The Church of St. Bunco Part 11

CHAPTER XVI.

THE GRAND RESULT OF DISSECTING PHENOMENA.

Since the days of Immanuel Kant, no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought--the reason being that he saw through, and explained, the principle of universal relativity, the law of scientific idealism, and relaid the whole structure, from the corner-stone up.

Before Kant it was known well enough that "matter," however we must all accept it with our hands and eyes, has no standing, under the a.n.a.lysis of thought, except as a system of effects on ourselves. Hume, we remember, saw all this so clearly that he p.r.o.nounced the very organs of sense, "our limbs and members," to be "not our body," but "certain impressions" to which the mind ascribes "a corporeal existence." Our limbs and members certainly _are_ our body--the only body we have--but Hume was right in his meaning that our body is a phenomenon which has no existence but as a plexus of impressions on a principle of intelligence, possessing various modes of reception, named senses. But this _principle_ of _intelligence_ itself was, to Hume, not a fact to be grasped by "reason," not a principle to be known and described, but was to be taken as a "force and vivacity"

unknowable beyond an _instinct_ of it. Hume's unknowable "force and vivacity"--an improved form of Locke's "blank-tablet"--Kant _a.n.a.lyzed_ in the light of its products; namely, those conjuncts of sense-effects called objects; those conjuncts of objects called species, genera, and categories; and finally those conjuncts of all things and all conditions of things, called transcendental ideas. Now, such conjuncts of various "manifolds" actually exist. They are man's percepts and concepts; they are his facts, his environment. But _as_ percepts and concepts, and always conjuncts of "the manifold," they are formed, organized, totalized, through a _principle_--the principle of perception and conception itself.

This is Kant's _a-priori_ synthetical unit, common and necessary to all "things" and to all "experience."

The last word of any weight, against this reduction of matter to mind, was said a few years ago by that exceptionally acute thinker, Professor Huxley, in his summary of Hume. Too able and learned, both as philosopher and scientist, to question idealism, Huxley admitted it unqualifiedly.

But, not having gone beyond the British proofs of it, he defended what is commonly called "materialism" in this way:

"If we a.n.a.lyze the proposition that all mental phenomena are the effects or products of material phenomena, all that it means amounts to this: that whenever those states of consciousness which we call sensation, or emotion, or thought, come into existence, complete investigation will show good reason for the belief that they are preceded by those other phenomena of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion. All material changes appear, in the long run, to be modes of motion; but our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the place and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is restricted to those feelings of which we a.s.sume it to be the cause."

To this last posture of materialism, a competent understanding of Kant is the _only reply that has ever been needed_. It is simply of no consequence to the case what states of consciousness precede or follow other states of consciousness. Let it be granted (whether true or not) that "phenomena of consciousness to which we give the names of matter and motion" precede all others. What of it? Kant has proved to us that _no_ phenomenon of consciousness--no matter, no motion, no sensation--and, beyond all these, no time and no s.p.a.ce, in which all the rest appear--has, or can have, _any existence_, except as put into unity, form, and order, by the unity, form, and order of mind. If both "the synthesis of apprehension" and "the synthesis of apperception" enter into any state of consciousness named matter, _to give it birth_, there is no possibility that the element of intelligence can be an _after-birth_ of the process.

All our objects, then, from a germ cell to the horizon, are constructed such through a mental principle innate in our own structure. But here it must be re-iterated and re-emphasized that whatever we, as units of mind, may embody in objects as _form_, the _filling_ of them is not ours. It has a source apart. The filling of our objects comes from "the ultimate non-ego," the "background of matter." This ultimate non-ego was a heritage to Kant from British idealism. He took it for granted at his first step and held by it unchanged when he was old and exhausted. He called it the "noumenon," the "real correlate of matter," and pluralized it as "things in themselves." But he insisted, as firmly as Herbert Spencer has since done, that the "noumenon" is "unknown and unknowable."

In a certain way--vital enough, too--"things in themselves" _are_ "unknown and unknowable." Man is a small, dependent, limited being. Let us admit at once every old proverb in the world, to the effect that "the finite cannot comprehend the infinite." Sir William Hamilton issued a tedious list of such proverbs. Let us adopt the whole of it. "The finite cannot comprehend the infinite." The very meaning of "things in themselves" is that they are withheld from us in their _specific contents_. But in their _general nature_ they are related and revealed to us; and the revelation is always a.s.serted when we name them "source of impact," the "real correlate of matter," "things in themselves," or even "the unknown and unknowable." Is there an "unknown and unknowable?" Yes, there _is_. But whatever _is_ has _being_--_must_ have being, or not be that which "is." So much then we _know_ of "the unknown and unknowable"; it has being; it is a _fact_. But we know it negatively, as well as positively. We know what it is _not_, on precisely the same ground that we know what it _is_. Being a "noumenon,"

it is _not_ a phenomenon; being a "thing in _itself_," it is not what things are to _us_. Being "the real correlate of matter," it is _not_ matter, but is the objective background of matter.

