PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. (continued 2)

Another line of thought will, perhaps, lead us more directly and nearer to the end we have in view. The external influence of women on the whole human community is, for the most part (for here, too, there are great and memorable exceptions) confined to a narrow sphere of the immediate duties of the affections, or to similar relations in the wider social circle. So, too, is it inwardly as regards the consciousness. All the faculties of women and their several manifestations lie, if I may so express myself, close together, and, as it were, in a friendly circle around the loving soul, as their common center. With regard, then, to the comparison of the two sexes and their mental differences, I would venture to observe, that on the one side it seems to me that a certain harmonious fullness of the consciousness is the preponderating character; and, on the other, its eccentric evolution. Not that I mean that in the sex which is pre-eminently called to outward activity, the mind loses its grand center in the inner life, or, comet-like, delights to wander in vast, irregular orbits, as is, indeed, commonly enough asserted. My meaning is, simply, that the masculine mind will ever dare, as, indeed, it ought, to move in wider circles than the feminine. The extremes of the consciousness, if the expression be allowable—the farthest poles both of reason and fancy—are, so to speak, the property of the more active sex; while the harmonious union and contact of both in the soul belong to the more sensitive. All such general and characteristic sketches, however, must always be most imperfect. Still I believe it may be safely and truly said, that, with highly-favored dispositions and noble natures (and these must be always supposed and taken for the foundation of such general remarks), the gain to be derived from this intellectual community and influence, in which one individual consciousness completes the other, must be sought in the one sex in a greater development of mind and elevation of soul, and in the other in a more harmonious adjustment and softening of the mental powers, and in a far more sensitive excitement of the soul’s susceptibilities. But in this most intimate of unions, when regarded as divinely blessed, and when in reality it appears to be so, then on either side both mind and soul are, as it were, twice combined and joined together in closest association, and, if we may say so, even married and wedded together. Consequently, while external life derives from marriage its moral foundation and origin, the internal life of man is, as it were, mentally renewed by it, or fructified afresh and redoubled.

LECTURE III. OF THE SOUL’S SHARE IN KNOWLEDGE; AND OF REVELATION.

IN the first Lecture our attention was directed to the thinking soul as the center of the whole human consciousness; while in the second, I attempted fully to set before you, and to delineate, the loving soul as the true middle point of the moral life. The object of our present disquisition will be to ascertain the part which the soul takes in the knowledge to which man is able to attain. The general element, indeed, which the soul furnishes as its contribution to human knowledge, is not indeed very difficult to determine; but when we come to details, there is much that requires to be well weighed and pondered.

Now, the soul furnishes the cognitive mind with language for the expression of its cognitions; and it is even the distinctive character of human knowledge, that it depends on language, which not only forms an essential constituent of it, but is also its indispensable organ. Language, however, the discursive, but at the same time also the vividly figurative language of man, is entirely the product of the soul, which in its production first of all, and pre-eminently, manifests its fruitful and creative energy. In this wonderful creation the two constituent faculties of the soul—fancy and reason—play an equal and co-ordinate part. From the fancy it derives the whole of its figurative and ornamental portion, and also its melodious rhythm and animated tone. And, moreover, its inmost fundamental web and the primary natural roots belong also to man’s original deep feeling of sympathy with outward nature, and therefore to fancy, unless perhaps some would prefer to ascribe them at once to the soul itself, as still more profoundly and intimately akin to nature. To the reason, on the other hand, language owes its logical order, and its grammatical forms and laws of construction. Which part is the more important, or more highly to be esteemed, is a question whose solution will vary according to the point of view which in any case may be adopted as fundamental, or to the different relations under which the whole shall be considered. Both elements, however, are equally essential and indispensable. In all the instances already considered of the reciprocal relation of reason and fancy we found almost invariably a decided preponderance of one or the other; but neither there nor elsewhere will reason and fancy be found combining in such harmonious proportions, or working so thoroughly together, or contributing so equally to the common product, as in the wonderful production of language, and in language itself. And this is the case, not only with language in general, but also with all its species and noblest applications. Now this dependence of the cognitive mind on its organ of language, discursive indeed, but yet almost always figurative—this close and intimate connection between man’s knowledge and his speech—is even the characteristic mark of human intelligence. But the fault of most of the mere speculative thinkers lies even in this, that they abandon the standard of humanity, by seeking to wrest, and to conquer an unhuman, if we may so say, i.e., a wholly independent and absolute knowledge, which, however, it is not in their power to attain to, and in pursuit of which they lose the certainty which lies within their reach, and so at last grasp nothing but an absolute not-knowing, or an endless controversy. If, as we can not but suppose, a communication does take place among those spiritual beings, who in intelligence are preferred to man, then must the immediate speech of these spirits be very different from our half-sensuous half-rational, half-earthly half-heavenly language of nature and humanity. For, even as spiritual, it can not but be immediate—never employing figure and those grammatical forms which human language first analyzes, to form again out of them new and fresh compounds. According to the two properties which constitute the essence of mind [geist], it can only be a communication, a transmission, an awakening or immission of thought—some wholly definite thought—by the will, or else the communicating, exciting, and producing by the thought of some equally definite volition. It may be that something of this, or at least something not absolutely dissimilar, occurs in human operations. It is possible that this immediate language of mind, as a secret and invisible principle of life—as a rare and superior element—is contained also in human language, and, as it were, veiled in the outer body, which, however, becomes visible only in the effects of a luminous and lofty eloquence, in which is displayed the magic force of language and of a ruling and commanding thought. Taken on the whole, however, human speech is no such immediate and magically-working language of mind or spirit. It is rather a figurative language of nature, in which its great permanent hieroglyphics are mirrored again in miniature, and in rapid succession. And it retains this natural and figurative character even in the ordinary form of rational dialogue, which must observe so many varieties and details of grammar, of which superior intelligences have no need for their immediate intercommunion, but in which, as in all other human things, many greater or less grammatical oversights creep in and give rise to important consequences in science and thought, and also in life itself. But in the next place, language is intimately connected and co-ordinate with tradition, whether sacred or profane, with all the recorded fruits of human speculation and inquiry. And as the word is the root out of which the whole stem of man’s transmitted knowledge, or tradition, has grown up, with all its branches and offshoots, so, too, in the eloquent speech, in the elegant composition, and even in all lofty internal meditation—which form, as it were, the leaves, flowers, and fruits of this goodly tree of living tradition—it is again the word by which the whole is carried on and ultimately perfected.

But now, in order to develop still more completely, and more accurately to ascertain the part which the soul, as the creator of language, contributes to human cognition and knowledge, it will be necessary to examine nicely the essence of reason, and especially in relation to its collateral and closely-connected, but subordinate faculties. Above all, it will be advisable to determine, as accurately and carefully as possible, the difference between reason and understanding. For otherwise its proper share in this common fruit and joint product of human knowledge can not be ascribed to each power of mind and to each faculty of the soul, nor their proper places and due limits in the whole be severally assigned.

The faculties, then, of the soul, which stand in the same close relationship to the reason that the senses and the instincts or passions do to the fancy, are memory and conscience. Now, memory may be considered either as a gift, according to its greater or less power of comprehension and retention, or as an art to strengthen and facilitate its operations by artificial means of every kind, or as a problem to determine how far the exercise of it constitutes an essential part of man’s intellectual culture and development. But it is not in any of these points of view that we have here to consider it, but simply in its essential conjunction with the reason and rationality, which appear to be dependent on this union.

In other words, we have to regard the memory principally as the inward clew of recollection and of association in the consciousness, in the ever-flowing stream of thought and interchange of ideas. We may, or, I might rather say, we must, forget infinitely many things. But this connecting thread of memory being once broken, or destroyed, or lost, the reason invariably suffers with it, and is injured, or its exercise limited, or, lastly, is rendered totally confused and extinct. Whenever, in the extreme decrepitude of old age, memory fails, reason ceases in an equal degree to be active and energetic, and is supplanted by more or less of a foolish doting. In sleep, no doubt, consciousness is regularly interrupted, but still it is immediately restored again on awaking. If the contrary were to take place, if, as is the foundation of many an ingenious story among the poets, when suddenly awakened we could not recall our former memory and our knowledge, then should we be continually falling into mistakes about ourselves and lose all identity of consciousness. Some such violent interruption or rent in the inward memory of self-consciousness is invariably to be found in madness, and is a leading symptom of it. And here I would merely call upon you to observe a further illustration of what has been already more than once pointed out. The triple principle of body, soul, and spirit is again repeated and manifested even in this sad state of mental alienation, and in all its different forms and species. In true lunacy or monomania—which is generally harmless and quiet—a radically false but fixed idea is often associated, and is not inconsistent with an extraordinary shrewdness on all other points. Nevertheless, this fixed erroneous idea, being made the center of all other thoughts and of the whole consciousness, produces that confusion and that disorganization of the mind which characterizes this form of a disordered intellect. But in true madness, or frenzy, the seat of the disease is in the soul, which, having broken loose from all the ties and restraints of reason and rational habit, appears to have fallen a prey to some hostile, wild, and raging force of nature. In idiotcy, lastly, especially where it is inborn and conjoined with the perfection of the external organs of sense, we must assume the existence of some faulty organization, some defect in the brain, or whatever else is the unknown but higher organ both of thought and life. The source of the last is altogether physical and corporeal, whereas moral causes often co-operate in the highest degree to the production of the former two. The deaf and dumb, if left wholly to themselves, would, in all probability, belong always to the third class, since, with the loss of speech they are simultaneously deprived of a leading condition of rationality. And, accordingly, the first object with those who undertake the difficult task of training these unfortunate beings is to furnish them with another language, by means of signs, instead of the ordinary audible speech of which the accident of birth has deprived them. This instance, therefore, is only a further confirmation of what I have already advanced, that the intellectual character is, in every respect, most intimately dependent on the faculty of speech. A more minute examination of these matters belongs to physical science. Nevertheless, our passing remark on the triple character of this psychological evil, or misfortune, will not, I hope, be found inappropriate here, as affording, even in this narrow and special sphere of a disordered intellect, a further illustration of the general principle of our theory of the human consciousness.

