No More Learning

A
condition once perceived by us, we enter into it immediately. At the
moment when we think of them, we become possessors of a virtue, authors
of an action, discoverers of a truth, possessors of a happiness. We
ourselves become the object perceived. Let no ambiguous smile from you,
dear Raphael, disconcert me here,--this assumption is the basis on which
I found all that follows, and we must be agreed before I take courage to
complete the structure.

His inner feeling or innate consciousness tells every man almost the same
thing. For example, when we admire an act of magnanimity, of bravery and
wisdom, does not a secret feeling spring up in our heart that we are
capable of doing the same? Does not the rush of blood coloring our
cheeks on hearing narratives of this kind proclaim that our modesty
trembles at the admiration called forth by such acts? that we are
confused at the praise which this ennobling of our nature must call down
upon us? Even our body at such moments agrees with the attitude of the
man, and shows clearly that our soul has passed into the state we admire.
If you were ever present, Raphael, when a great event was related to a
large assembly, did you not see how the relater waited for the incense of
praise, how he devoured it, though it was given to the hero of his
story,--and if you were ever a relater did you not trace how your heart
was subject to this pleasing deception? You have had examples, my dear
Raphael, of how easily I can wrangle with my best friend respecting the
reading aloud of a pleasing anecdote or of a beautiful poem, and my heart
told me truly on these occasions that I was only displeased at your
carrying off the laurels because these passed from the head of author to
that of the reader. A quick and deep artistic appreciation of virtue is
justly held to be a great aptitude for virtue, in the same way as it is
usual to have no scruple in distrusting the heart of a man whose
intelligence is slow to take in moral beauty.

You need not advance as an objection that, frequently, coupled with a
lively perception of a perfection, the opposite failing is found to
coexist, that evil-doers are often possessed with strong enthusiasm for
what is excellent, and that even the weak flame up into enthusiasm of
herculean growth. I know, for example, that our admired Haller, who
unmasked in so manly a spirit the sickly nothingness of vain honors; a
man whose philosophical greatness I so highly appreciated, that he was
not great enough to despise the still greater vanity of an order of
knighthood, which conferred an injury on his greatness. I am convinced
that in the happy moment of their ideal conceptions, the artist, the
philosopher, and the poet are really the great and good man whose image
they throw out; but with many this ennobling of the mind is only an
unnatural condition occasioned by a more active stirring of the blood, or
a more rapid vibration of the fancy: it is accordingly very transient,
like every other enchantment, disappearing rapidly and leaving the heart
more exhausted than before, and delivered over to the despotic caprice of
low passions. I expressly said more exhausted than before, for universal
experience teaches that a relapsing criminal is always the most furious,
and that the renegades of virtue seek additional sweets in the arms of
crime to compensate for the heavy pressure of repentance.

I wished to establish, my Raphael, that it is our own condition, when we
feel that of another, that perfection becomes ours for the moment during
which we raise in ourselves the representation of it; that the delight we
take in truth, beauty, and virtue shows itself when closely analyzed to
be the consciousness of our individual ennobling and enriching; and I
think I have proved this.

We have ideas of the wisdom of the highest Being, of His goodness, of His
justice, but none of His omnipotence. To describe His omnipotence, we
help ourselves by the graduated representation of three successions:
Nothing, His Will, and Something. It is waste and empty; God calls on
light; and there is light. If we had a real idea of His operative
omnipotence we should be creators, as He.

Accordingly, every perfection which I perceive becomes my own; it gives
me joy, because it is my own; I desire it, because I love myself.
Perfection in nature is no property of matter, but of spirits. All
spirits are happy through their perfection. I desire the happiness of
all souls, because I love myself. The happiness which I represent to
myself becomes my happiness; accordingly I am interested in awakening
these representations, to realize them, to exalt them; I am interested in
diffusing happiness around me. Whenever I produce beauty, excellence, or
enjoyment beyond myself, I produce myself; when I neglect or destroy
anything, I neglect, I destroy myself. I desire the happiness of others,
because I desire my own; and the desire of the happiness of others we
call benevolence and love.


LOVE.

Now, my most worthy Raphael, let me look round. The height has been
ascended, the mist is dissipated; I stand in the midst of immensity, as
in the middle of a glowing landscape. A purer ray of sunlight has
clarified all my thoughts. Love is the noblest phenomenon in the world
of souls, the all-powerful magnet in the spiritual sphere, the source of
devotion and of the sublimest virtue. Yet love is only the reflection of
this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, based upon an
instantaneous permutation of individuality, an interchange of being.

When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer
by what I love. To pardon is to recover a property that has been lost.
Misanthropy is a protracted suicide: egotism is the supremest poverty of
a created being.

When Raphael tore himself from my embrace my soul was rent in twain, and
I weep over the loss of my nobler half. On that holy evening--you must
remember it--when our souls first communed together in ardent sympathy,
all your great emotions became my own, and I only entered into my
unvarying right of property over your excellence; I was prouder to love
you than to be loved by you, for my own affection had changed me into
Raphael.

Was it not this almighty instinct
That forced our hearts to meet
In the eternal bond of love?
Raphael! enraptured, resting on your arm,
I venture, joyful, the march towards perfection,
That leadeth to the spiritual sun.

Happy! happy! I have found thee,
Have secured thee 'midst millions,
And of all this multitude thou art mine!
Let the wild chaos return;
Let it cast adrift the atoms!
Forever our hearts fly to meet each other.

Must I not draw reflections of my ecstasy
From thy radiant, ardent eyes?
In thee alone do I wonder at myself.
The earth in brighter tints appears,
Heaven itself shines in more glowing light,
Seen through the soul and action of my friend.

Sorrow drops the load of tears;
Soothed, it rests from passion's storms,
Nursed upon the breast of love.
Nay, delight grows torment, and seeks
My Raphael, basking in thy soul,
Sweetest sepulchre! impatiently.