But _now_: Kant had a.n.a.lyzed matter and found it to be a _relation_--a relation between finite subjective awareness and this very noumenal background now in evidence. He had found, too, that all _matter_--every spicule of it--is _exhausted in the relation_. He had found that, out of the relation, _matter has no existence_. By these presents, then, we know that the objective background of matter, the ultimate non-ego, is _not material_.

And, at this point, where are we, if we pause and think? When reduced to elements, to principles, what is there of the universe--the all of things?

Just the subjective and the objective, mind and matter. Hence, that which is _not matter_ is _mind_. Nothing else is left for it.

We may wriggle at this terminus as much as we like, but there is no dodging it. It may be said, for instance, that, while we _know_ and _experience_ nothing but mind and matter (including with matter its phenomenal vistas, s.p.a.ce and time), we can _imagine something_ else than either; and, during the past fifty years, this nonsense has found lodgment in some heads. Now I can imagine _anything_, in the meaning that I can arbitrarily produce some foolish _fancy_. I can imagine a white blackbird, with his tail-feathers on his head. But I cannot imagine even this self-evident contradiction as a thing of neither mind nor matter. What is an object of "imagination" in the meaning of fancy? It may be empty of matter, and so unlike the white blackbird. But _no_ object of imagination can be empty of mind. Imagination is itself an act of mind; hence every possible product of imagination must partake of mind. If, therefore, I imagine something apart from mind and matter, it must still spring from mind, contain mind, and so _not_ be apart from mind. The "_reductio ad absurdum_" can be had cheap and sure, just where it is most needed.

After Immanuel Kant had once and for good dissected the universe, it seems a pity that he declined to put his findings together, and take the last logical step of his magnificent demonstrations. As a requisite, perhaps, to his microscopic a.n.a.lysis of human subjectivity, he declined to generalize his own discoveries. In short, Kant's synthesis was Hegel. But Hegel we need not follow, as our short cut to him, through the solution of noumena, is worth more, as yet, than the whole German tour of "post-Kantean philosophy."

Very early in his work Kant said:

"There are two sources of human knowledge (which probably spring from _a common, but to us unknown root_), namely, sense and understanding. By the former, objects are _given_ to us; by the latter, _thought_."

Dissecting, with Kant, the nature of "understanding," we have discovered in it the unal form of all our re-presentations--of every perceptible and conceivable objected fact. Dissecting "sense," with the same instructor, we have found it to be certain modes of mental susceptibility, its physical organs being nothing but relations between susceptible awareness and the noumenal unknown, like all the rest of "matter." Led, once more, by our Professor straight up to this noumenal unknown, where _he_ willed to stop and turn his back on it, we have only had to _look_, in order to see it collapse into the self-retention of Spirit--spirit _out_ of _us_, but still _in itself_, and thus going to make up the totality of Spiritual Being. We have thus found the "one common root" of all knowledge and all things. But we have touched, also, the apex of thought, and can now see what is meant--really and fully meant--by "_absolute idealism_."

Absolute Idealism is not merely a phrase; it is a grand and glorious fact.

Immersed in matter, stuck in our senses, we may insist on looking at sensuous phenomena as our friend John Jasper looked at the sun, with honest contempt for Copernicus and Newton. "De earf do _not_ move roun' de sun," exclaimed the st.u.r.dy preacher, "but de bressed sun move roun' de earf. Dere she go now: don't I see her wi' dese very eyes?" Parson Jasper did see the sun moving round the earth, and in the same way we all see the objects of our senses existing in perfect independence of ourselves.

Still, as surely as astronomy has proved the delusion of taking the sun's movement from the eye, philosophy, with the aid of "practical science,"

has proved the delusion of taking objective re-presentations as not constructed through subjective being. The inevitable end of this proof is the dissolution of noumena as anything "material," and the inclusion of all things in Universal Spirit. Of such spirit, finite subjectivity is a function--a necessary partic.i.p.ative reflex, through which the Universal Spirit is life, manifestation, self-evolution.

CHAPTER XVII.

SOME SEQUENCES OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM.

Since Kant, we have said, "no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought." It must be added that since the fulfilment of Kant's _Critique_, especially by Hegel, there has not been one stone left as a foundation for "materialism." It goes right on, however, in multifarious forms, its defunct exponents still imagining they live.