Now, the outer and especially the higher senses may, by reason of the supremacy of the fancy, to which they are subordinate, be termed, with propriety, so many applied faculties of imagination. In the same way we might give the same designation to the inclinations and impulses—the good as well as the evil—if, perhaps, it would not be more accurate to name them an imagination passed into life. In a similar way the memory may be considered as an applied reason which in the application has become quite mechanical and habitual; for unquestionably the logical arrangement is the chief quality in memory. From this it derives both its value and scientific utility. On the other hand, there are certain acquired mental aptitudes which, though originally they can not be formed without the voluntary exercise of memory, become at last a completely unconscious and mechanical operation—the facility, for instance, of learning by heart, or the acquisition of foreign languages, or catching up of musical tunes. In all these the reason has become an instinct, just as the instinct of animals, their artistic impulse and skill, may be designated an unconscious analogy of reason.

In this subordinate faculty of the memory, the reason, agreeably to its specific character, exhibits itself as a useful and ministering agent. In conscience, on the contrary, as its highest function, it assumes a somewhat negative character. But in both relations, whether as a ministerial or negative faculty of thought, the reason, in its place, is of the highest value. If occasionally we have seemed to detract from and to limit its importance, such remarks have been called forth by the undue and overweening authority which the present age would claim for the reason. This is the sole end and meaning of our opposition, which is directed exclusively against that spurious reason which claims to be supreme, and arrogates to itself a productive power; whereas, in truth, it ought not to be the one, and can never be the other. The thought which distinguishes, divides, and analyzes, and that also which combines, infers, and concludes—which, as such, make up the faculty of reason—may be so carried on in indefinite and infinite process, as ultimately to get entirely rid of its object-matter. It is this endless thinking, without a correspondent object, that is the source of scientific error, which, as in all cases it arises solely out of this vacuum in thinking, can only lead to a thinking of nothing—a cogitation absolutely null and false. Far different is the case where a memory, stored with the rich materials of intellectual experience, forms the useful basis of man’s studies and pursuits, or where, as is the case with the apperception of the conscience, the object, even while it is less extensive and manifold, is the more highly and more intensely important. Now, as the reason generally is not only a combining and connecting, but also a distinguishing faculty of thought, so likewise the conscience is a similar power of drawing distinctions in the thought and in the internal consciousness, though in a higher and special degree, and also in a different form from that which, in all other instances, is discursive reason. For it is by a simple feeling and immediate perception that the conscience, in obedience to the voice within man, draws between right and wrong, or good and evil, the greatest of all distinctions. This voice of conscience, while it makes itself heard among all nations, nevertheless, under the ever and widely-varying influence of ruling ideas of the age, and of education, and of custom, speaks in different times and places, in differing tones and dialects. But these differences extend only to subordinate matters. The primary and essential point remains unchanged and never to be mistaken; the same dominant tone and key-note sounds through all these variations—the common tongue and language of human nature and of an untaught and innate fear of God. This fact has led many to regard the conscience as the principal source of all higher and divine truth; with whom I can readily concur, so long as they do not mean thereby that it is the only source, to the exclusion of every other.

Now it is surely significant that in German—and all languages furnish numerous instances of such significant allusions—the word and the name of reason[17] is derived from that internal perception of the conscience which constitutes its highest function. What, then, it may be asked, is perceived by this wonderful perception, that before it the will inwardly retires and withdraws even its earlier and most cherished wishes? The warning voice it is called, in every age and nation. It is, as it were, one who within us warns and remonstrates. It is not, therefore, our own Me, but as it were another, and, as a vague feeling would suggest, of a higher and a different nature. And now by its light that earlier and retiring will appears in like manner as another self—a lower false and seducing Ego—an alien power which would hurry away ourselves and our proper Me. But between the two—this higher warning voice on the one hand, and this constraining, compelling force on the other—there stands a power which is free to decide between them. And this, as soon as the decomposing process is finished, which in the as yet undecided will, or its mixed states, separates and distinguishes between the good voice and the evil inclination—remains to us as our own Ego and our proper self. This inward voice, and the immediate perception of it, is an anchor on which the vessel of man’s existence rides safely on the stormy sea of life, and the ebb and the flow of the will. In other words, it is a divine focus, or a sacred stay of truth. But further, it must be observed, that the understanding of this inner perception, as I have just painted it, does not belong to the reason, to which alone the perceiving can itself be ascribed. The true intelligence thereof—its higher interpretation, and explanation, which adds to it, or recognizes in it a reference to the divine—must, even because it is an intellectual act, be ascribed to the understanding.

The present, therefore, is the place for a close and accurate investigation of the difference between reason and understanding—a question of the highest importance for the whole theory of the consciousness, and its true philosophical interpretation, as well as absolutely for every branch of science. For this purpose I shall follow a line of thought somewhat unusual, perhaps, but which on that account is even the more likely to carry us quickly to the desired end, and to place the distinction in a full and clear light. I lately employed the somewhat hypothetical comparison between man and a superior order of intelligences, as a means of illustrating the faculty of the fancy as the peculiar property of the human consciousness. And now I would go a step higher, and from the acknowledged characteristics of the divine intelligence, derive the means of determining the different functions of the human consciousness, and of setting the relations they stand in, not only to one another, but also to a superior intellect. In this course, however, I shall take nothing for granted but what is well known and generally intelligible. That God is a Spirit, is the concurrent voice of all men, wherever a belief in the one God is professed, or the idea of a Divine Being is diffused. God is a Spirit, and therefore an omniscient intellect and an all-mighty will are unanimously attributed to Him. This axiom, with which a child even of the most ordinary intelligence can associate some kind of meaning, is at the same time the fundamental principle which is involved in all that the deepest thinker can know of God. The same faculties, therefore, that make up the essence and the two functions of created spirits—understanding and will—may, without hesitation, be attributed to the uncreated Spirit; and although this attribution must be understood according to the exalted standard of the infinite distance between the creature and the Creator, still it is made properly and not merely by way of figure.

