Chapter 7

It does not appear to me to be open to question that there is in the soul of man a nature and an order obtaining in it as permanent and universal as in the material world. The soul of man has a common being in all. There could be no science of logic, psychology, or metaphysics on the hypothesis of any uncertainty as to the identity of mind in all, nor any science of ethics on the hypothesis of any variation as to the identity of the will in all, nor any ground of expression even, of communication between man and man, on the hypothesis of any radical difference in the experience and faculties to which all expression appeals for its intelligibility; neither could there be any system of life in social groups, or plan for education, unless such a common basis is accepted. The postulate of a common human nature is analogous to that of the unity of matter in science; it finds its complete expression in the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, for if race be fundamentally distinguished from race as was once thought, it is only as element is distinguished from element in the old chemistry. So, too, the postulate of an order obtaining in the soul, universal and necessary, independent of man's volition, analogous in all respects to the order of nature, is parallel with that of the constancy of physical law. A rational life expects this order. The first knowledge of it comes to us, as that of natural law, by experience; in the social world--the relations of men to one another--and in the more important region of our own nature we learn the issue of certain courses of action as well as in the external world; in our own lives and in our dealings with others we come to a knowledge of, and a conformity to, the conditions under which we live, the laws operant in our being, as well as those of the physical world. Literature assumes this order; in Aeschylus, Cervantes, or Shakspere, it is this that gives their work interest. Apart from natural science, the whole authority of the past in its entire accumulation of wisdom rests upon the permanence of this order, and its capacity to be known by man; that virtue makes men noble and vice renders them base, is a statement without meaning unless this order is continuous through ages; all principles of action, all schemes of culture, would be uncertain except on this foundation.

So near is this order to us that it was known long before science came to any maturity. We have added, in truth, little to our knowledge of humanity since the Greeks; and if one wonders why ethics came before science, let him own at least that its priority shows that it is near and vital in life as science is not. We can do, it seems, without Kepler's laws, but not without the Decalogue. The race acquires first what is most needful for life; and man's heart was always with him, and his fate near. A second reason, it may be noted, for the later development of science is that our senses, as used by science, are more mental now, and the object itself is observable only by the intervention of the mind through the telescope or microscope or a hundred instruments into which, though physical, the mind enters. Our methods, too, as well as our instruments, are things of the mind. It behooves us to remember in an age which science is commonly thought to have materialized, that more and more the mind enters into all results, and fills an ever larger place in life; and this should serve to make materialism seem more and more what it is--a savage conception. But recognizing the great place of mind in modern science, and its growing illumination of our earthly system, I am not disposed to discredit its earliest results in art and morals. I find in this penetration of the order of the world within us our most certain truth; and as our bodies exist only by virtue of sharing in the general order of nature, so, I believe, our souls have being only by sharing in this order of the inward, the spiritual world.

What, then, is this order? We do not merely contemplate it: we are immersed in it, it is vital in us, it is that wherein we live and move and have our being, ever more and more in proportion as the soul's life outvalues the body in our experience. It is necessary to expand our conception of it. Hitherto it has been presented only as an order of truth appealing to the intellect: but the intellect is only one function of the soul, and thinkers are the merest fraction of mankind. We know this order not only as truth, but as righteousness; we know that certain choices end in enlarging and invigorating our faculties, and other choices in their enfeeblement and extinction; and the race adds, acting under the profound motive of self-preservation, that it is a duty to do the one thing and avoid the other, and stores up this doctrine in conscience. We know this order again under the aspect of joy, for joy attends some choices, and sorrow others; and again under the aspect of beauty, for certain choices result in beauty and others in deformity. What I maintain is that this order exists under four aspects, and may be learned in any of them--as an order of truth in the reason, as an order of virtue in the will, as an order of joy in the emotions, as an order of beauty in the senses. It is the same order, the same body of law, operating in each case; it is the vital force of our fourfold life,--it has one unity in the intellect, the will, the emotions, the senses,--is equal to the whole nature of man, and responds to him and sustains him on every side. A lover of beauty in whom conscience is feeble cannot wander if he follow beauty; nor a cold thinker err, though without a moral sense, if he accept truth; nor a just man, nor a seeker after pure joy merely, if they act according to knowledge each in his sphere. The course of action that increases life may be selected because it is reasonable, or joyful, or beautiful, or right; and therefore one may say fearlessly, choose the things that are beautiful, the things that are joyful, the things that are reasonable, the things that are right, and all else shall be added unto you. The binding force in this order is what literature, ideal literature, most brings out and emphasizes in its generalizations, that causal union which has hitherto been spoken of in the region of plot only; but it exists in every aspect of this order, and literature universalizes experience in all these realms, in the provinces of beauty and passion no less than in those of virtue and knowledge, and its method is the same in all.