Surgical psychology, in special, is still as active with scalpel and microscope as if ours were the day of Coudillac and Erasmus Darwin. The knife goes into the brain, and the eye peers after it, with the funny expectation of seeing, with Dr. Cabanis, some spicule or plexus of matter, there, "which secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." The work is excellent as anatomy, and may have a plenty of important uses. But we, here, if we have had the capacity and patience to grasp the findings of Immanuel Kant, know that mind can never be derived from any physical correspondence of its nature and action. We know that every possible attempt at such derivation is merely a side-show of Parson Jasper's great astronomical comedy, which Copernicus exploded four hundred years ago. We know that every fiber, every solid or liquid, of the brain, with every movement of every atom it contains, is a ready-made physical object in a ready-made s.p.a.ce and a ready-made time. But if we know Kant, we know, without a misgiving, that s.p.a.ce and time, with all things in them, are not only dependencies but are literal creations and manufactures of a universal principle named _mind_. We know it is this principle which furnishes the form, the unity, and so the very existence of every phenomenon. Hence we know, finally, that the first step in the understanding of matter is the a.n.a.lysis of mind, through which all matter _is_ and is _constructed_. Without this first step, all other steps are simply a stumble in the dark--the blind-man's buff of children. Or we may say, with a little more dignity, perhaps, that every material law of the cosmos is subject to "The Law of Scientific Idealism."

Now scientific idealism, pursued to the end, merges in absolute idealism.

The source and substance of the universe is Intelligent Spirit; or, as the Bible and its Theologians say, this is the All-In-All.

For fifty years--from the publication of Kant's _Critique_ in 1781, along through Fichte, and Sch.e.l.ling, to the death of Hegel in 1831--the vast illumination of thought that has been summed up as "German Transcendentalism" strove to unify natural theology and practical science in "Absolute Idealism." It will yet be seen that the work was done, however ill-comprehended. The good old Kant still had his whole head with him when he said, in 1787, "the danger, in this case, is not that of being refuted, but of being misunderstood." The Comtes, the Hamiltons, the Mills and Spencers--with no end, too, of their German brothers--are ill.u.s.trious examples in proof of Kant's remark, however greatly they may be respected within the limits of their own work.

Once and for good, the history of philosophy, when understood, and the history of science, when understood, have joined in the proof that the principle of all life--we may say G.o.d if we like--is Spirit Principle.

Transcendentalism--a bulky word, but covering much more than the letter of it--was naturally too high and too deep a result to get all at once into the average human head. For thirty-odd years after the close of its epoch in Germany--or until, in 1864, Dr. James Hutchison Stirling produced his _Secret of Hegel_--not a man stood on the earth adequate to reproduce transcendentalism in basis and system. But the practical gist of it, without the full center or circ.u.mference, gradually became a part of the world's literature. In Britain, most notably through Thomas Carlyle, the new light penetrated biography, history, criticism, and even political disquisition. In America, focused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same light, whiter and purer if less flaming and burning, both vivified and purified all things on which it was shed. There the Infinite Oversoul and the finite undersoul seemed once again to meet in communion and evolution.

Meanwhile, Theodore Parker, with his vast scholarship and overpowering courage, preached Jesus of Nazareth, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule, with little regard for any organized theology of his day, whether its Unitarianism or its Calvinistic Orthodoxy. Back of all this, as now appears, there was a plain, uncultured, but inquiring and thoughtful man, in the byways of New England, who from the mechanism of clocks turned to the workings of the human mind, and in his own way reached the depth of knowledge and the mysteries of life. From a few practical experiments, he, too, a.n.a.lyzed the things of matter, and found them to be re-presentations, externalizations, of elemental spirit. And then he drew the inference that spirit molds, directs, governs matter, and so that health of mind materializes health of body.

But now, at once, the whole question at issue confronts us--what is the true and full position and power _of mind in therapeutics_? This question must be answered, here, not from the Quimby standpoint, and much less from that of the shallow muddle termed Christian Science, but from the standpoint of actual, accredited, established metaphysics, now substantially bearing the concensus of religion, philosophy, and the practical investigation of material phenomena.

By aid of Kant, with our short-cut to the logical and necessary end of his achievement, we have grasped the elemental source and solvent of man and his universe. It is Spirit in its evolution. But, in this evolution, man--or say rather and always _the principle of sensation and consciousness in which man inheres_--is merely the general form, diversely individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body, its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and unity. The forms of matter, with no exception, are fabricated in this way.

Thus, not figuratively, but literally and with exact knowledge, we may repeat after St. John:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with G.o.d, and the Word was G.o.d. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made."