But now, in Holy Writ, and in the language of pious adoration and prayer, among other nations as well as the Jewish, a multitude of properties, faculties, and senses are ascribed to the Deity in perfectly anthropomorphic descriptions and imagery. Thus mention is even made of His eye, His ear, His guiding hand, His mighty arm, and the omnipotent breath of His mouth. In so far as these are admitted to be mere images there can be no objection to them, and it is not easy to see how they can lead to any abuse. And this is equally the case even with such expressions as it is plain can only be applicable to the Deity in a figurative sense—for instance, when human passions are ascribed to Him—since, if employed properly and literally, they all involve more or less of imperfection. And in the same way, where no forgetfulness is possible or conceivable, it can only be in a figurative sense that it is allowable to speak of memory. And with still less propriety can the faculty of conscience, in its human sense, be ascribed to God. His balance of justice—His regulative thought—is something very different from our mere sense of right. To ascribe conscience to the Deity would be to confound the judge on the bench with the criminal at the bar. Even the first man, as long as he was yet innocent, knew not conscience. For the sense of guilt, and the faculty of perceiving it, must at the very earliest have come simultaneously with the transgression itself, if it was not, rather, consequent upon it. In the application to the Deity of such figurative language, great license is of course allowable. The question, however, which concerns us in a philosophical point of view is whether, in the same proper sense as understanding and will, so also the other faculties which are so peculiarly distinctive of man—reason and fancy, or the soul—can be attributed to the Divine Being. Now it is at once evident that, far beyond all other figurative expressions, it would be perfectly unsuitable to ascribe fancy to God. We feel clearly enough that by so doing we should be leaving the safe ground of truth for the treacherous domain of mythology. That inner mine of intellectual riches which man in his weak measure finds in the faculty of fancy, is, in the case of the Divine Being, furnished once and for all by His omnipotent will; which of itself creates and produces its object, and, unlike created beings, is not confined to any limited data or to a choice between them. Here, then, the Almighty will itself is the full fatherly heart—embracing, nourishing, and sustaining all creatures—or even the living maternal womb of eternal generation, and requires no new and special faculty for this end. In the next place, as to the soul: the expression of the soul of God does, indeed, occur in some of the less known Christian writers of the first centuries of the church, but it soon fell into disuse—from a fear, probably, of its leading to a confusion of idea, and being identified with a mere soul of the world. But however that may be, the soul is simply a passive faculty, and therefore, on that account alone, is highly inappropriate as applied to God. That third property which in the Divine nature is associated with an omniscient intelligence or understanding, and an omnipotent will, can not be called the soul of God, but is even the spirit of love, in which both understanding and will unite and are one. And if this third property be added to the axiomatic definition of the Deity already alluded to, then in the proposition, God is a spirit of love, the double predicate in its essential import involves all that man in general, and even the profoundest thinker, can properly know of God. All besides is a mere expansion or elucidation of this primary and fundamental thought. Moreover, if it is not allowable to ascribe fancy or a soul to God, so neither can He be spoken of as possessing reason as an essential faculty in the same proper sense as understanding and will are attributed to Him. God is indeed the author of reason; and the sound reason is even that which adheres to the center of truth, as He, in creating it, designed and ordered. But from this it does not by any means follow that He is himself the reason which He has created, or that He is even one with it. Were it so, then the advocates of absolute science, the rationalists, would be in the right; in such a case, the knowledge of God were in truth a science of reason, inasmuch as like can only be known by like.

But now, if it be not reason, but rather understanding, that, with the co-operation of all the other faculties both of soul and spirit, is the proper organ for acquiring a knowledge of the divine, and the only means by which man can arrive at a right apprehension thereof; then is the knowledge of God simply and entirely a science of experience, although of a high and peculiar kind, by reason of the finiteness and frailty of man as compared with such an object. As the fancy is the apprehension or seizing of an object, the reason a combination or distinction, so the understanding is the faculty which penetrates, and, in its highest degree, clearly sees through its object. We understand a phenomenon, a sensation, an object, when we have discerned its inmost meaning, its peculiar character and proper significance. And the same is the case even when this object be a speech and communication addressed to us—a word or discourse given us to extract its meaning. If we have discerned the design which is involved in such a communication, its real meaning and purpose, then may we be said to have understood it, even though some minutiæ in the expression may still remain unintelligible, which, as not belonging essentially to the whole, we put aside and leave unconsidered. There are, therefore, many steps and degrees in understanding—very different phases and species of it. A familiar instance will, perhaps, elucidate this matter. We will suppose the case of an extremely rare and remarkable, or, perhaps, hitherto wholly unknown, plant, brought to our country from a foreign clime. The naturalist, having examined its structure and organs, assigns it to a particular class of the higher botanical genera, where it either belongs to some lower species or forms an exception. The chemist, again, when the plant is brought before his notice, conjectures, from certain other characters, that it is formed of such or such elementary parts; while the physician, on other grounds, concludes that in certain diseases it will probably serve as a remedy, equally if not more efficacious than other herbs or roots previously employed for that purpose. Now, if the two last have judged correctly, if their conjectures be confirmed by trial and experiment, then will all the three have understood the plant, and each in his own department have learned and discerned its intrinsic character. Again: how slowly, step by step and gradually, do men attain to the understanding of some ancient, foreign, and difficult language. It commences, perhaps, with the long and difficult deciphering of a manuscript or inscription, with an alphabet incomplete or imperfectly known, and after much painful labor the final discovery of its true meaning is made perhaps by some fortunate accident which all at once throws a full light upon it. A remarkable instance, in our own days, will both elucidate the matter, and serve at the same time to prove how a higher Providence regulates even the progress of science. For more than a millenium and a half had the hieroglyphics of an ancient race remained unintelligible to and undeciphered by a posterity of aliens, when at last, amid the recent commotions and tempests of the political world, a happy accident brought the secret to light. Who can forget the brilliant and dazzling expectations which hailed the departure of the French expedition for Egypt? How was all Europe electrified at the bold project of planting at the foot of the Pyramids a colony of European art and civilization. The enterprise itself failed, and was soon forgotten amid still more important events and greater revolutions; and the humble monument with its triple inscription, which was carried away from Egypt, is all, if we may so speak, that remains of it. But that has unquestionably founded a great epoch in the peaceful empire of science.[18] For a whole generation the learned labored to decipher it with but slow and very imperfect success, when at last a happy coincidence presents itself, and suddenly the key is found. And although of the seven hundred secret symbols, scarcely more than one hundred are as yet made out, still even these have opened a wide vista into the spacious domain of the dark origines of man’s history. And this was effected at a time when man had just learned to put together a few characters of the great alphabet of nature, and here and there to decipher a word or two of its hieroglyphical language, while at the same time streams of historical knowledge began to flow down from the remotest antiquity of the human race, confirming and setting in the clearest light the best of all that we had before possessed, and exciting a hope that we might, perhaps, be also able to understand the obscure hieroglyphics of our own age, and the fearful war of minds which is commencing in it.

Such is the course of things, or, rather, the higher Providence that rules therein; and it was to this, chiefly, that I wished to call your attention by this digression. Thus slow and gradual, but permanent, are the progressive steps in the growth and development of true human science, which is founded on experience—the internal as well as external, the higher as well as the lower—and on tradition, language, and revelation. But, on the contrary, that false, or, as I termed it at the outset, that unhuman and absolute knowledge, as it pretends to embrace all at once, and by one step to place us in full possession of the whole sum of human knowledge, so, ever fluctuating between being and non-being, it soon dissolves into thin air, and leaves nothing behind but a baseless void of absolute non-knowing. Ill would it fare with the knowledge of God and of divine things, if they were left to be discovered, and, as it were, first established by human reason. Even though, in such a case, the intellectual edifice were never so well built and compact, still, as it had originally issued out of man’s thoughts, it would be ever shaking before the doubt whether it were any thing better than an idea, or had any reality out of the human mind.

For this doubt is the foundation of all idealism, to which, often recurring under differing forms of error, it does but give a fresh creation and new shape. Even from this side, consequently, it is apparent that no living certainty and complete reality is attainable by it. Easy, in truth, were it from this position to evolve the ideas of the illimitable, and the infinite, and the absolute; and of such developments there is no lack. But they are at best but pure negations, which do not serve in the least to explain that which is most necessary for us to understand. Curious, indeed, should I be to see the process by which, out of this pet metaphysical idea of the absolute, any one positive notion of God—His patience, for example, and long-suffering—is to be deduced. Strange, too, must be the way in which alone it could carry out the proof that the absolute Deity, or as man prefers, it seems, to say, the Absolute, can not dispense with the possession of this attribute of patience, on which, however, before all others, it is important for man to insist. Moreover, this character of absoluteness is applied to the Deity in a manner which is altogether false and erroneous. That God, in the mode of his existence, is unlimited—that the First Cause is not dependent on, and can not be qualified by any other being, is self-evident, and is nothing but a mere identical proposition. But this character does not admit of being applied to his inner essence, or His essential attributes in relation to man and the whole creation. Wo to all men, nay, we might rather say, wo to all created beings, if God were really absolute—if, for instance, His justice, which, however, is the first and principal of all His attributes, were not manifoldly modified, limited, and conditioned by His goodness, His mercy, and His patience. Before such a justice of God, if it were at once to make such an unconditional manifestation of itself, the whole world in terror would sink in dust and ashes. But it is not so. Man does hope—he must believe—ay, we may go on and add, man does know, that the divine justice is not unconditional, but is in an eminent degree limited by His fatherly love and goodness.

No doubt, too, it must not, on the other hand, be forgotten, that the divine love and grace are also conditioned by the attribute of justice, what, however, in a certain effeminate theology of a recent day, seems to have been totally overlooked. However, this grave error of a too sentimental view of divine things is now pretty generally recognized as such, and, for the most part, abandoned. Moreover, it does not properly lie within the scope of our present disquisition. Now, the position that the justice and the grace of God mutually limit each other, involves nothing unintelligible, or, in this sense, inconceivable; as, however, is the case with the baseless phantom of the absolute, where the empty phrase becomes only the more unintelligible the more frequently it is repeated. How much more correct, in this respect, were the definitions and distinctions of the great philosophers of antiquity, especially the Pythagoreans. With them the limitless and the indeterminate were even the imperfect and the evil, and the former they regarded as the characteristic marks of the latter; while the fixedly definite and positive, which forms the very heart and core of personality, was with them identical with the good: and unquestionably, God’s personality—the fundamental notion, the proper and universal dogma of every religion that acknowledges the one true God—is the true center around which the whole inquiry revolves. For the question is, whether philosophy, while it allows this idea to stand indeed externally, and apparently—for even in Germany only one has been found bold enough to deny it expressly and without reserve—intends all the while to put it quietly aside, and secretly to entomb it by refusing to see in it any thing more than an illusion of the natural feelings. The point at issue is whether, by so teaching, philosophy is to come into direct collision with one of man’s most universal and deeply-rooted feelings, and to produce an eternal schism—an irreconcilable discord—not only between science and faith, but even between science and life. For to unsettle life, is even the necessary result of rationalism.