Is not our knowledge of this fourfold order in its principles, in those relations of its phenomena which constitute its laws, of the highest importance of anything of human concern? In harmony with these laws, and only thus, we ourselves, in whom this order is, become happy, righteous, wise, and beautiful. In ideal literature this knowledge is found, expressed, and handed down age after age--the knowledge of necessary and permanent relations in these great spheres which, taken together, exhaust the capacities of life. Man's moral sense is strong in proportion as he apprehends necessity in the sequence of will and act; his intellect is strong, his emotions, his sense of beauty, are strong in the same way in proportion as he apprehends necessity in each several field of experience. And conversely, the weakness of the intellect lies in a greater or less failure to realise relations of fact in their logic; and the other faculties, in proportion as they fail to realize such relations in their own region, have a similar incapacity. Insanity, in the broad sense, is involuntary error in a nature incapable of effectual enlightenment, and hence abnormal or diseased; but the state of error, whether more or less, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether curable or incurable, in itself is the same. To take an example from one sphere, in the moral world the criminal through ignorance of or distrust in or revolt from the supreme divine law seeks to maintain himself by his own power solitarily as if he might be a law unto himself; he experiences, without the intervention of any human judge, the condemnation which consigns him to enfeeblement and extinction through the decay and death of his nature, as a moral being, stage by stage; this is God's justice, visiting sin with death. Similarly, and to most more obviously, in society itself, the criminal against society, because he does not understand, or believe, or prefers not to accept arbitrary social law as the means by which necessarily the general good, including his own, is worked out, seeks to substitute for it his own intelligence, his cunning, in his search for prosperity, as he conceives it, by an adaptation of means to ends on his own account. This is why the imperfection of human law is sometimes a just excuse for social crime in those whom society does not benefit, its slaves and pariahs. But whether in God's world or in man's, the mind of the criminal, disengaging itself from reliance on the whole fabric for whatever reason, pulverizes because he fails to realize the necessary relations of the world in which he lives in their normal operation, and has no effectual belief in them as unavoidably operant in his nature or over his fortunes. This was the truth that lay in the Platonic doctrine that all sin is ignorance; but Plato did not take account of any possible depravity in the will. Nor is what has been illustrated above true of the mind and the will only. In the region of emotion and of beauty, there may be similar aberration, if these are not grasped in their vital nature, in organic relation to the whole of life.

These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but are in the closest alliance. They act conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of one personal power. It cannot be that contradiction should arise among them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible. In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together. To represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our nature. Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton's imagination. "The Infernal Serpent" is the first name the poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised at the ear of Eve "squat like a toad"; and when he springs up in his own form there, as the "grisly king," he mourns most his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable. To me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge. In all great creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should he preserved.

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often breaks down. But if the order of the material universe seems now a more settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; God was known and nature miraculous. It must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves. It is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts.

The expansion of the conception of ideal literature so as to embrace these other aspects, in addition to that of rational knowledge which has thus far been exclusively dwelt upon, requires us to examine its nature in the regions of beauty, joy, and conscience, in which, though generalization remains its intellectual method, it does not make its direct appeal to the mind. It is not enough to show that the creative reason in its intellectual process employs that common method which is the parent of all true knowledge, and by virtue of its high matter, which is the divine order in the soul, holds the primacy among man's faculties; the story were then left half told, and the better part yet to come. To enlighten the mind is a great function; but in the mass of mankind there are few who are accessible to ideas as such, especially on the unworldly side of life, or interested in them. Idealism does not confine its service to the narrow bounds of intellectuality. It has a second and greater office, which is to charm the soul. So characteristic of it is this power, so eminent and shining, that thence only springs the sweet and almost sacred quality breathing from the word itself. Idealism, indeed, by the garment of sense does not so much clothe wisdom as reveal her beauty; so the Greek sculptor discloses the living form by the plastic folds. Truth made virtue is her work of power, and she imposes upon man no harder task than the mere beholding of that sight--

"Virtue in her shape how lovely,"

which since it first abashed the devil in Paradise makes wrong-doers aware of their deformity, and yet has such subtle and penetrating might, such fascination for all finer spirits, that they have ever believed with their master, Plato, that should truth show her countenance unveiled and dwell on earth, all men would worship and follow her.