If I alone stood in the great All of things,
Dreamed I of souls in the very rocks,
And, embracing, I would have kissed them.
I would have sighed my complaints into the air;
The chasms would have answered me.
O fool! sweet sympathy was every joy to me.

Love does not exist between monotonous souls, giving out the same tone;
it is found between harmonious souls. With pleasure I find again my
feelings in the mirror of yours, but with more ardent longing I devour
the higher emotions that are wanting in me. Friendship and love are led
by one common rule. The gentle Desdemona loves Othello for the dangers
through which he has passed; the manly Othello loves her for the tears
that she shed hearing of his troubles.

There are moments in life when we are impelled to press to our heart
every flower, every remote star, each worm, and the sublimest spirit we
can think of. We are impelled to embrace them, and all nature, in the
arms of our affection, as things most loved. You understand me, Raphael.
A man who has advanced so far as to read off all the beauty, greatness,
and excellence in the great and small of nature, and to find the great
unity for this manifold variety, has advanced much nearer to the
Divinity. The great creation flows into his personality. If each man
loved all men, each individual would possess the whole world.

I fear that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many
of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this
heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in
the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the
cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish
influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with
self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to
explain a phenomenon which was too godlike for their narrow hearts. They
have spun their comfortless doctrine out of a miserable egotism, and they
have made their own limits the measure of the Creator; degenerate slaves
decrying freedom amidst the rattle of their own chains. Swift, who
exaggerated the follies of men till he covered the whole race with
infamy, and wrote at length his own name on the gallows which he had
erected for it--even Swift could not inflict such deadly wounds on human
nature as these dangerous thinkers, who, laying great claim to
penetration, adorn their system with all the specious appearance of art,
and strengthen it with all the arguments of self-interest.

Why should the whole species suffer for the shortcomings of a few
members?

I admit freely that I believe in the existence of a disinterested love.
I am lost if I do not exist; I give up the Deity, immortality, and
virtue. I have no remaining proof of these hopes if I cease to believe
in love. A spirit that loves itself alone is an atom giving out a spark
in the immeasurable waste of space.


SACRIFICE.

But love has produced effects that seem to contradict its nature.

It can be conceived that I increase my own happiness by a sacrifice which
I offer for the happiness of others; but suppose this sacrifice is my
life? History has examples of this kind of sacrifice, and I feel most
vividly that it would cost me nothing to die in order to save Raphael.
How is it possible that we can hold death to be a means of increasing the
sum of our enjoyments? How can the cessation of my being be reconciled
with the enriching of my being?

The assumption of immortality removes this contradiction; but it also
displaces the supreme gracefulness of this act of sacrifice. The
consideration of a future reward excludes love. There must be a virtue
which even without the belief in immortality, even at the peril of
annihilation, suffices to carry out this sacrifice.

I grant it is ennobling to the human soul to sacrifice present enjoyment
for a future eternal good; it is the noblest degree of egotism; but
egotism and love separate humanity into two very unlike races, whose
limits are never confounded.

Egotism erects its centre in itself; love places it out of itself in the
axis of the universal whole. Love aims at unity, egotism at solitude.
Love is the citizen ruler of a flourishing republic, egotism is a despot
in a devastated creation. Egotism sows for gratitude, love for the
ungrateful. Love gives, egotism lends; and love does this before the
throne of judicial truth, indifferent if for the enjoyment of the
following moment, or with the view to a martyr's crown--indifferent
whether the reward is in this life or in the next.

Think, O Raphael, of a truth that benefits the whole human race to remote
ages; add that this truth condemns its confessor to death; that this
truth can only be proved and believed if he dies. Conceive this man
gifted with the clear all-embracing and illumining eye of genius, with
the flaming torch of enthusiasm, with all the sublime adaptations for
love; let the grand ideal of this great effect be presented to his soul;
let him have only an obscure anticipation of all the happy beings he will
make; let the present and future crowd at the same time into his soul;
and then answer me,--does this man require to be referred to a future
life?

The sum of all these emotions will become confounded with his
personality; will flow together in his personal identity, his I or Ego.
The human race he is thinking of is himself. It is a body, in which his
life swims forgotten like a blood-drop, forgotten, but essential to the
welfare of the economy; and how quickly and readily he will shed it to
secure his health.


GOD.

All perfections in the universe are united in God. God and nature are
two magnitudes which are quite alike. The whole sum of harmonic activity
which exists together in the divine substance, is in nature the antitype
of this substance, united to incalculable degrees, and measures, and
steps. If I may be allowed this expressive imagery, nature is an
infinitely divided God.

Just as in the prism a white ray of light is split up into seven darker
shades of color, so the divine personality or Ego has been broken into
countless susceptible substances. As seven darker shades melt together
in one clear pencil of light, out of the union of all these substances a
divine being would issue. The existing form of nature's fabric is the
optical glass, and all the activities of spirits are only an endless play
of colors of that simple divine ray. If it pleased Omnipotence some day
to break up this prism, the barrier between it and the world would fall
down, all spirits would be absorbed in one infinite spirit, all accords
would flow together in one common harmony, all streams would find their
end in the ocean.

The bodily form of nature came to pass through the attractive force of
the elements. The attraction of spirits, varied and developed
infinitely, would at length lead to the cessation of that separation (or
may I venture the expression) would produce God. An attraction of this
kind is love.

Accordingly, my dear Raphael, love is the ladder by which we climb up to
likeness to God. Unconsciously to ourselves, without laying claim to it,
we aim at this.

Lifeless masses are we, when we hate;
Gods, when we cling; in love to one another,
Rejoicing in the gentle bond of love.
Upwards this divinest impulse holdeth sway
Through the thousandfold degrees of creation
Of countless spirits who did not create.