But let us now turn from the “Absolute” of reason to the personal God of the believers among all peoples and times. If, now, the knowledge of God be not a discovery of the reason, whose proper office is to analyze and investigate—if, on the contrary, we are only able to understand of Him so much as is given and imparted to us, then the matter assumes quite another aspect. If God has conferred a knowledge of Himself upon man—if He has spoken to him, has revealed Himself to him—as is the common tradition of all ancient nations, the more unanimously corroborated the older they are—then is the power to understand this divine communication given together and at the same time with it, even though we should be forced to allow that this intellectual capacity be limited by human frailty and extremely imperfect. To take our estimate of it as low as possible, we will conceive it to be something like the degree of intelligence with which a child eighteen months old understands its mother. Much it does not understand at all; other things it mistakes, or perhaps does not fully attend to, and its answers, too, are not much to the purpose; but something, nevertheless, it does understand—this we see clearly enough. On this point we should not be likely to be led astray, even though the theorist should wish to raise a doubt on the matter, by attempting to prove that the child could not properly understand its mother, since for that purpose it would be necessary for it to have previously learned thoroughly and methodically the elements of grammar. We believe, however, what, indeed, we see, that man’s power of understanding divine things is really very imperfect. For the relation between the child a year and a half old and its mother completely represents that of man to God, with the more than half-imperfect organs that are given him for this purpose—with his so manifoldly limited mind or spirit, which is a spark of heavenly light, indeed, but still only a spark—a drop out of the ocean of the infinite whole—and, moreover, with his half-soul. For half-soul we may and must call it in this respect, since with the one half it is turned to the earth, and still wholly fraternizes with the sensible world; while with the other it is directed to, and is percipient of, the divine. But such a childlike and humble docility will not satisfy the proud reason, and so it is ever turning again to the other absolute road of a false, imaginary, and unhuman knowledge. Fundamentally, however, those two words,[19] which alone man can be certain of with respect to God, would, since God invariably imparts to every creature its due measure, be quite enough, if only man would always rightly apply and faithfully preserve them.

Now, to this first hypothesis we might append the further question:—supposing that God has imparted a knowledge of Himself to mankind—has spoken to them, and revealed Himself to them—is it not highly probable that He has ordained some institution for the further propagation and diffusion of revealed truth, and also for the maintenance as well of its original integrity as also of the right interpretation of it? But I must content myself with merely advancing this question. I can not attempt to prosecute it in the present place; for its further consideration would carry us out of the established limits of philosophy into the domain of history, and it involves, moreover, the positive articles of faith.

But the previous question, whether the knowledge of God, which we either possess or are capable of possessing, be a science of absolute reason, or rather an understanding of given data, and consequently a science of experience, and resting, ultimately, on revelation—this certainly falls within the scope of philosophical investigation. Indeed, it forms the chiefest and most essential problem of philosophy, inasmuch as it is properly the very question of being and non-being—of a true and human, or of an empty and imaginary science—that is here to be decided. On this account, a precise and correct phraseology is of the utmost importance toward a right solution of this leading topic of philosophical inquiry. Now, it is a fact deserving of remark, and well calculated to arrest our attention, that nowhere in Holy Writ, nowhere in all antiquity, or in any of the great teachers and philosophers of olden time, is there any mention made of God’s reason—but universally it is intelligence or understanding, an omniscient intelligence that is ascribed to Him. The wrongful interchange of the two words was reserved exclusively for our modern times, and for the epoch of the absolute rule of reason, and of the worse than Babylonish confusion of scientific terms which has arisen out of it. The only exceptions from the previous remark, which may be found in antiquity, are confined to one or two of the Stoics. But when we reflect how greatly their whole chapter on the Deity labors under the evil influence of that doctrine of an inevitable necessity and blind fate, which forms the reproach of the whole Stoical theory, this apparent exception serves to confirm the general rule, that a wrong use of language invariably has its source in a rationalistic basis of speculation, or, perhaps, is itself the spring and occasion of that erroneous point of view. God is unquestionably the author of reason. If, therefore, any one be disposed to call the divine order of things (which, however, is not the Deity himself) a divine reason, this is a mere matter of indifference. Only in such a case the question to be agitated would not involve the mere expression, but rather the meaning which is associated with it. But, for my part, I should prefer to avoid a mode of speaking which might give rise to great misconception. And this is the more desirable the more needful it is at all times carefully to distinguish between the true and sound reason and its contrary. God is the author of the sound reason, i.e., of the reason which follows and is obedient to the divine order. But the other, the rebellious reason, has for its source that spirit of negation which every where opposes God, and has drawn so great a part of creation after him in his fall. For, having lost his true center, and finding none in himself, that evil spirit, with indescribable desire and raging passionateness, seeks to find one in the disordered world of sense, and in its noblest ornament—even in the soul of man, the very jewel of creation. And this is even the origin of the rebellious reason. And it is rebellious even because having wandered from its center in the loving soul, which again has its center in God, it has thrown off the obedience of love, that holy bond which retains the soul in subjection to the divine order. How far in the present day, amid the fermenting rationalistic medley which constitutes the spirit of the age, that sound reason which willingly follows and observes the divine order, or that rebellious reason which is absolute in itself, has the upper hand, and forms the predominant element, is a question easy of solution. It is one which I am content to leave to the decision of all who are in any degree acquainted with the prevailing tone of science and of life.

The philosophy which I have here undertaken to develop, setting out from the soul as the beginning and first subject of its speculations, contemplates the mind or spirit as its highest and supreme object. Accordingly, in its doctrine of the Deity, directly opposing every rationalistic tendency, it conceives of Him and represents him as a living spirit, a personal God, and not merely as an absolute reason, or a rational order. If, therefore, for the sake of distinction, it requires some peculiar and characteristic designation, it might, in contrast with those errors of Materialism and Idealism which I have described and condemned, be very aptly termed Spiritualism. But our doctrine is not any such system of reason as the others pretend to be. It is an inward experimental science of a higher order. Such a designation, consequently, bespeaking as it does, a pretension of system, is not very appropriate, and is, at all events, superfluous. It is best indicated by a simple name, such as we have given it in calling it a philosophy of life.

Moreover, the revelation by which God makes himself known to man, does not admit of being limited exclusively to the written word. Nature itself is a book written on both sides, both within and without, in every line of which the finger of God is discernible. It is, as it were, a Holy Writ in visible form and bodily shape—a song of praise on the Creator’s omnipotence composed in living imagery. But besides Scripture and nature—those two great witnesses to the greatness and majesty of God—there is in the voice of conscience nothing less than a divine revelation within man. This is the first awakening call to the two other louder and fuller proclamations of revealed truth. And, lastly, in universal history we have set before us a real and manifold application and progressive development of revelation. Here the luminous threads of a divine and higher guidance glimmer through the remarkable events of history. For, not only in the career of whole ages and nations, but also in the lives of individuals, the ruling and benignant hand of Providence is every where visible.

Fourfold, consequently, is the source of revelation, from which man derives his knowledge of the Deity, learns his will, and understands his operation and power—conscience, nature, Holy Writ, and universal history. The teaching of the latter is often of that earnest and awful kind, to which we may, in a large sense, apply the adage, “Who will not learn must feel.” How often does it show us some mighty edifice of fortune, which, having no firm basis in the deep soil of truth and the divine order, owed its rapid growth and false splendor to some evil influence, falling suddenly in ruins, as if stricken by the invisible breath of a superior power. On such occasions the public feeling recognizes the hand which sets a limit to every temerity in the history of the world—to every extravagance of a false confidence—and appoints it its ultimate term. And the olden notion (which, with men of the day, had become little more than an antiquated legend) of God’s retributive justice, resumes its place among the actuating sentiments of life, with new and intense significance. The sublime truth, however, is only too soon forgotten, and the temporary alarm subsides but too quickly into the habitual calm of a false security—that old and hereditary feeling of human nature.

