CHAPTER III.

THE PROVISION FOR THE INTELLECTUAL NATURE OF MAN.

Truth and reality stand for the same thing. Reality is truth out of the mind, and truth is reality in the mind. Reality is objective truth, and truth is subjective reality. But all reality is in relation to mind; objective reality to the divine mind, and subjective reality to the human mind. Objective reality is the realized thought of God; subjective reality is the realized thought of man. The correspondence of thoughts to things is called scientific truth. Objective reality is truth, because it corresponds to the thought of God. Knowledge in the human mind is truth when it corresponds to objective reality or the expressed thought of God. When words and conduct correspond to knowledge, we have truth in the domain of morals.

In saying that objective reality is the realized thought of God, we denote its unity. This is not to destroy the particulars of which it is composed, or to swamp their individuality in an inarticulate mass, but simply to indicate their oneness.

When the observer looks out into the universe, which includes and shuts him round, he is impressed by the infinite varieties and diversities which everywhere meet his gaze. No two things are alike. No two leaves, no two drops of water, no two snowflakes, no two apples, no two faces. Every particular thing seems to be persistently determined to differ, in some respect at least, from everything else. The history of true knowledge begins, however, with the observation of resemblance and similarity—just beneath the surface of difference and variety. The lightning that appears on the bosom of the cloud, like the writing of some awful fiend, is seen to be the same with the gentle sparks emitted when a tag of silken ribbon is drawn briskly between the fingers. The power that pulls the ball to the ground is seen to be the same as that which keeps the sun in his place.

The plant lifts itself up as but a sum of organized varieties; but every part, corolla, petal, and stamen, is known to be only modified leaf. Keeping to their silent and lonely rounds since the dawn of time, are the stars in the heavens, differing in color, orbit, and size, but we now know that to understand the elements of which they are composed, we have only to lift our foot and see what the constituent parts of the earth beneath it are. Were objective reality one amorphous mass, it would not be intelligible. It is one and many, particular and universal, singular and manifold, concrete and discrete. All things cohere in a centrality that includes and commands them.

So true is it that unity underlies all difference, that no single variety can be understood, only as it is considered in relation with the whole of which it forms a part.

No one could ever get a correct notion of a particular star by directing his entire attention to the study of that star. To understand it, he must study it through the system of which it forms a member, and in connection with all laws and forces related to it. Oxygen separate and distinct from other elements has no meaning. It gets its definition and significance from the things to which it is related. What it is for rocks and water and trees and globes, that it is in itself. But it must be seen in connection with these before we can know what it is in itself. What an acid is for an alkali and for other things, that it is in itself. Alone, out of relation, we could know absolutely nothing of it. Society is the organism that reveals to each person the nature of his own life. Out of contact and touch with other human beings, no one would ever know anything concerning himself.

Objective reality embraces manifold variety, but it is the unity that presides over it that makes it intelligible. Difference provokes questions and unity answers them.

In calling objective reality truth, we tacitly assume the laws and relations constitutive of it. We could not speak of the truth of the globe, had there been no method in its formation, no order in its development, no system in its parts, and no relations between its constituent elements. To speak of the truth of it, is to imply the thought of it, the intelligibility of it. Were it not the expression of mind, man’s reason could find no truth in it. Scholars have been able, after long and painstaking study, to understand the meaning of Egyptian and Assyrian hieroglyphics, but they never could have found thought in them, had they contained no thought. The original elements which make up the matter of the globe, have come into such relations with one another as that they make up the soil, rocks, water, trees, and animals we see. Thought, then, is the result of the internal relations of the particles which compose it. These internal relations, too, constitute its intelligibility. The globe that wheels on its axis is objective. This may be taken into the mind, and by its synthesizing, organizing activity converted into a subjective globe. The difference between the objective and the subjective globe will be, that one will be thought and the other will be thing. But the same internal relations found in the objective globe will be preserved in the subjective, and the transcript of the globe that is held in thought will be truth in exact proportion as it corresponds to the material globe that rolls out of the mind. That an objective globe, which is a thing, may become a subjective globe, which is a thought and not a thing, implies that there is something in common between thoughts and things; that is, the mind, by its constitution, is capable of apprehending and taking into itself the constitution and relations of things. This is its capacity for truth, and shows that truth is not foreign to it, but one with itself.