But the principle of animal apprehension and human apperception--or say just the conscious and the sub-conscious--is not the Ultimately Creative One, but is, in _us_, only a sub-creative power and agency. We simply individualize it in endless degrees and variations, all of us framing the same general world of objects, conceptions and feelings, but no one of us being, seeing, or feeling, in all respects, exactly like any other incarnation of our common ident.i.ty.

But while the _form_--the unity, and thus the individuality--of all things, is materialized from Spirit through sensation and consciousness in subjectivity--while this is the secret and genesis of all creation--we must ever hold fast to the equally basic and universal fact that the _filling_ of the form--the infinite variety of impact on subjectivity which furnishes the diversity of objects--all this comes from that ultimate spirit-background crudely called "the unknown and unknowable."

Now this background of Absolute Spirit, the very withholding of which from finite creatures const.i.tutes them such, inst.i.tutes their law of progress, and gives movement of expression to the Infinite Itself, can only be absorbed and mastered by human beings through study, work, and experience. While genuine metaphysics, then, a.s.sures us of our spirit-origin and relative oneness with G.o.d--of being G.o.d's children far more directly and intimately than most of us have ever imagined--it teaches us that for practical purposes, in our condition of existence called "matter," it makes no difference _what_ we _call_ this condition.

'Tis something actual, something definite, something _fixed_, just as long as we are in our earthly relation to it. From this point of view, Dr.

Johnson's kicking of the stone to refute Berkeley was a deserved kick, and even Byron's fun was justified in his tipsy lines,

"When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said."

All things are spirit surely enough; but the phenomena of matter, as transformed spirit, are related to each other under the laws of what we necessarily designate as material nature. Little by little, through long and hard exertion, we find out what these relations are, and how they are fitted to the human center of them. Some things are good to eat and to nourish us; others to poison and kill us. A cold or fever may be a manifestation of spirit, and an herb or drug may be another; but if the herb or drug counteracts and destroys the cold or the fever, and experience proves it ten thousand times, who cares to a.n.a.lyze a dose of aconite or a cup of saffron-tea into a draft of "mortal" or "immortal"

mind? The process is a mere fooling with ideals--hysterics jumping at the moon. _On metaphysical grounds_--as far as anybody knows what metaphysics really means--there is no need that our physicians, if they are "good physicians," should trouble themselves much about a Mrs. Mary Baker G.

Eddy. Esculapius came into the world long before her, and his followers will stay in it long after her materialized divinity has risen into a more spiritual and a more intelligent state.

The same may be said of our theologians. Their creeds have not come out of nothing, however much the spirit of them may have grown thick and muddy through crude understandings. The Christian Church, surely, can yet offer to mankind something better than the Eddy "Church Scientist"; and if it can, it is in no ultimate jeopardy from a few, or a few hundred, congregations of half-educated faddists.

For a student of history--not in its moments, but in its decades and centuries--it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of the fact and _the spread of it_, in its being a protest against the depressing materialism around it--a materialism which, though rationally decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever since the execution.

The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark, and b.u.t.ting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending "mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has long been settled in the public mind--such part of the public mind, at least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.

Has the pulpit itself--orthodox and not so orthodox--contributed to the success of Eddy "Science"? We must say it has. The practise, among the sects, of twisting the Bible out of its straight, historical, natural significance, and fitting its texts to every sort of whim, folly, and malefaction--this general practise has at last culminated in Mrs. Eddy's _Key to the Scriptures_, with pretty nearly the dissolution of them in the abomination of interpretation.

But "Christian Science"--the Eddy misfit for a specious name--has had its rise, and it has probably risen about as high as it can reach, notwithstanding its rapid extension for the moment. Only its protrusion from insignificance and non-attention was needed to uncover its foundation on the sands of ignorance, its strength in the perennial weakness and credulity of mankind, and its business success in ordinary, or more than ordinary, business cupidity. Has it done no good in the world, then? Ah, that is another question. Whatever may have been the chief motive of its founder, and whatever may have been its "comedy of errors," it has forced the inception of a movement that, as a whole, may have vast results for the human mind and the human body. Whatever material medicines may be necessary to mankind while they themselves are in a material condition, psychic forces in the cure of disease can no longer be ignored. What is the extent, and what the limit, of these forces, is a problem that must be examined. As conditionally--here and now--man is _both spiritual and corporeal_--it would seem to be a self-evident conclusion that he must have both material and spiritual aids to health. That we can "jump" our condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever presented to the human mind; but the sequences--even physical--of systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pa.s.s some fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If the spirit of evil--of hypocrisy, selfishness and avarice--has entered into the movement of mental healing through another source, the frequent necessity of very human means to divine ends is once more ill.u.s.trated.