The volume of Holy Writ, as it is transmitted to us, and was first commenced about three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the possibility of an earlier sacred tradition in the twenty-four centuries which preceded it. So far, indeed, is the supposition of such an original revelation from being inconsistent with Scripture, that, on the contrary, it contains explicit allusions to the fact, that such a manifold enlightenment was imparted to the first man, as well as to that patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants, was the second progenitor of mankind. But as this divine knowledge, derived immediately from the primary source of all illumination, flowed down in free and unconfined channels to succeeding generations, and to the different nations which branched off from the parent stock, the original sacred traditions were soon disfigured and overloaded with fictions and fables. In these, however, a rich abundance of remarkable vestiges and precious germs of divine truth were mixed up with Bacchanalian rites and immoral mysteries. And thus, amid a multitude of sensuous and stimulating images, the pure and simple truth was buried, as in a second chaos, under a mass of contradictory symbols. Hence arose that Babylonish confusion of languages, emblems, and legends, which is universally to be met with among ancient, and even the most primitive nations. In the great work, therefore, of purification, and of a restoration of true religion (which we may call a second revelation, or, at least, as a second stage thereof), a rigid exclusion of this heathenish admixture of fable and immorality was the first and most essential requisite. But those older revelations, imparted to the first man and the second progenitor of mankind, are expressly laid down as the groundwork of that evangel of the creation, which forms the introduction to the whole volume of Scripture, and furnishes us thereby with a key to understand the history and religion of the primitive world—or, to speak absolutely, the true Genesis of the existing world, its history and its science. This double principle, expressly recognizing, on the one hand, an original revelation and divine illumination of the first progenitors of the human race, of which the olden and less corrupted monuments of heathenism still retain many a trace; and, on the other, strictly rejecting the additions of a corrupt and degenerated heathenism, with all its tissue of fables and false, godless mysteries, must be kept steadily in view in examining the earliest portions of the sacred Scriptures. For the neglect, or imperfect consideration of it, has already led, and is ever likely to give rise to many complicated doubts and perverted views, which imperil not only the simple understanding of the whole body of revealed Scripture, but even the right conception of revelation.

It would seem, then, that not only philosophical, but absolutely every higher species of knowledge is an internal science of experience. For the formal science of mathematics is not a positive science for the cognition of a real object, so much as an organon and aid for other sciences, which, however, as such, is both excellent in itself, and admits of many useful applications. We may, therefore, on this hypothesis consider each of these four faculties of man, which I have called the principal poles or leading branches of human consciousness, as a peculiar sense for a particular domain of truth. For all experience and all science thereof rests on some cognitive sense as the organ of its immediate perceptions. Now, the reason, which, in its form of conscience, announces itself as an internal sense of right and wrong, is, as the faculty for the development and communication of thought, usually named the common sense. It constitutes the bond of connection between men and their thoughts, which is dependent on and conditioned by language and its organ, and may be called the sense for all that is distinctively human. In this respect it forms the foundation and first grade of all other senses for, and immediate organs of, a higher knowledge. Fancy, again, being itself but a reflection of life and of the living powers of the natural world, is the inward sense for nature, which, as will hereafter be more fully shown, first lends and assures to natural science its due import and true living significance. And, inasmuch as the perfect intellection of a single object results from the totality alone—the significance and spirit of the whole—therefore the understanding is the sense for that mind [geist] which manifests itself in the sensible world, whether this be a human or natural, or the supreme Divine intelligence.

Now, if we may venture to consider the fourfold revelation of God in conscience, in nature, in Holy Writ, and the world’s history, as so many living springs or fertilizing streams of a higher truth, we must suppose the existence of a good soil to receive the water of life and the good seed of divine knowledge. For without an organ of susceptibility for good to receive the divine gift from above, no amount of revelation would benefit man. Now, the soul, so susceptible of good on all sides, both from within and from without, is even this organ for the reception of revelation. And this function of the soul, together with its creation of language as the outer form of human knowledge, constitutes its contribution to science, and especially to internal science. And even with the understanding, as the sense which discerns the meaning and purport of revelation, the soul is co-operative—since nothing divine can be understood merely in the idea, and of and by itself alone, but in every case a feeling for it must have preceded, or, at least, contributed toward its complete understanding. The soul, consequently, which is thus susceptible of the divine, is ever informing itself about, or co-operating in the acquisition of a knowledge of the Godlike. And this, the soul’s love and pursuit of divine truth, when, unfolding itself in thought, it comes forth in an investiture of words, is even philosophy—not, indeed, the dead sophistic of the schools, but one which, as it is a philosophy of life, can be nothing less than living. And the soul, thus ardently yearning for the divine, and both receiving and faithfully maintaining the revealed Word, is the common center toward which all the four springs of life and streams of truth converge. In free meditation it reconciles and combines them.

On this account the oldest and most natural form of philosophy was that of dialogue, which did not, however, exclude the occasional introduction of a simple narrative, or the continuous explanation of higher and abstruser questions. Philosophy, accordingly, might not inappropriately be defined as a dialogue of the soul in its free meditation on divine things. And this was the very form it actually possessed among the earliest and noblest of the philosophers of antiquity—first of all really and orally, as with Pythagoras and Socrates, and lastly in its written exposition, of which style Plato was the great and consummate master. But it was only to the noblest and best of all ranks, though without distinction of age or sex, that these the greatest men of antiquity communicated their treasures of philosophical wisdom. In this course Pythagoras first set the example, which, on the whole, was followed also by Socrates and Plato. For, in general, the latter confined their philosophical teaching to a select circle, and imparted it, as it were, under the seal of friendship, to such only as in the social intercourse of life they admitted to close and familiar intimacy. Occasional exceptions were, perhaps, furnished by their disputes with the sophists, in the course of which they were constrained to adopt, not only the weapons, but also the method of their adversaries—a license of which Plato, perhaps, has too often availed himself, even if he has not sometimes abused it. For about this time the sophists introduced a practice as erroneous as their doctrine was false. Publishing their philosophemes to the whole people, they treated it and quarreled about it in the market-place as a common party matter. Such a procedure was in every sense pernicious, and one which must have brought even truth itself into contempt. Lastly, Aristotle comprised in his manuals the collective results of all earlier philosophical speculation, and intrusted his treasury of mature knowledge and well-sifted and newly-arranged thoughts to the keeping of a school. Now, we should be far from justified were we to make this a reproach against this master of subtlety and profoundest of thinkers; for at this time all true intellectual life had, together with public spirit, become extinct among the Greeks, amid the disorders of democracy, or under the pressure of the armed supremacy of Macedonia. Still it must ever remain a matter of profound regret. For philosophy, as standing in the center between the guiding spirit of the divine education of man and the external force of civil right and material power, ought to be true mundane soul [Weltseele] which animates and directs the development of ages and of the whole human race. Deeply, therefore, is it to be deplored whenever science, and especially philosophy, are withdrawn from this wide sphere of universal operation, and from human life itself, to remain banished and cooped up in the narrow limits of a school.

LECTURE IV. OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO NATURE.

“WE know in part,” exclaimed, with burning zeal, the honest man of God in Holy Scripture, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part.” How true the first member of this sentence is even in the case of that knowledge of God which alone deserves the name of knowledge, or repays the trouble of its acquisition, the previous Lecture must in many ways have served to convince us. The second member, which will chiefly occupy our attention in the present discussion, is in an eminent degree applicable to physical science. For what, in fact, is all our knowledge of nature, considered as a whole and in its inmost essence, but a mere speculation, conjecture, and guess upon guess? What is it but an endless series of tentative experiments, by which we are continually hoping to succeed in unveiling the secret of life, to seize the wonderful Proteus, and to hold him fast in the chains of science? Or is it not, perhaps, one ever-renewed attempt to decipher more completely than hitherto the sybilline inscriptions on the piled-up rows and layers of tombs, which as nature grows older convert its great body into one vast catacomb, and so perchance to find therein the key to unlock and bring to light the far greater—nay, the greatest of all riddles—the riddle of death? Now there are undoubtedly, even in nature itself, occasional indications of, scattered hints and remote allusions to, a final crisis, when even in nature and in this sensible and elementary world, life shall be entirely separated from death, and when death itself shall be no more. Gravely to be pondered and in nowise to be neglected are these hints, although without the aid of a higher illumination they must forever remain unintelligible to man. Thus considered, however, the universe itself appears replete with dumb echoes and terrestrial resounds of divine revelation. It is not, therefore, without reason and significance, if in this beautiful hymn the ancient prophetess of nature lends her concurrent testimony to the promises of the holy seer of a last day of creation, which nature shall celebrate as the great day of her renovation and toward which she yearns with an indescribable longing which is nowhere so inimitably depicted, so strongly and so vividly expressed, as in Holy Writ itself. Holy Scripture could not and can not contain a system of science, whether as a philosophy of reason or a science of nature. Nay, in this form of a manual and methodical compendium of divine knowledge, it could not inspire us with confidence either as revelation or as science. Condescending altogether to the wants of man, both in form and language, it consists of a collection of occasional and wholly practical compositions derived immediately from, and expressly designed for, life—in a certain sense it consists of nothing but the registers and social statutes either of the prophetic people or of the apostolical community. Accordingly, its contents are of a mixed nature: historical, legal, instructive, hortatory, consolatory, and prophetical, together with a rich abundance of minute and special allusions, while it enters every where into, and with watchful love adapts itself to, individual wants and local peculiarities. And the form of these writings, at once so singular in its kind—and in such marvelous wise, but yet so eminently human—is so far from being inconsistent with the divine character, that the very condescension of the Deity constitutes a new and additional but most characteristic proof of genuine revelation. Only the first foundation-stone and the key and corner-stone form an exception. Embracing within their spacious limits the beginning of nature and the end of the world, they form, as it were, the corner-rings and the bearing-staves of the ark of the covenant of revelation. And while on the one side as well as on the other, in the opening no less than in the closing book, which contain almost as many mysteries as words, the seven-branched candlestick of secret signification is set up, still all else that is inclosed within the holy ark receives therefrom sufficient light for its perfect elucidation. In all other respects the style is that of a plain narrative couched in very appropriate and simple words; and if the masters of criticism in classical antiquity have quoted a few passages from the beginning of Genesis as the most exalted instances of the sublime, still it was in the very simplicity and extreme plainness of the language that they recognized this character of sublimity. From these two ends, moreover—from this first root as well as from the last crown of the book, there proceeds many threads and veins, which, running through the tissue, bind it together more closely into a living unity, on which account, although consisting of so many and such divers books, it is justly considered as one, being called simply the “Book” (Bible). Consequently it would, as already said, be foolish to look for a system of science in the divine book for men. Nevertheless we do meet here and there with single words about nature and her secrets—hints occasionally dropped and seemingly accidental expressions—which, giving a clear and full information as to much that is hidden therein, furnish science consequently with so many keys for unlocking nature. These, indeed, are not scattered throughout in equal measure, but here, perhaps, more thinly, and there again more thickly. In all these passages, and especially those of the Old Testament, which not only depict the external beauties and visible glory of nature, but also touch upon its hidden powers and inmost secrets of life, we may observe a kind of intentional, I might, perhaps, say, cautious reserve and heedful circumspection, amounting at times almost to an indisposition to speak out fully and clearly, lest the abuse or probable misconception of what should be said might give encouragement to the heathenish and wide-spread deification of nature.