The sides and angles of a right angle triangle have certain relations to one another. The square described on the hypotenuse of such an angle is equal to the squares described on the other two sides. This may be demonstrated on a piece of blank paper, or the mind may conceive a right angle triangle, and prove the proposition without making any marks at all. The constitutional relations which were in the nature of a right angle triangle are the same, whether it be drawn on paper or conceived by the imagination. The relations of the triangle make it intelligible, because they constitute its truth.

I.

To truth the intellect is related, as is the eye to light, and the ear to sound. If the eye were destroyed, the sun would not cease to shine. His light would still come upon hill and plain to feed the flowers and to disclose their beauty, but without the organ of vision no creature in the universe would be able to see the things which his light reveals. The ear does not create sound. Let it be forever sealed, and the Niagaras would still continue to fall and the thunders to shake the heavens, but they would not be heard. The intellect does not create truth, but it is the only faculty with which man is endowed by which he is able to discover it.

It was the error of the idealists that they made the order, laws, and relations of things as so many principles projected out of the observer’s own mind into the universe about him. What he seemed to see in things, were but modifications of his own mental states. The only order things had was in the observer’s own mind. It was regarded not only as the pivot upon which the universe turned, but also as the creative principle from which the universe took form. Apparently this was a great gain to mind, but it was at the expense of any real world for the mind to contemplate. It seemed to win a victory for the intelligence absolute and entire, but it was by shutting it up to its own shadowy abstractions, and abandoning it in a shoreless and bottomless void to its own vain musings. The personal pronoun _I_ was extended perpendicularly and horizontally, till topways and sideways the whole of space and time was filled with it. No solid earth, no burning sun, no rolling orbs were left. A great, illimitable, irresponsible ego became the sole occupant of all that is.

This extreme idealism is in direct contrast to the realism of the early thinkers. They taught that things depended on man neither for their existence nor their intelligibility. That each thing carried the real intelligible essence as an ultimate fact in itself. Thought in man was but the reflection of this intelligible essence in the thing, as the light in the mirror is but the reflection of the light of the lamp.

Of the two systems, extreme idealism is preferable to extreme realism. All mind and no matter, is better than all matter and no mind. Thought with no place to stand, is better than a place to stand and no thought. The eye with nothing to see, is better than something to see and no eye.

The solution which realism gave of the problem of existence, left no place for mind, the solution which idealism gave of it left no place for matter. But both the external world, upon which realism was founded, and the intelligence, upon which idealism was founded, are expressions of mind. The one as intelligible content, the other as combining active capacity and the intelligibility of the content, exactly corresponds to the active grasp of the capacity.

II.

But it must be remembered that the intellect which is the organ of truth, and objective reality which is abstract truth, do not come together to form knowledge in any accidental way.

A basket may be said to have capacity for holding potatoes, and potatoes may lend themselves as content to fill up the basket. But the union of potatoes and basket; the one as content, the other as capacity, is only mechanical. The basket would serve as well to hold onions, or muskadines, or chinquepins, as potatoes, and the potatoes could be carried as well in a wooden box or in a tin pan, as in a basket. No necessity inheres in the nature of a basket to contain potatoes, and no necessity is in the nature of potatoes to get into a basket. Truth and the intellect, however, are intended the one for the other. Truth is correlated to the intellect as the bird’s wing is to the atmosphere. Nothing can take hold of the truth but the intellect, and nothing can satisfy and furnish the intellect but truth.

Abstract truth, or objective reality, is converted by the combining organizing activity of the mind into knowledge, and when this knowledge corresponds to the reality it is truth in the realm of thought.

Before knowledge is possible, then, there must be an intelligence capable of knowing, and an object capable of being known.

How the intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is the most important question in philosophy. Upon the right settlement of it, everything depends. This has been the point about which the battle of thought, in modern times, has been most fiercely waged. If the mind firmly grasps the meaning of this problem and settles it right, it is almost sure to think right on other questions. If it is wrong here, it is sure to be wrong everywhere else. Mistake here is as fatal to the correct solution of the question we are considering, as would be the mistake that two and two make five to the correct solution of a sum in arithmetic.

III.

The distance of a question from ordinary thought does not render it any the less important, even for ordinary thinking. How the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is the most important problem to-day before the human mind. If writers would only take their bearings from the only rational solution that can be given to it, they would find half the books they are writing on the inspiration of the Scriptures, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, agnosticism and materialism, unnecessary.

Agnosticism and materialism pass away with a correct theory of knowing. Labor and painstaking thought are involved in the task of getting a right theory of knowledge, but agnosticism and materialism are in line with ignorance and indolence.