Arm-in-arm, higher and still higher,
From the savage to the Grecian seer,
Who is linked to the last seraph of the ring,
We turn, of one mind, in the same magic dance,
Till measure, and e'en time itself,
Sink at death in the boundless, glowing sea.

Friendless was the great world's blaster;
And feeling this, he made the spirit world
Blessed mirrors of his own blessedness!
And though the Highest found no equal,
Yet infinitude foams upward unto Him
From the vast basin of creation's realm.

Love is, Raphael, the great secret that can restore the dishonored king
of gold from the flat, unprofitable chalk; that can save the eternal from
the temporal and transient, and the great oracle of duration from the
consuming conflagration of time.

What does all that has been said amount to?

If we perceive excellence, it is ours. Let us become intimate with the
high ideal unit, and we shall be drawn to one another in brotherly love.
If we plant beauty and joy we shall reap beauty and joy. If we think
clearly we shall love ardently. "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven
is perfect," says the Founder of our Faith. Weak human nature turned
pale at this command, therefore He explained himself in clearer terms:
"Love one another! "

Wisdom, with thy sunlike look,
Awful goddess! turn thee back,
And give way to Love;
Who before thee went, with hero heart,
Up the steep and stormy path
To the Godhead's very throne;
Who, unveiling the Holiest,
Showed to thee Elysium
Through the vaulted sepulchre.
Did it not invite us in?
Could we reach immortality--
Or could we seek the spirit
Without Love, the spirit's master?
Love, Love leadeth only to Nature's Father,
Only love the spirits.

I have now given you, Raphael, my spirit's confession of faith--a flying
outline of the creation I have undertaken. As you may perceive, the seed
which you scattered in my soul took root. Mock, or rejoice, or blush at
your scholar, as you please. Certain it is this philosophy has ennobled
my heart, and extended and beautified the perspective of my life. It is
possible, my excellent friend, that the entire structure of my
conclusions may have been a baseless and visionary edifice. Perhaps the
world, as I depicted it, nowhere exists, save in the brain of your
Julius. Perhaps, after the lapse of thousands on thousands of years,
when the wiser Judge promised in the future, sits on the judgment-seat,
at the sight of the true original, filled with confusion, I should tear
in pieces my schoolboy's design. All this may happen--I expect it; and
even if not a vestige of reality is found in my dream, the reality will
fill me with proportionately greater delight and wonder. Ought my ideas
to be more beautiful than those of the Creator? How so? Could we
tolerate that His exalted artistic structure should fall beneath the
expectations of a mortal connoisseur? This is exactly the fiery
probation of His great perfection, and the sweetest triumph for the
Exalted Spirit, that false conclusions and deception do not injure His
acknowledgment; that all tortuous deviations of the wandering reason at
length strike into the straight road of everlasting truth; that all
diverging arms and currents ultimately meet in the main stream. What an
idea, Raphael, I form of the Great Artist, who, differently travestied in
a thousand copies, still retains identical features in all this
diversity, from which even the depreciating hand of a blunderer cannot
remove admiration.

Moreover, my representation may certainly be fallacious, wholly an
invention,--nay, I am persuaded that it must necessarily be so; and yet
it is possible that all results of this may come to pass. All great
sages are agreed that our whole knowledge moves on ultimately to a
conventional deception, with which, however, the strictest truth can
co-exist. Our purest ideas are by no means images of things, but only
their signs or symbols determined by necessity, and co-existing with
them.

Neither God, nor the human soul, nor the world are really what we
consider them. Our thoughts of these are only the endemic forms in which
the planet we inhabit hands them to us. Our brain belongs to this
planet; accordingly, also, the idioms of our ideas, which are treasured
up in it. But the power of the soul is peculiar, necessary, and always
consistent: the capricious nature of the materials through which it finds
expression changes nothing in the eternal laws, as long as this
capriciousness does not stand in contradiction with itself, and so long
as the sign remains true to the thing it designates. As the thinking
power develops the relations of the idioms, these relations of things
must also really be present in them. Therefore, truth is no property of
the idioms, but of the conclusion; it is not the likeness of the sign
with the thing signified, of the conception with the object; but the
agreement of this conception with the laws of thought. In a similar
manner, the doctrine of quantity makes use of cyphers which are nowhere
present, except upon paper, and yet it finds with them what is present in
the world of reality. For example, what resemblance is there between the
letters A and B, the signs : and =, +, and -, and the fact that has to be
ascertained? Yet the comet, foretold centuries before, advances from a
remote corner of the heavens and the expected planet eclipses the disk
at the proper time. Trusting to the infallibility of his calculation,
the discoverer Columbus plunges into unknown regions of the sea to seek
the missing other half of the known hemisphere--the great island of
Atlantis--to fill up a blank in his geographical map. He found this
island of his paper calculation, and his calculation was right. Would it
have been less great if a hostile storm had shattered his fleet or driven
it back? The human mind makes a similar calculation when it measures the
super-sensual by means of the sensible, and when mathematics applies its
conclusions to the hidden physics of the superhuman. But the last test
of its calculations is still wanting, for no traveller has come back from
that land to relate his discovery. Human nature has its proper bounds,
and so also has the individual. We will give each other mutual comfort
respecting the former: Raphael will concede this to the boyish age of his
Julius. I am poor in conceptions, a stranger in many branches of
knowledge which are thought to be essential in inquiries of this nature.
I have not belonged to any philosophical school, nor have I read many
printed books. It may quite well be that I occasionally substitute my
fancies in the place of stricter logical proofs, that I mistake the rush
of my blood or the hopes of my heart for sound wisdom; yet, my dear
friend, you must not grudge me the moments I have thus lost. It is a
real gain for universal perfection: it was the provision of the Wisest
Spirit that the erring reason should also people the chaotic world of
dreams, and make fruitful even the barren ground of contradiction. It is
not only the mechanical artist who polishes the rough diamond into a
brilliant whom we ought to value, but also that one who ennobles mere
ordinary stones by giving them the apparent dignity of the diamond. The
industry displayed in the forms may sometimes make us forget the massive
truth of the substance. Is not every exercise of the thinking power,
every sharpening of the edge of the spirit, a little step towards its
perfection; and every perfection has to obtain a being and substantial
existence in a complete and perfect world. Reality is not confined to
the absolutely necessary; it also embraces the conditionally necessary:
every offspring of the brain, every work elaborated by the wit, has an
irresistible right of citizenship in this wider acceptation of creation.
In the measureless plan of nature no activity was to be left out, no
degree of enjoyment was to be wanting in universal happiness. The great
Inventive Spirit would not even permit error to be wasted, nor allow this
wide world of thought to remain empty and chaotic in the mind of man.
For the Great Ruler of His world does not even allow a straw to fall
without use, leaves no space uninhabited where life may be enjoyed; for
He converts the very poison of man into the food of vipers; He even
raises plants from the realm of corruption, and hospitably grants the
little glimmer of pleasure that can co-exist with madness. He turns
crime and folly into excellence, and weaves out of the very vices of a
Tarquin the great idea of the universal monarchy of Rome. Every facility
of the reason, even in error, increases its readiness to accept truth.