In the New Testament (if we may venture to speak of these things in the same natural and human fashion that Scripture itself employs) the Holy Spirit uses language far more precise and clear. On the whole, the relation in which Holy Writ and divine revelation stand to nature itself, and the science thereof, is a peculiar one. It is eminently tender and wonderful, but not, indeed, intelligible at the first glance, or broadly definable according to any rigorous and established notion. It is one, however, capable of being made clearer by means of a simile borrowed from Scripture itself. Those guileless men whom the Redeemer chose as His instruments for carrying out His great work of the redemption of the world, were endued with miraculous powers, which it was and ever will be apparent, were not of their own strength, but of His. Now, of the first of these apostles it is narrated that a healing power, and, as it were, an invisible stream of life proceeded from him, without his being conscious of, or, at least, without his regarding it, which healed the sick who were brought out and placed within the range of his shadow as he passed by.[20] In the same manner the fiery wain of divine revelation, as it passes on its way, scatters, in single words and images, many a bright spark. The radiant shadow of the word of God, as it falls, is sufficient to kindle and throw a new light over the whole domain of nature, by means of which the true science thereof may be firmly established, its inmost secrets explored and brought into coherence and agreement with all else.

I have already more than once called your attention to the method which all the philosophers of reason, without exception, pursue. In different ways, according to the special objects they have in view, they all alike presumed to set certain absolute and impassable limits to human reason (which, however, by some slight turn or other, they soon dextrously contrive to transgress) in order to bring within their system of absolute science—which is at best but a dead semblance—all that it will hold, and even what it can not contain. Quite different, however, is it with the truth, and with that living science which we take for the basis of our speculations. For from it it appears that the soul of man, however liable it may be to manifold error, is, nevertheless, capable of receiving the divine communications. Since, then, man can possess as many of these higher branches of knowledge, and can learn as much of divine things as it is given to him to know, and since, at the same time, it is God himself who is the primary source from which all man’s knowledge flows, and his guide to truth—who shall determine the measure and fix the limits—who shall dare to say how much of knowledge and of science God will vouchsafe to man?—who shall venture to prescribe the limits beyond which His illumination can not pass? This, it is evident, is illimitable. It may go on to an extent which, at the beginning, man would not have believed to be possible. In a word, though of himself, and by his own unassisted reason, man is incapable of knowing any thing, yet through God, if it be his will, he may attain to the knowledge of all things. And yet it is true, though in a very different sense from that intended by these philosophers of reason, that man’s knowledge is in reality limited. No absolute limit, indeed, is set to it. Yet because it is a mixed knowledge, composed of outward tradition and inward experience, and is founded on the perceptions of the external and internal senses, therefore is it made up of individual instances, extremely slow in its growth, and in no respect perfect and complete, and scarcely ever free from faults and deficiencies. Consequently, when considered in its totality, and as pretending to be a whole, it is invariably imperfect. But this character of imperfection belongs, in fact, to all real science, as derived from the experience of the senses. Seldom, indeed, is the first impression free from the admixture of error; numberless repeated observations, comparisons, essays, experiments, and corrections, which must often be carried on through many centuries, not to say many tens of centuries, are necessary before a pure and stable result can be attained to. In this way all truly human knowledge is imperfect, and “in part;” and although, on the contrary, the false conceited wisdom may parade itself from the very first as fully ripe and complete, yet in a very brief space indeed will its imperfection and rottenness appear.

And, indeed, the character of imperfection shows itself, as in all other human things, so also in the science of nature. From its birth among the earliest naturalists of Greece to its boasted maturity among ourselves, it counts an age of two millenniums and a half of unbroken cultivation. But now if, looking beyond the explanation of single isolated facts, we consider rather our knowledge of nature in its universal system and internal constitution, can we say that physical science has, during the time, made more than, perhaps, two steps and a half of progress? And this slow and toilsome advance which, in a certain sense, never arrives at more than “knowing in part,” is the law of every department of human science. Consequently it may be justly said of the development of man’s science, that with God a thousand years are as a day, and one day as a thousand years.[21] All knowledge drawn from the senses and experience is bound by this condition. It may, no doubt, apply immediately and principally to external experience, which is dependent on the lower and ordinary senses, whether we reckon them according to the number of their separate organs as five, or as three in compliance with a more scientific classification. But it also holds equally good of those which we pointed out and described in the last Lecture as being the four superior scientific senses, the organs of a knowledge founded on a higher and internal experience, the sense, viz., of reason, the sense of understanding, the sense for nature or fancy, and the proper sense for God, which lies in the inmost free will of man. Not merely as the faculty of suggestion [Ahndungsvermogen], is fancy to be regarded as the higher and internal sense for nature, or because it is from this side that the affinity of man, and of man’s soul with nature, is most distinctly revealed, but it also exhibits itself as such in the scientific apprehension of natural phenomena. That dynamical play of the inner life, that law of a living force which constitutes the essence of every phenomenon of nature, is a something so fleeting and evanescent that it can only be seized and fixed by the fancy alone, since, as is now pretty generally allowed by all profound observers of nature, in the abstract notion life eludes the grasp, and nothing remains but a dead formula.

The apprehension of a living object in thought, so as to seize and fix it in its mobile vitality and its fluctuating and fleeting states, is an act of the imagination, which, however, is naturally of a peculiar kind, and entirely distinct from artistic or poetical fancy. It is, in this respect, worthy of remark, that all the most characteristic and felicitous terms which are employed to designate the great discoveries in modern times of the profounder secrets of nature are, for the greater part, boldly figurative, and often even symbolical. Here, therefore, also, we have a manifestation of that affinity which subsists between nature and the faculty of fancy, by which alone its ever-stirring vitality is scientifically apprehended.

I formerly observed that, in the outer senses, as faculties of the soul subordinate to the fancy, a higher intellectual endowment, as a special gift of nature, is occasionally found to exist, namely, the sense of art, or the eye for beautiful forms, and the ear for musical sounds. But even the lower sense, the more purely organic feeling, is often evolved to higher degrees of susceptibility, which, however, do not fall within the sphere of the feeling for art, but form, as it were, a peculiar and special sense of nature. To this class belong those indescribable feelings of sympathy and inward attraction—the many vivid presentiments of a strange foreboding—traces of which may be observed among many other animals besides man, just as, in the case of musical tones and emotions, a light note of remote affinity seems to bring the soul of man in unison with a correspondent nature soul in the higher members of the brute creation. Numberless are the instances of such forebodings (among which we must reckon also the significant vision or dream) recorded of all times, countries, and spheres of life. No doubt, from their strange nature, and from the manifold difficulties with which man’s mode of observing and narrating these phenomena perplexes the consideration of them, it is any thing but easy, in any individual case, to arrive at a pure result, and to pass a final and decisive sentence. Still, on the whole, the fact can not well be denied, as, indeed, it is not even attempted, by any unprejudiced and profound observer of nature in the present day. But now, if such an immediate feeling of invisible light and life does freely develop and clearly manifest itself as an indubitable faculty and a perfectly distinct state of the consciousness, then assuredly we have herein a new organ of perception and a new natural sense. Though not, indeed, more infallible than any other of the senses, it may, nevertheless, be the source of very remarkable phenomena, which, perhaps, above all others require investigation, in order that their distinctive character may be precisely and accurately determined. It is, however, necessary to remember that the latter is not to be determined by any side-blow of caprice, any more than the electric phenomena of nature and the atmosphere, when they are actually lowering there, are to be got rid of by any such expedient.