So, while few men ever ask themselves how the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge, millions of men are affected, even in their practical life, by the answer which is given to the question. Someone has said that not more than six men in any one age ever read Plato or understand him. Yet for the six men Plato comes down through the ages. The six men who understand him translate him into the vernacular of the one hundred men who live on the next plane of thought below them.

The one hundred translate him into the common language of one thousand below them. These, in turn, translate Plato into the ordinary thought of the millions below them. So it happens at length that Plato gets so universally known, that not a laborer in the field but wears his hat after one style, rather than another, because Plato wrote.

Doubtless it would have been considered a very unimportant question two hundred years ago, as to whether heat were an igneous fluid or a mode of motion. Perhaps not more than two or three men wrestled with the question for centuries before it was settled. By the masses of the people they were regarded as wasting their time in vain and idle speculation. By an experiment made by Count Rumford, it was put beyond the possibility of doubt that heat was not an igneous fluid, but a mode of motion. Was this a question that concerned the multitudes, that two or three men spent a hundred years talking about and torturing their brains to understand? There is not a single human being in the civilized world to-day whose interests and welfare have not been touched by the settlement of it. There are millions of peasants in Russia who never heard of Count Rumford, or of an igneous fluid, or of caloric, who have this present year been fed by flour sent them by the western millers and transported on the strength of the conclusion that heat is not an igneous fluid, but a mode of motion. Every steam-car that crosses the continent, and every steamboat that crosses the ocean, moves in the wake of this same conclusion. At first we see some algebraic formulas, an array of curves and figures, that practical people said had nothing to do with everyday life. After a while we see the abstract conclusions reached by aid of the algebraic signs, and settled by the test of experiment, translated into steam engines, and transporting even the peasants of India and Mexico from one end of the country to the other. We see the abstract conclusions of the few thinkers turned into steam to spin the people’s clothes and grind the people’s bread.

In 1632 there was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, England, a boy, who was educated at the University of Oxford. In the esteem of his contemporaries he devoted his time to the consideration of subjects of no practical value. In the course of events he put the results of his study into a book known as “The Essay on the Human Understanding.” Few people read it. But the few who did read it started the ideas of it to circulating. They were translated into French and Latin, and were soon potent influences in the intellectual life of Europe. Were they practical and did they concern the ordinary affairs of men? They created the Encyclopedists of France. These learned men were the authors of the radical opinions which cut the people from the moorings of traditional and age-long thought. The fire and the blood of the Revolution were the legitimate expressions of the speculative essay of John Locke that not one in ten thousand ever read. The persons whose heads were cut off in the Reign of Terror must have thought the ideas exceedingly practical that led to the destruction of social and political institutions, that took form in a movement which respected neither law nor property nor life. The speculative opinions of John Locke not only helped to create the French Revolution, but they led to the idealism of Bishop Berkeley, and this in turn to the skeptical philosophy of David Hume. The modern successors of Hume are John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, Frederic Harrison, and Professor Huxley, whose contributions have been given to the popular reviews, and which have been read by all intelligent people. Every man in Europe and America has been influenced both in conduct and character by the speculative “Essay on the Human Understanding.”

Locke’s speculative philosophy passed through Berkeley to Hume, and through Hume reached Kant, the great German thinker, and resulted in the “Critique of Pure Reason.” This led to Fichte and Schelling, and finally to Hegel. This led to Heidelberg and the Tübingen school, to Bauer and Dewette, to extreme idealism and rationalism, translated into books and reviews and newspapers, and read by all the people, affecting their thought and life.

Even people who never read, who never open a book or a newspaper, have been influenced by the subtle piece of speculative reasoning given to the world by the great sensational philosopher of England. The spirit of utilitarianism and secularism prevalent throughout the world at the present time is easily traceable to it.

IV.