Dear friend of my soul, suffer me to add my contribution to the great
woof of human wisdom. The image of the sun is reflected differently in
the dewdrop and in the majestic mirror of the wide-stretching ocean.
Shame to the turbid, murky swamp, which never receives and never reflects
this image! Millions of plants drink from the four elements of nature; a
magazine of supplies is open for all: but they mix their sap in a
thousand different ways, and return it in a thousand new forms. The most
beautiful variety proclaims a rich Lord of this house. There are four
elements from which all spirits draw their supplies: their Ego or
individuality, Nature, God, and the Future All intermingle in millions of
ways and offer themselves in a million differences of result: but one
truth remains which, like a firm axis, goes through all religions and
systems--draw nigh to the Godhead of whom you think!




LETTER V.


Raphael to Julius.

It would be very unfortunate, my dear Julius, if there were no other way
of quieting you than by restoring the first-fruits of your belief in you.
I found with delight these ideas, which I saw gaining in you, written
down in your papers. They are worthy of a soul like yours, but you could
not remain stationary in them. There are joys for every age and
enjoyments for each degree of spirits. It must have been a difficult
thing for you to sever yourself from a system that was entirely made to
meet the wants of your heart. I would wager that no other system will
strike such deep roots in you, and, possibly, if left quite to your own
direction, you would sooner or later become reconciled to your favorite
ideas. You would soon remark the weakness of the opposite system, and
then, if both systems appeared equally deficient in proof, you would
prefer the most desirable one, or, perhaps, you would find new arguments
to preserve at least the essential features of your former theory, even
if a few more doubtful points had to be given up.

But all this is remote from my plan. You must arrive at a higher freedom
of mind, where you no longer require support. I grant that this is not
the affair of a moment. The first aim of the earliest teaching is
commonly the subjugation of the mind, and among all the artifices of the
art of education this generally succeeds the first. Even you, though
endowed with great elasticity of character, yet appear destined to submit
readily to the sway of opinions, and even more inclined to this than
thousands; and this state of infancy might last very long with you, as
you do not readily feel the oppression of it. Your head and heart are in
very close connection. A doctrine is sweet to you on account of the
teacher. You soon succeeded in finding an interesting side in this
doctrine, you ennobled it according to the wants of your heart, and you
suffered your mind to be resigned to other points that must needs appear
strange to you. You regarded attacks on this doctrine as boyish revenge
taken by a slavish soul against the rod of its tutor. You played with
your chains, which you thought you carried by your own free will.

I found you in this situation, and the sight gave me pain--how, in the
midst of the enjoyment, of your glowing life, and while giving expression
to your noblest powers, you were hemmed in by narrow considerations.
The
very logical consistency with which you acted according to your
convictions, and the strength of soul that made every sacrifice light to
you, were twofold hinderances to your activity and to your joys. I then
resolved to set aside these clumsy efforts by which it had been
endeavored to cramp a soul like yours in the measure of ordinary natures.
The result of your first exertions favored my intentions. I admit that
your imagination was more actively employed upon the work than was your
penetration. The loss of your fondest convictions was more than atoned
for by your presentiments, which gathered results much more rapidly than
the tortoise pace of cold scientific inquiry, passing from the known to
the unknown. Your kind of inspired system gave you your first enjoyment
in this new field of activity, and I was very careful not to destroy a
welcome enthusiasm which was very favorable to the development of your
excellent disposition. The scene is now changed. A return into the
restrictions of infancy is closed forever. Your way leads onwards, and
you require no further precautions.