It is only just and right, and not inconsistent with true human knowledge, if physical science should commence with the study of man. Still, if we would contemplate man from the side of nature, it seems the safer course to endeavor, first of all, to obtain a clear and leading idea of the whole of his constitution in this respect, rather than to lose ourselves in the contemplation of the special phenomena of a particular sphere. Now, with regard to the whole of man’s organization, the organic body as the third constituent of human existence, I will merely remark that, just as the triple principle of body, soul, and spirit is repeated in the special and narrower spheres of the senses, the instincts, and the passions, and even in the different forms in which a disordered intellect usually manifests itself, so also it admits of a further application to the organic body in general. That most wonderful organization, the marvelous structure of bones and muscles, the outward organic frame, is, as it were, the body in a narrower sense, the pre-eminently material constituent of living bodies. The soul of man—here consequently the organic soul—is in the blood and in the five or six organs whose functions are first of all to elaborate the blood and afterward to provide for its circulation—or perhaps by maintaining a perpetual interchange of the breath and the external air, to keep the vital flame constantly burning on the hearth of life within. A third element—and, indeed, the principal one of the three, though only noticeable in its effects on the brain—exists within the higher senses and functions—in short, in the whole nervous tissue. But it lies not in the nervous filaments themselves: anatomy can not detect it, for it is not visible to the eye. On this account some have called it the æther of the nerves to indicate its incorporeal nature—incorporeal, i.e., relatively to, and in comparison with, the other two constituents of man—the blood-soul, and the external frame—as being the spirit of life in the organic body. Strictly and sharply enough does Holy Writ distinguish this spiritual body (as it calls it) of man from the body of the soul, or the organic blood-soul, considering the former, as it were, the seed of the resurrection, even because at the moment of death this ethereal body-of-light leaves its terrestrial veil to be in due time reunited to it after a more glorious fashion. And death itself is even nothing else than its total departure and painful emancipation from the organic body, on which the features, one might almost say, the physiognomy of corruption stamps itself, immediately that the immortal Psyche, the invisible seed of light and eternity, has put off the tabernacle of this body.

This internal, invisible body-of-light [Lichtkorper] is also the organ and the center of all the higher and spiritual powers of the human organization. For it is easily conceivable that a partial projection of this life of light which is latent in the sound organic body should produce such phenomena, while its complete projection, or rather total separation, would have death for its result, or rather would itself be death. A truly scientific view of nature can easily enter into or allow the legitimacy of this idea. The true rule, however, and standard for the right decision of phenomena of this kind can only be found in a higher region, even because they themselves lie on the extreme limits of nature and life, and in part also pass beyond them.

We therefore prefer to follow the more slow but sure course of development pursued by physical science itself, as commenced nearly twenty-five centuries ago by the Greeks. On the whole it began even there with the cognition of man—of his diseases and their cure. The naturalists, indeed, of the present day are in general disposed to laugh at the ideas of nature which were advanced by the first philosophers of Greece, and to despise the hypotheses of water, or air, or fire, as being the essence of all things, which, nevertheless, as the first beginnings of a clearer contemplation and of a higher view of nature, greatly recommend themselves by their extreme simplicity. But however modern observers of nature may be ready to hand these systems over to fancy as so many purely poetical cosmogonies, yet, on the other hand, the present masters of medicine, with greater gratitude and fuller acknowledgment of his merits, reverence Hippocrates as the founder of their art. For, indeed, as such, and not properly as a science, or at any rate as an art far more than as a science, was medicine regarded by its founder and the great masters who came after him. They looked upon it as the art of the diagnosis and treatment of disease, in which the unerring tact of a practiced and happy judgment is of primary importance, and where the rapid and searching glance of genius into the secret laboratories of life or into the hidden sources of disease is, and ever will be, the principal and most essential point. The mere historical acquaintance with the different forms of diseases and their remedies, with botany, and the anatomy of the human body, with the number and structure of its organs, forms merely the materials, the external sphere of medical practice; while the essential qualification is even this penetrating glance which searches out the inmost secrets of the bodily temperament. But now those who have been most richly gifted with this peculiar gift have ever been the last to believe themselves possessed of a perfect science. And yet, inasmuch as that physical knowledge which, by attaining to a complete understanding of life, shall be able to comprehend and explain the mystery of death would alone deserve the name of the science of nature; inasmuch also as the searching glance of the true physician arrives the nearest to such a point, penetrating, as it does, deep into the manifold fluctuation and struggle between the two, and into the secrets of their conflict, this, therefore, is perhaps to be considered as the first germ of life for a future science of nature, which, however as yet undeveloped, has for more than twenty centuries been slumbering on, hidden, as it were, in embryo, in the womb of medical art and lore. The physical, geographical, and astronomical observations of this whole period of gestation, form, it is true, a rich treasury of valuable materials, but they do not give us that profound knowledge, of which alone the physician’s penetrating glance into life and its constitution furnishes the first commencement and essay, however weak.

With respect to natural science in general, and the possibility of our attaining to it, the case stands thus:—If nature be a living force—if the life which reigns within it be in a certain though still very remote degree akin to the life of man and the human soul—then is a knowledge of nature easily conceivable, and right well possible (for nothing but the like, or at least the similar and cognate, can be known by the like) even though this cognition may still be extremely defective, and at best can never be more than partial. But if nature be a dead, stony mass, as many seem to suppose, then would it be wholly inconceivable how this foreign mass of petrifaction could penetrate into our inmost Ego; then at least would there seem to be good grounds for the idealistic doubt whether ultimately this external world be any thing but a mere phantom, having no existence save in our own thoughts—the outward reflection of ourselves—the pure creation of our own Me.

The question of innate ideas has been often mooted in philosophy. As, however, the essential functions and different acts of thought, together with its several notions, are, properly speaking, nothing but the natural division of man’s cogitative faculty, it is not on their account necessary to suppose such a preliminary intercalation of general ideas into the human mind. And as little necessary is it, in order to explain the universal belief in the existence of a Deity, to suppose that there is in the minds of all men an implanted idea of God; for this would lead to the purely arbitrary hypothesis, of that which is so difficult to conceive—the pre-existence of the spirit or soul of man. And as no created beings can have an idea of God, but those to whom He vouchsafes to communicate it, and to accord a knowledge of His existence, so can He bestow this privilege the very instant He pleases, without the intervention of any innate idea expressly for that end. And yet I am disposed, and not, I think, without reason, to assume that man, as at present constituted, does possess one, though only one, species of inborn ideas, viz., an innate idea of death. This, as a false root of life, and a true mental contagion, produces a dead cogitation, and is the origin of all dead and dead-born notions. For this idea of death, whether hereditary or inoculated in the soul, is, as its peculiar but fundamental error, transferred by the mind of man to every object with which it comes in contact. And thus, in man’s dead cogitation, the surrounding world and all nature appears to him a similar lifeless and inert mass, so long as sitting beneath this shadow of spiritual death, his mind [geist] has not sufficient strength to work its way out of its dark prison-house into the light. For not at all without higher aid, and even with it only slowly and tardily, does man discover that all that is really and naturally dead is within himself, or learn to recognize it for what it truly is, a something eminently null and naught. Another species of this false and dead conception of nature presents itself under the form of multiplicity. In this view nature is represented as forming something like a vast sandhill, where, apart from the pile they thus form together and their aggregation in it, the several grains are supposed to have no connection with each other; while, however, they are so diligently counted, as if every thing depended on their right enumeration. But through the sieve of such an atomistic, which would break up the universe into a number of separate and absolute individualities, the sand will ever run, however often and painfully man may strive to reckon or to measure the infinity of these grains of nature. Mathematical calculation and measuring hold the same place in physical science that is held in every living language by conjugating and declining, and other grammatical rules, which, in truth, are but a species of mathematical formulæ. In learning a foreign and especially a dead language, these are indispensable and necessary aids, which greatly promote and facilitate its acquisition; so also mathematics furnish indispensable helps and a most valuable organon for the cognition of nature. But with them alone man will never learn to understand even a word, not to talk of a whole proposition, out of nature’s strangely-sounding and most difficult hieroglyphics.