The images of Plato--those images in which alone he could adequately body forth his intuitions of eternity--present the twofold attitude of our nature, in mind and heart, toward the ideal with vivid distinctness; and they illustrate the more intimate power of beauty, the more fundamental reach of emotion, and the richness of their mutual life in the soul. Under the aspect of truth he likens our knowledge of the ideal to that which the prisoners of the cave had of the shadows on the wall; under the aspect of beauty he figures our love for it as that of the passionate lover. As truth, again,--taking up in his earliest days what seems the primitive impulse and first thought of man everywhere and at all times,--under the image of the golden chain let down from the throne of the god, he sets forth the heavenly origin of the ideal and its descent on earth by divine inspiration possessing the poet as its passive instrument; and later, bringing in now the cooperation of man in the act, he again presents the ideal as known by reminiscence of the soul's eternal life before birth, which is only a more defined and rationalized conception of inspiration working normally instead of by the special act and favour of God. As beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love. In these various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind and heart; and, as he developed,--and this is the significant matter,--the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth. It is the persuasion with which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has fastened upon him the love of later ages. He was the first to discern in truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.

So, too, from the other great source of the race's wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the heart of man. Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with true desire. Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness. At the height of Hebrew genius in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill. The years lived under the Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on men's gaze. It is this loveliness which needs only to be seen that wins mankind. The emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character. More men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead. For this is Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were little to see the story of Pelops' line if the emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own play, but to form the soul. The emotional glow of the creative imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth.

What, then, is the nature of this emotional appeal which surpasses so much in intimacy, pleasure, and power the appeal to the intellect? It is the keystone of the inward nature, that which binds all together in the arch of life. Emotion has some ground, some incitement which calls it forth; and it responds with most energy to beauty. In the strictest sense beauty is a unity of relations of coexistence in coloured space and appeals to the eye; it is in space what plot is in time. Like plot, it is deeply engaged in the outward world; it exists in the sensuous order, and it shadows forth the spiritual order in man only in so far as a fair soul makes the body beautiful, as Spenser thought,--the mood, the act, and the habit of heroism, love, and the like nobilities of man, giving grace to form, feature, and attitude. It is primarily an outward thing, as emotion, which is a phase of personality, is an inward thing; what the necessary sequence of events, the chain of causation, is to plot,--its cardinal idea,--that the necessary harmony of parts, the chime of line and colour, is to beauty; thus beauty is as inevitable as fate, as structurally planted in the form and colour of the universe as fate is in its temporal movement. And as plot has its characteristic unity in the impersonal order of God's will, shown in time's event, so beauty has its characteristic unity in the same order shown in the visible creation of space. It is true that all phenomena are perceived by the mind, and are conditioned, as is said, by human modes of perception; but within the limits of the relativity of all our knowledge, beauty is initially a sensuous, not a spiritual, thing, and though the structure of the human eye arranges the harmonies of line and colour, it is no more than as the form of human thought arranges cause and effect and other primary relations in things; beauty does not in becoming humanly known cease to be known as a thing external, independent of our will, and imposed on us from without. It is this outward reality, the harmony of sense, that sculpture and painting add in their types to the interpretation they otherwise give of personality, and often in them this physical element is predominant; and in the purely decorative arts it may be exclusive. In landscape, which is in the realm of beauty, personality altogether disappears, unless, indeed, nature be interpreted in the mood of the Psalmist as declaring its Creator; for the reflection which the presence of man may cast upon nature as his shadow is not expressive of any true personality there abiding, but enters into the scene as the face of Narcissus into the brook. The pleasure which the mind takes in beauty is only a part of its general delight in order of any sort; and visible artistic form as abstracted from the world of space is merely a species of organic form and is included in it.