You must not be surprised to find that a system such as yours cannot
resist the searching of a severe criticism. All essays of this kind,
equal in breadth and boldness to yours, have had no other fate. It was
also most natural that your philosophical progress began with you
individually, as with the human race in general. The first object on
which man's spirit of inquiry first attempted its strength was, at all
times, the universe. Hypotheses relating to the origin of the world, and
the combination of its parts, had occupied the greatest thinkers for
ages, when Socrates called down the philosophy of his day from heaven to
earth. But the limits of human wisdom were too narrow for the proud
intellect of his followers. New systems arose on the ruins of the former
ones. The penetrating mind of subsequent ages explored the immeasurable
field of possible answers to those ever-recurring questions, bearing on
the mysterious interior of nature, which could not be disclosed by any
human intellect. Some, indeed, succeeded in giving a certain coloring of
distinctness, completeness, and evidence to their views. There are many
conjuring tricks by which the pride of reason seeks to avoid the disgrace
of not being able to exceed the bounds of human nature in extending the
circle of its knowledge. It is a frequent conceit with men to believe
that they have discovered new truths, when they have dissected a
conception into the separate elements out of which it was first
compounded by an act of caprice. Not unfrequently an imperceptible
assumption lies at the basis of a chain of consequences, whose breaks and
deficiencies are cunningly concealed, while the false conclusions are
admired as sublime wisdom. In other cases, partial experiences are
accumulated to found a hypothesis, and all contradictory phenomena are
either ignored, or the meaning of words is changed according to the
requirements of the reasoning. Nor is it only the philosophical quack
who employs these conjuring tricks to deceive the public; without being
conscious of it, the most upright and the least prejudiced thinker uses
analogous means to satisfy his thirst for knowledge directly that he
issues from the only sphere where reason can legitimately enjoy the fruit
of its activity.

After what you have heard me say on former occasions, Julius, these
expressions must cause you no little astonishment; yet they are not the
product of a sceptical caprice. I could lay before you the foundations
on which they rest, but this would require, as prelude, a somewhat dry
examination into the nature of human knowledge,--and I prefer to reserve
this for a time when you will feel the want of it. You have not yet
arrived at that state of mind when humiliating truths on the limits of
human knowledge can have any interest for you. Make a first essay with
the system which has supplanted your own in your mind. Examine it with
the same impartiality as severity. Proceed in the same manner with other
theories with which you have recently become acquainted; and if none of
them can fully satisfy your requirements, you will ask yourself if, after
all, these requirements are reasonable.

Perhaps you will tell me this is a poor consolation. You will infer that
resignation is your only refuge after so many brilliant hopes had been
raised. "Was it worth while," you will say, "to challenge me to a full
exercise of my reason in order to set bounds to it at the very moment
when it was beginning to bear the noblest fruit? Was I only to become
acquainted with a higher enjoyment in order to feel with a double
keenness how painful it is to be thus bounded? "

Nevertheless, it is this very feeling of discouragement that I expressly
wish to banish from your soul. My aim is this: to remove all that places
an obstacle to the free enjoyment of your being, to bring to life in you
the germ of all lofty inspiration--the consciousness of the nobility of
your soul. You have been awakened from the slumber in which you were
rocked by the slavery of others' opinions; but you would never reach the
degree of grandeur to which you are called if you dissipated your
strength in the pursuit of an unattainable end. This course was all
proper up to the present time; it was the natural consequence of your
recently acquired freedom. It was necessary that the ideas which had
most engaged you previously should give the first impulse to the activity
of your mind. . Among all possible directions that your mind could take,
is its present course the most fertile in results? The answer would be
given, sooner or later, by your own experience. My part was confined to
hastening, if possible, this crisis.

It is a common prejudice to take as a measure of the greatness of man
that matter on which he works, and not the manner of his work. But it is
certain that a superior Being honors the stamp of perfection even in the
most limited sphere, whilst He casts an eye of pity on the vain attempts
of the insect which seeks to overlook the universe. It follows from this
that I am especially unwilling to agree to the proposition in your
papers, which assumes that the high destiny of man is to detect the
spirit of the Divine Artist in the work of creation. To express the
activity of infinite perfection, I admit that I do not know any sublimer
image than art; but you appear to have overlooked an important
distinction. The universe is not the pure expression of an ideal, like
the accomplished work of a human artist. The latter governs despotically
the inanimate matter which he uses to give a body to his ideas. But in
the divine work the proper value of each one of its parts is respected,
and this conservative respect with which the Great Architect honors every
germ of activity, even in the lowliest creature, glorifies it as much as
the harmony of the immeasurable whole. Life and liberty to all possible
extent are the seal of divine creation; nowhere is it more sublime than
where it seems to have departed most widely from its ideal. But it is
precisely this highest perfection that prevents us from grasping the
limits in which we are at present confined. We embrace only too small a
part of the universe, and the explanation of most of its discords is
inaccessible to our faculties. Each step we climb in the scale of being
will make us more susceptible of these enjoyments of art; but even then
their only value will be that of means, and to excite us to an analogous
exercise of our activity. The idle admiration of a greatness foreign to
ourselves can never be a great merit. A superior man is never wanting in
matter for his activity, nor in the forces necessary to become himself a
creator in his sphere. This vocation is yours also, Julius; when you
have recognized this you will never have a thought of complaining of the
limits that your desire of knowledge cannot overstep.

When you have arrived at this conviction I expect to find you wholly
reconciled to me. You must first know fully the extent of your strength
before you can appreciate the value of its freest manifestation. Till
then, continue to be dissatisfied with me, but do not despair of
yourself.






ON THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE ANIMAL AND THE SPIRITUAL NATURE IN MAN.


"It behooves us to clearly realize, as the broad facts which have most
wide-reaching consequences in mental physiology and pathology, that all
parts of the body, the highest and the lowest, have a sympathy with one
another more intelligent than conscious intelligence can yet, or perhaps
ever will, conceive; that there is not an organic motion, visible or
invisible, sensible or insensible, ministrant to the noblest or to the
most humble purposes, which does not work its appointed effect in the
complex recesses of the mind, and that the mind, as the crowning
achievement of organization, and the consummation and outcome of all its
energies, really comprehends the bodily life. "--MAWDESLEY, Body and Mind.

"It is an indisputable truth that what we call the material world is only
known to us under the forms of the ideal world, and, as Descartes tells
us, our knowledge of the soul is more intimate and certain than our
knowledge of the body. "--HUXLEY.



INTRODUCTION.

S 1.