Somewhat different is it, when man seeks to understand the true living geometry in nature herself, i.e., attempts to discover the place which the circle and eclipse (passing from these up to the spheres in their sidereal orbits), or which the triangle, the square, the hexagon, and so forth, assume in the scale of its creations—or when, in a similar spirit, he investigates and ascertains the really dominant rule in the arithmetic of life; those numbers which the physician observes in the periodic developments of life, and which, in the fluctuating states of an abating and heightening malady, enable him, under certain conditions, to predict the moment of its crisis. Of a still higher kind is that spiritual, we might almost call it divine chronology, which, in universal history, marks out definite epochs of the mental development of the human race, and traces therein the influence of certain grades of life, or ages of the world, and the alternating phases of disease in whole communities, and those decisive moments and great critical emergencies in which God Himself appears as the healing Physician and Restorer of life. It was, in all probability, in reference to such an arithmetic, or in some similar sense, that Pythagoras taught that numbers are, or contain the essence of things. For such an arithmetic of life and geometry of nature do afford a positive cognition and a real knowledge. As commonly understood, however, mathematics are nothing more than a formal science—in other words, they are simply a scientific organon, rather than a science. But now, if nature be not regarded as dead, but living, who can doubt that it—or, as we are now speaking of man’s nearest neighbor—that the earth is akin to man? Was he not formed out of the dust of the earth, and is he not therefore the son, nay, in truth, the first-born of the earth?—does he not receive from it food and nourishment? and when the irrevocable summons goes forth from above, does he not give back again to its bosom the earthly tabernacle of his flesh? Do not chemists tell us that the principal constituent of the purest wheat-corn has a great affinity to the substance of man’s blood? and does not the blood, moreover, derive one of its ingredients from iron—the principal among the metals of the earth? And are not gold and other metallic substances either wholesome medicines or deadly poisons? And is there not also an inexhaustible store of both in the wonderful varieties of herbs and plants? Do not invigorating and healing springs burst from numberless rocks and fissures of the earth? Is not—to speak only of the heavenly bodies nearest to and immediately connected with our globe—is not the sun’s heat so specifically different from every other kind of warmth, the quickener of all that lives and moves, and for man under a milder clime, as it were, a soft renovating bath? And is not the other and lesser light—earth’s mighty satellite and companion, the moon—the cause of all those changes in the weather and atmosphere, which, from the earliest times, have been acknowledged to be most serviceable and highly beneficial to agriculture? Is not the great pulse of the ocean, in its ebb and flow, measured by it, as well as many periods, of the development of life? And is it not, when its operation is too powerful or violently exciting, the cause of a peculiar disease among men? As, therefore, the musical unisons in the melodious songs of birds, both find and wake a concordant echo in the heart of man, so, too, in a larger scale, the blood-soul of man, with its living pulsation and organic sensibility, is most nearly akin to and sympathizes with the earth and the whole earthly frame. And is not, in all probability, this sympathetic influence between the earth and man reciprocal? Must not, for instance, the respiration of nine hundred millions of human beings have affected the atmosphere? Has not the very air degenerated with the human race, and like it become corrupt and deteriorated? Are not certain pestilential diseases propagated by the air alone, being carried in fixed telluric directions, without material contact or pollution? And if, in answer to the inference which we would draw from these facts, any one should sit down to calculate the number of cubic miles in the atmospheric belt, and argue that the breath and evaporation from ever so many myriads of human beings would be insufficient to have any effect thereon, we might easily retort upon him the equally vast reckoning of the millions of seconds which make up a hundred and more generations, and by which these respirations must be counted. But, however this may be, it does appear that the air must, in primitive times, have been far more pure and balsamic, and more vital and more nutritive, than at present. For before the Flood men required neither flesh nor wine to recruit their strength, and yet, in duration of life and bodily vigor, and above all in energy of will and powers of mind, they far surpassed the sons of a later age; and it was even by the misuse of these great gifts and endowments that they brought down the divine vengeance on their sinful generation. And, lastly, if the earth were wholly without life, how could it, at the creation of the animals of this planetary world, have yielded obedience to the behest of the Creator, as it went forth on the sixth day, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind?” Highly important, moreover, as regards the true estimate of the whole realm of nature as contemplated by the Divine mind, and deeply significant, is the wide interval which, in the Mosaic history of the creation, separates the bringing forth of the beasts by the earth at the command of the Almighty, from the making of man, whereof it is written, “Let us make man in our own image.”

Physical science having thus sluggishly advanced through a definite period and number of centuries—having lived through almost two millenniums in little better than an embryo state—made at last the few steps of progress that it has yet taken. By a more rapid march of time, it hastened to suit itself to the riper age of man, and to come forth itself, as it were, mature, although, in many respects, this is even yet very far from being the case. The principal of these advances of physical science is the invention of the compass. For, in the first place, the phenomenon of magnetism presents a remarkable manifestation of the universal life of the world, which eludes all mathematical calculations of magnitude, while the little piece of this wonderful iron balances by its living agency the whole globe itself. And, in the second place, the results to which it has led have been no less important and marvelous. The magnetic index pointed the way to the discovery of the New World, and to a more perfect acquaintance with the figure of the earth, and thus, through an enlarged observation of geographical and astronomical facts, opened out a grander and more extensive view of the whole planetary system. Of the new world in the other hemisphere, a trace unquestionably is to be found in antiquity in the legend of the island of Atlantis. The general description of this island, as equal in extent to both Asia and Africa together, agrees remarkably with the size of America. But the fable contains the additional circumstance, that, having existed in the Western Ocean in very ancient times, it was subsequently swallowed up by the waves. From this circumstance I am led to infer, that the legend did not, as is generally supposed, owe its origin to Phœnician navigators, who, even if it be true that they did succeed in sailing round Africa, most assuredly never ventured so far westward. Like so much besides that is equally great and grand, and, indeed, far grander, the main fact of the legend seems to be derived from an original tradition from the primeval times, when, unquestionably, man was far better acquainted with his whole habitation of this earth than in the days of the infant and imperfect science of Greece, or even of the more advanced and enlightened antiquity. A vague traditionary notion of its existence lived on from generation to generation. But afterward, when even the Phœnician sailors, however far they penetrated into the wide ocean, were unable to give any precise information about, or adduce any proof of, the fact, the hypothesis was advanced, and finally added to the tradition, that the island had been swallowed up by the sea.

Modern astronomy, at its first rise, was extremely revolting to man’s feelings, which had become, as it were, habituated to the olden theory of the world’s shape. The system of Ptolemy, indeed, with its narrow egotistic conceit of making man the center of the sidereal universe, was as unsatisfactory as it was absurd, and little was lost when it was exploded. But, on the other hand, it was startling, and still has a staggering effect on our minds, to be told, that, when measured by the mathematical standard of the vast distances and periodic times of the planetary system, the earth, for which the Almighty has done such incalculably great things, and on which He has bestowed such high and precious gifts, is, as it were, but a little and insignificant splinter in the vast regions of infinite space. A true and profound science of nature, however, does not allow of the validity of mathematical magnitude as an exclusive standard of the value of things. Whether in a greater or less sphere of existence, it sees and discovers in far other properties the true center of life. If, even in our globe, the living magnetic pole does not coincide with the true mathematical north pole, but lies a considerable distance on one side of it, may it not, without prejudice to modern astronomy, be also the case with the whole planetary system? The first conceptions of nature are rarely, if ever, free from mistakes, and oftentimes, together with great truths, contain also great errors. And while the first fresh impression, the living intuition, ever recommends itself to the general feeling of mankind, and takes deep root therein, the notions, on the other hand, which new discoveries of nature introduce, not unfrequently do violence to the prevalent views as to the shape and form of the old world. Often, indeed, the former run directly counter to what we might call the old family feelings of mankind, which, transmitted through generations from father to son, have become, as it were, a custom of life, a holy habit. Afterward, however, as the new scientific discovery is more perfectly developed, it gradually conciliates the old hereditary and customary feeling of nature. The two at last fall into friendly relations with each other.

Now, in the article of the stars, the cherished creed of nature, professed by all ancient peoples, insisted, perhaps, on no one dogma so earnestly as that there are seven planets. That this deeply-rooted and habitual feeling of men was not uninfluenced by the general consideration of the number seven, is only natural to suppose. For not only does it comprise the three dimensions of time, together with the four cardinal points of space, but it is also found entering, under a variety of combinations, into the life, the thought, and history of men. And in the new astronomy, though the sun and moon have been ejected from the number of the planets, yet the earth has entered into the list, and the deficient member of the system having been discovered, we have again seven planets, as in the olden belief. For it is, to say the least, highly improbable that any new planetary body will ever be discovered beyond Uranus,[22] and as for the small bodies which are situate between Mars and Jupiter, it is pretty generally acknowledged that they are not properly to be counted as planets, from which they are even distinguished by their very names by some astronomers.