus is ours. An organon alike serviceable to metaphysician and naturalist--whereby things answer to thought, facts are resolved into truths, images into ideas, matter into mind, power into personality, man into G.o.d; the One soul in all souls revealed as the Creative Spirit pulsating in all b.r.e.a.s.t.s, immanent in all atoms, prompting all wills, and personally embosoming all persons in one unbroken synthesis of Being.[E]

[Footnote E: "Truth can be known by the thinking reason. It has been known by speculative thinkers scattered through the ages. Their systems exist and may be mastered. Their differences are not radical, but lie rather in the mode of exposition--the point of departure, the various obstacles overcome, and the character of the _technique_ used. Their agreement is central and pervading. The method of speculative cognition is to be distinguished from that of sensuous cert.i.tude, and from the reflection of the understanding by the exhaustive nature of its procedure. It considers its subject in a universal manner and its steps are void of all arbitrariness.

In order to detect a speculative system, ask the following questions of it: 1. "Is the highest principle regarded as a fixed, abstract, and rigid one, or as a concrete and self-moving one?" 2. "Is the starting point of the system regarded as the highest principle, and the onward movement of the same merely a result deduced a.n.a.lytically; or is the beginning treated as the most abstract and deficient, while the final result is the basis of all?" In other words, "Is the system a descent from a first principle or an ascent to one?" This will detect a defect of the method, while the former question, (1,) will detect defects in the content or subject matter of the system."--WILLIAM T. HARRIS.]

"It has. .h.i.therto, unhappily, 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 this creative order, and thus hang the world's picture as a man with his heels upwards"--a process conducting of necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature's author.

a.s.suming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance, piles his atom atop of atom, cements cell on cell, in constructing his column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of gifts crown itself surrept.i.tiously with the ape's glorified effigy, as Nature's frontispiece and head--life's atomy with life omitted altogether, man wanting. Contrarywise reads the ideal naturalist the book of lives. Opening at Spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas, he finds their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs, faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its connections and interpendencies appear in series and degrees as he traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man connexus, archetype, and cla.s.sifier 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.[F]

[Footnote F: "There are four modes of knowledge which we are able to acquire in the present life:

1. The first of these results from opinion, by which we learn that a thing is, without knowing the why; and this const.i.tutes that part of knowledge which was called by Aristotle and Plato, erudition; and which consists in moral instructions for the purpose of purifying ourselves from immoderate desires.

2. But the second is produced by the sciences, which from establishing certain principles as hypotheses, conduct to necessary conclusions whereby we arrive at the knowledge of the why, as in the mathematical sciences, but at the same time are ignorant with respect to the principles of these conclusions, because they are merely hypothetical.

3. The third species of knowledge is that which results from Plato's dialectic; in which by a progression through ideas, we arrive at the first principles of things, and at that which is no longer hypothetical, and thus dividing some things and a.n.a.lyzing others, by producing many things from one, and one from many.

4. But the fourth species is still more simple than this; because it no longer uses a.n.a.lyses or compositions, but whole things themselves by intuition, and becomes one with the object of its perception; and this energy is the Divine Reason, which Plato speaks of, and which far transcends other modes of knowledge."--THOMAS TAYLOR.]

III.--MAN.

"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 G.o.d bereft of visible token.

A theometer--an instrument of instruments--he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being the 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, perpetually replenishing his waste;--the final conflagration a current fact of his existence.

Does the a.s.sertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is a blaze refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phoenix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light is its resolvent emblem.[G]

[Footnote G: "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 const.i.tuents 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.]

"Thee, eye of heaven, the great soul envies not, By thy male force is all we have, begot."

"This kindles the fire which exists in every thing, is received by every thing. While it sheds a full light, it is itself hidden. Its presence is unknown, unless some material be given to induce the exertion of its power. It is invisible, as well as unquenchable; and it has the faculty of transforming into itself every thing it touches. It renovates every thing by its vital heat, it illumines every thing by its flashing beams; it can neither be confined nor intermingled; it divides and yet is immutable. It always ascends, it is constantly in motion; it moves by its own will and power, and sets in motion every thing around it. It has the power of seizing, but cannot itself be grasped. It needs no aid. It increases silently and breaks forth in majesty upon all. It generates, it is powerful, invisible, and omnipotent. If neglected, its existence might be forgotten, but on friction being applied, it flashes out again like the sword from its scabbard, shines resplendently by its own natural properties, and soars into the air. Many other powers may yet be noticed as belonging to it. For this reason theologians have a.s.serted that all substances being formed of fire, are thus created as nearly as possible in the image of G.o.d."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Small decoration of a flower and leaves]

II.

MIND.

"But all the G.o.ds we have are in The Mind, By whose proportions only we redeem Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find The measure of ourselves and of our powers, And that all happiness remains confined Within the kingdom of this breast of ours, Without whose bounds all that we look on lies In others' jurisdiction, others' powers, Out of the circuit of our liberties."

DANIEL.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Decorative banner of a gra.s.shopper among greenery]

MIND.

I.--IDEAS.

The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its Powers. They fabled these as G.o.ds celestial, mundane, infernal, according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal metaphysic has not as yet been surpa.s.sed or superseded altogether, as the cla.s.sic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall.

Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow--these distribute mankind into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist, grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.

"Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely, But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."

Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following particle of the pa.s.sing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality which to slower wits seems fixed in s.p.a.ce and apart from thought, subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming, not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our thought.

So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of meaning.[H] Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense.

They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark; at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both.

Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and originals of words.

[Footnote H: CATEGORIES OF SPEECH,