Many philosophers have asserted that the body is, as it were, the
prison-house of the spirit, holding it only too firmly to what is
earthly, and checking its so-called flight towards perfection. On the
other hand, it has been held by another philosophic school that knowledge
and virtue are not so much an end as a means towards happiness, and that
the whole perfection of man culminates in the amelioration of his body.

Both opinions [1], methinks, are one-sided. The latter system has
almost entirely disappeared from our schemes of ethics and philosophy,
and is, I am inclined to think, not seldom cast out with over-fanatical
zeal--(nothing assuredly is so dangerous to truth as when one-sided
opinions meet with one-sided opponents). The former system has on the
whole been more patiently endured, since it has the greatest capacity for
warming the heart towards virtue, and has already justified its value in
the case of truly great souls. Who is there that does not admire the
strength of mind of a Cato, the lofty virtue of a Brutus and Aurelius,
the equanimity of an Epictetus and a Seneca? But, in spite of all this,
the system in question is nothing more than a beautiful aberration of the
understanding, a real extreme, which in its wild enthusiasm underrates
one part of our human nature, and desires to raise us into the order of
ideal beings without at the same time relieving us of our humanity,--a
system which runs directly contrary to all that we historically know or
philosophically can explain either of the evolution of the single man or
of that of the entirer race, and can in no way be reconciled with the
limitations of our human soul. It is therefore here, as ever, the wisest
plan to hold the balance between the two opinions, and thus reach with
greater certainty the middle line of truth. But, inasmuch as a mistake
has very often been committed by treating the mental powers in an
exclusive way, that is, in so far as they can be considered in
independence of the body, and through an intentional subordination of
this same body, the aim of this present essay will be to bring into a
clearer light the remarkable contributions made by the body to the
workings of the soul, and the great and real influence of the animal
system of sensations upon the spiritual. But this is as like the
philosophy of Epicurus as the holding of virtue to be the summum bonum is
stoicism.

Before we seek to discover those higher moral ends which the animal
nature assists us in attaining to, we must establish their physical
necessity, and come to an agreement as to some fundamental conceptions.


[1] Huxley, speaking of psychology and physiology (idealism and
materialism), says: "Our stem divides into two main branches, which grow
in opposite ways, and bear flowers which look as different as they can
well be. But each branch is sound and healthy, and has as much life and
vigor as the other. If a botanist found this state of things in a new
plant, I imagine he might be inclined to think that his tree was
monoecious, that the flowers were of different sexes, and that, so far
from setting up a barrier between the branches of the tree, the only hope
of fertility lay in bringing them together. This is my notion of what is
to be done with physics and metaphysics. Their differences are
complementary, not antagonistic, and thought will never be completely
fruitful until the one unites with the other. "--HUXLEY, Macmillan's Mag. ,
May 1870.

Descartes' method (according to Huxley) leads straight up to the critical
idealism of his great successor, Kant, in declaring that the ultimate
fact of all knowledge is a consciousness and therefore affirming that the
highest of all certainties, and indeed the only absolute certainty, is
the existence of mind. But it stops short of Berkeley in declaring that
matter does not exist: his arguments against its existence would equally
tend to prove the non-existence of soul. In Descartes' stem, the body is
simply a machine, in the midst of which the rational soul (peculiar to
man) is lodged, and which it directs at its will, as a skilful engineer
familiar with its working might do--through will and through affection he
can "increase, slacken, and alter their movements at his pleasure. " At
the same time, he admits, in all that regards its mere animal life--in
active functions, such as those connected with hunger, respiration,
sleep, digestion; in many passive ones, such as we are accustomed to call
mental, as in memory, the perception of color, sound--a purely automatic
action of the body, which it pursues simply by following out its own
laws, independent of the soul's direction or interference.



PHYSICAL CONNECTION.

THE ANIMAL NATURE STRENGTHENS THE ACTION OF THE SPIRIT.

S 2. --Organism of the Operations of the Soul--of its Maintenance and
Support--of Generation.


All those conditions which we accept as requisite to the perfection of
man in the moral and material world may be included in one fundamental
sentence: The perfection of man consists in his ability to exercise his
powers in the observation of the plan of the world; and since between the
measure of the power and the end towards which it works there must exist
the completest harmony, perfection will consist in the highest possible
activity of his powers, and, at the same time, in their mutual
subordination. But the action of the human soul is--from a necessity
which I do not understand--bound fast to the action of matter. The
changes in the world of matter must be modified and, so to speak, refined
by a peculiar class of secondary powers--I mean the senses--before they
can produce in me any corresponding ideas; while, on the other hand, a
fresh set of organic powers, the agents of voluntary movements must come
into play between the inner spirit and the outward world in order to make
the changes of the former tell upon the latter; thus must the operations
of thinking and sensation alike correspond to certain movements of the
internal sensorium. All this goes to make up the organism of the soul's
activities.

But matter is spoil stolen from the eternal change, and wears itself
away, even as it works; in its movement its very element is driven from
its grooves, chased away and lost. Because now, on the contrary, that
simple essence, the soul, possesses in itself permanence and stability,
and in its essence neither gains nor loses aught,--matter cannot keep
step with the activity of the spirit, and there would thus soon be an end
of the organism of spiritual life, and therewith of all action of the
soul. To prevent which there must be added to the first system or
organic powers a second one, which shall make good the losses sustained,
and sustain the decay by a chain of new creations ready to take the place
of those that have gone. This is the organism of maintenance.

Still further. After a short period of activity, when the equal balance
of loss and reparation is once removed, man quits the stage of life, and
the law of mortality depopulates the earth. There is not room enough for
the multitude of sentient beings, whom eternal love and wisdom seemed to
have called to a happy existence, to live side by side within the narrow
boundaries of our world, and the life of one generation shuts out the
life of another. Therefore was it necessary that new men should appear,
to take the place of those who had departed, and that life should be kept
up in unbroken succession. But of creation there is no longer any trace;
what now becomes new becomes so only by development. The development of
man must come to pass through man, if it is to bear a proportion to the
original number, if man is to be cultivated into man. On this account a
new system of organic powers was added to the two that had preceded it,
which had for its object to quicken and to develop the seed of humanity.
This is the organism of generation.

These three organisms, brought into the most thorough connection, local
and real, go to form the human body.



S 3. --The Body.


The organic powers of the human body naturally divide themselves into two
principal classes. The first class embraces those which no known laws
and phenomena of the physical world enable us to comprehend; and to these
belong the sensibility of the nerves and the irritability of the muscles.
Inasmuch as it has hitherto been impossible to penetrate the economy of
the invisible, men have sought to interpret this unknown mechanism
through that with which they were already familiar, and have considered
the nerves as a canal conducting an excessively fine, volatile, and
active fluid, which in rapidity of motion and fineness was held to excel
ether and the electric spark. This fluid was held to be the principle
and author of our sensibility and power of motion, and hence received the
name of the spirit of life. Further, the irritability of the muscles was
held to consist, in a certain effort to contract themselves on the touch
of some external provocation. These two principles go to form the
specific character of animal organism.

The second class of powers embraces those which we can account for by the
universally-known laws of physics. Among these I reckon the mechanism of
motion, and the chemistry of the human body, the source of vegetable
life. Vegetation, then, and animal mechanism, thoroughly mingled, form
the proper physical life of the human body.



S 4. -Animal Life.


This is not yet all. Since loss or misfortune, when it occurs, falls
more or less within the will-power of the spirit, the spirit must be
able to make some compensation for it. Further, since the body is
subjected to all the consequences of this connection, and in the circle
of circumstances is exposed to countless hostile forces, it must be
within the power of the soul to protect the body against these harmful
influences, and to bring it into such relations with the physical
world as shall tend most to its preservation. The soul must therefore
be conscious of the present evil or good state of its organs; from a
bad state it must draw dissatisfaction, from a good state satisfaction,
so that it may either retain or remove the condition, seek it or fly
from it. Here then we have the organism at once and closely linked to
the sensational capacity, and the soul drawn into the service of the
body. We have now something more than vegetation, something more than a
dead model and the mechanism of nerves and muscles. Now we have animal
life. [1]

A healthy condition of our animal life is, as we know, most important for
the healthy condition of our spiritual life; and we dare never ignore the
animal life so long as we are not quit of it. It must therefore possess
a firm foundation, not easily moved; that is, the soul must be fitted and
prepared for the actions of our bodily life by an irresistible power.
Were then the sensations of our animal loss or well-being to become
spiritual perceptions, and had they to be created by thought, how often
would the soul be obscured by the overwhelming blaze of passion; how
often stifled by laziness and stupidity; how often overlooked in the
absorptions and distractions of business! Further, would not, in this
case, the most perfect knowledge of his economy be demanded of the animal
man--would not the child need to be a master in a branch of knowledge in
which, after fifty years of investigation, Harvey, Boerhaave, and Haller
were only beginners? The soul could thus have positively no idea of the
condition she was called upon to alter. How shall she become acquainted
with it? how shall she begin to act at all?


[1] But we have something more than the animal life of the animal
(beast). A beast lives an animal life in order that it may experience
pleasant sensations. It experiences pleasant sensations that it may
preserve the animal life. It lives now, therefore, in order that it may
live again tomorrow. It is happy now that it may be happy to-morrow.
But it is a simple, an uncertain happiness, which depends upon the action
of the organism, it is a slave to luck and blind chance; because it
consists in sensation only. Man, too, lives an animal life,--is sensible
of its pleasures and suffers its pains. But why? He feels and suffers
that he may preserve his animal life. He preserves his animal life that
he may longer have the power to live a spiritual one. Here, then, the
means differ from the end; there, end and means seem to coincide. This
is one of the lines of separation between man and the animal.



S 5. --Animal Sensations.


So far we have met with such sensations only as they take their rise in
an antecedent operation of the understanding; but we have now to deal
with sensations in which the understanding bears no part. These
sensations, if they are not exactly the expression of the present state
of our organs, mark it out specifically, or, better, accompany it. These
sensations have quickly and forcibly to determine the will to aversion or
desire; but, on the other hand, they are ever to float on the surface of
the soul, and never to extend to the province of the reason. The part,
accordingly, played by thought, in the case of a mental perception, is
here taken up by that modification in the animal parts of us which either
threatens the destruction of the sensation or insures its duration: that
is, an eternal law of wisdom has combined with that condition of the
machine which confirms its welfare, a pleasant emotion of the soul; and,
on the other hand, with that condition which undermines it and threatens
ruin, an unpleasant emotion is connected; and this in such a manner that
the sensation itself has not the faintest resemblance to the state of the
organs of which it is the mark. Animal sensations have, on this showing,
a double origin: (1) in the present state of the machine; (2) in the
capacity or faculty (of sensation).

We are now able to understand how it is that the animal sensations have
the power to drive the soul with an irresistible tyranny in the direction
of passionate action, and not seldom gain the upper hand in a struggle
with those sensations which are most purely intellectual. For these last
the soul has produced by means of thought, and therefore they can by
thought be solved or even destroyed. Abstraction and philosophy have
this power over the passions, over opinions--in short, over all the
situations of life; but the animal sensations are forced upon the soul by
a blind necessity, by a stern mechanical law. The understanding, which
did not create them, likewise cannot dissolve them and make them as if
they were not, though by giving an opposite direction to our attention it
can do much to weaken their power and obscure their pretensions. The
most stubborn stoic, lying in the agony of the stone, will never be able
to boast that he did not feel its pain; but, lost in the consideration of
the end of his existence, he will be able to divide his whole power of
sensation and perception, and the preponderating pleasure of a great
achievement, which can subordinate even pain to the general welfare, will
be victorious over the present discomfort. It was neither absence of nor
annihilation of sensation that enabled Mucius, while he was roasting his
hand in the fire, to gaze upon the foe with the Roman look of proud
repose, but the thought of great Rome in admiration of his deed. This it
was that ruled in his soul, and kept it grandly self-possessed, so that
the terrible provocation of the animal pain was too slight to disturb the
equal balance of his nature. But not on this account was the pain the
Roman suffered less than it would have been in the case of the most
effeminate voluptuary. True enough, the man who is accustomed to pass
his days in a state of confused ideas will be less capable of manly
action, in the critical moment of sensuous pain, than he who lives
persistently among ideas distinct and clear; but, for all that, neither
the loftiest virtue, nor the profoundest philosophy, nor even divine
religion, can save a man from the result of a necessary law, though
religion can bless her servants even at the stake, and make them happy as
the pile gives way.

The wisest purpose is served by the power which the animal sensations
possess over the perceptive faculty of the soul. The spirit once
initiated in the mysteries of a higher pleasure would look with disdain
upon the motions of its companion, and would pay no heed to the poor
necessities of physical life, were it not that the animal feeling
compelled it to do so. The mathematician, soaring in the region of the
infinite, and dreaming away reality in a world of abstractions, is roused
by the pang of hunger from his intellectual slumber; the natural
philosopher, dismembering the solar system, accompanying through
immeasurable space the wanderings of the planets, is restored by the
prick of a needle to his mother earth; the philosopher who unfolds the
nature of the Deity, and fancies himself to have broken through the
fetters of mortality, returns to himself and everyday life when the bleak
north wind whistles through his crazy hut, and teaches him that he stands
midway between the beast and the angel.

Against an excess of the animal sensations the severest mental exertion
in the end possesses no influence; as they continue to grow stronger,
reason closes her ears, and the fettered soul moves but to subserve the
purposes of the bodily organization. To satisfy hunger or to quench
thirst man will do deeds at which humanity will shudder: against his will
he turns traitor or murderer--even cannibal:--

Tiger! in the bosom of thy mother wilt thou set thy teeth?

--so violent is the influence of the animal sensation over the mind.
Such watchful care has the Creator shown for the preservation of the
machine that the pillars on which it rests are the firmest, and
experience has taught us that it is rather the over-abundance than the
want of animal sensations that has carried destruction with it.

The animal sensations therefore may be said to further the welfare of the
animal nature, just as the moral and intellectual perceptions promote
spiritual progress or perfection. The system of animal sensations and
motions, then, comprises the conception of the animal nature. This is
the ground on which all the activities of the soul depend, and the
conformation of this fabric determines the duration of the spiritual
activity itself, and the degree of ease with which it works. Here, then,
we find ourselves in possession of the first member of the connection
between the two natures.



S 6. --Objections against the Connection of the Two Natures, drawn from
Ideas of Morality.


There is no doubt that thus much will be conceded; but the next remark
will be: "Here ends, too, any determining influence the body may possess;
beyond this point the body is but the soul's inert companion, with whom
she must sustain a constant battle, attendance on whose necessities robs
her of all leisure, whose attacks and interruptions break the thread of
the most intricate speculation, and drive the spirit from the clearest
and plainest conceptions into a chaotic complexity of the senses, whose
pleasures remove the greatest part of our fellow-creatures far from their
high original, and reduce them to the level of the beasts, which, in a
word, entangles them in a slavery from which death only can deliver them.
Is it not senseless and injust," our complainer might go on to say, "to
mix up a being, simple, necessary, that has its subsistence in itself,
with another being that moves in an eternal whirl, exposed to every
chance and change, and becomes the victim of every external necessity? "
On cooler afterthought we shall perhaps see a great beauty take its rise
out of this apparent confusion and want of plan.



PHILOSOPHICAL CONNECTION.

ANIMAL IMPULSES AWAKEN AND DEVELOP THE IMPULSES OF THE SOUL.

S 7. --The Metho.


The surest way, perhaps, to throw some light upon this matter is the
following: Let us detach from man all idea of what can be called
organization,--that is, let the body be separated from the spirit,
without, however, depriving the latter of the power to attain to
representations of, and to produce actions in, the corporeal world; and
let us then inquire how the spirit would set to work, would develop its
powers, what steps it would take towards its perfection: the result of
this investigation must be founded upon facts. The actual culture of the
individual man is thus surveyed, while we at the same time obtain a view
of the development of the whole race. In the first place, then, we have
this abstract case: the power of representation and will are present, a
sphere of action is present, and a free way opened from the soul to the
world, from the world to the soul. The question then is, How will the
spirit act?



S 8. -The Soul viewed as out of connection with the Body.


We can form no conception without the antecedent will to form it; no
will, unless by experience of a better condition thereby induced, without
[some] sensation; no sensation without an antecedent idea (for along with
the body we excluded bodily sensations), therefore no idea without an
idea.

Let us consider now the case of a child; that is, according to our
hypothesis, a spirit conscious in itself of the power to form ideas, but
which for the first time is about to exercise this power. What will
determine him to think, unless it be the pleasant sensation thereby
arising, and what can have procured for him the experience of this
pleasurable sensation? We have just seen that this, again, could be
nothing but thinking, and he is now for the first time to think.
Further, what shall invite him to a consideration of the [external]
world? Nothing but the experience of its perfection in so far as it
satisfies his instinct of activity, and as this satisfaction affords him
pleasure. What, then, can determine him to an exercise of his powers?
Nothing but the experience of their existence; and all these experiences
are now to be made for the first time. He must therefore have been
active from all eternity--which is contrary to the case as stated--or he
will to all eternity be inactive, just as the machine without a touch
from without remains idle and motionless.



S 9.