Before we can possibly know that truth is the provision for the intellectual nature of man, we must determine whether the knowing faculties, which he finds himself to possess, are capable of grasping truth and turning it into knowledge. The fight of skepticism in modern times has been made upon the knowing faculties. It is useless to talk about the existence of God, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the divinity of Christ, or the immortality of the soul, if the human intellect is, by its limitations, denied the possibility of knowing anything whatsoever concerning these things. It is a waste of time for me to attempt to dip water out of the ocean with a bucket with no bottom to it. What is the relation of the intelligence to the outer world? Does the outside world create knowledge in the mind by the impressions it makes upon it, or does the mind bring something to the outside world which converts this raw material into knowledge? Is knowledge a reflection of the outer, or a creation of the inner? Does nature work it in us, or is there some spontaneous, creative, organizing, mental activity within us that takes the material presented by nature, turning it into a rational system of knowledge? What is the relation between the being that knows and the object known? How much of the creative factor of knowledge does nature supply? How much does man supply? Can a man with deranged faculties get order out of a rational world? Can a man of sane mind get order out of an irrational world? If there is to be a rational system of knowledge built up in the mind, must there not be reason in the thinker and reason in the outside world, coming into organic relations, the one with the other? As to how we regard this question will determine how we regard truth, and whether or not it is possible for us to know it.

V.

The human mind has never been able to resist the conviction that there is such a thing as truth. Though baffled and defeated a thousand times, in every age, in its attempt to formulate truth, it has never been able to consent to give up the search for it. Interest in truth has kept alive and fostered the belief that the mind has power to understand it. The mind’s passion for truth has deepened its confidence in the faculties with which it is ever trying to discover it. The everlasting longing to know truth has been taken as implicit capacity to find it. Philosophic systems have been only so many devices and creations of the mind with which to take hold of truth. The methods proposed, in the first stages of philosophic thinking, for getting at the truth were crude, as the first instruments devised for cultivating the soil and getting out of it what there was in it for food, were crude. Thales, Pythagoras, and Anaximander first attempted to penetrate objective reality, to know its cause, to bring its multiplicity to unity, and to reduce its variety to law. The ever-changing phenomena by which they were surrounded necessarily eluded the meager theories with which they attempted to reduce them to order. They prepared the way, however, for systems which accommodated a greater number of facts. They made possible Plato and Aristotle, who, with hypotheses more complicated and more consonant with the reality they sought to grasp, found truth enough to keep the human race thinking for two thousand years. The blocks of truth they quarried from the mines of objective reality were used to carry up the theological and speculative temples of the Middle Ages.

After the failure of scholasticism, which denotes a period in human thought rather than a particular system of philosophy, Lord Bacon proposed the method of material induction to bring the mind into relations of knowledge with truth. He emphasized the study of the outward facts, their classification and organization. In his esteem, truth was to be reached by the consideration of actual, tangible things. Man was the interpreter of nature, and not necessarily its interpretation.

Truth in the mind was the image of objective truth. It differed from truth out of the mind, as the direct from the reflected ray. He failed from lack of adequate recognition of one of the important factors in the problem of truth. Descartes’ method was more successful, because larger and completer recognition was taken of man.

He began by doubting everything that could be doubted. Heir to the beliefs of all the ages, he determined to summon these, one by one, before the bar of reason, and force them to show cause for their existence. Everyone was to be called into court and put out that could be doubted. The existence of a God was called up and doubted, condemned, and put out. The existence of an external world was called up, doubted, condemned, and put out. In the same summary and shorthand way, man and mind were doubted and put out. All positive beliefs were doubted. After his process of elimination, he found himself without God, without man, without mind, without a permanent external world. All that remained after emptying himself of all mental furnishments and beliefs was the fact that he doubted. But he could not doubt without thinking. In the very act of doubting, he thought. If one thinks, he must think something. The nearest something to the thinking subject is his own personal being. So he thought himself and concluded, “I think, therefore, I am.” But he was not always; he began to be. So he must think of a being that caused him. The being that caused him must himself be uncaused. Moreover, there could not be an uncaused cause, without an effect. Creation, then, with which he stood face to face, was the effect of the great first cause. Thus Descartes’ method, based upon the thought underlying doubt, led him, necessarily, to himself, the object of his thought; and to God, the cause of himself; and to creation, the effect of the great first cause or God. Through his process of coming at the problem, he was able, rationally, to believe in the existence of himself, the outer world, and God, the cause of both. Descartes, as a thinker, was affirmative, positive, constructive. He only doubted down to the point where he could doubt no longer, that he might have a sure foundation upon which to build. His contribution gave fresh courage and inspiration to the human mind. He failed to determine the boundary line between the self and the not-self, between mind and matter, between the thinker and the creation with which he stood face to face. This was the work Spinoza proposed for himself, and in the celebrated Ethics, published to the world at the peril of his life and soul, imagined the task mathematically performed. The two poles of Descartes’ philosophy, the self and the not-self, he united in Descartes’ cause, and named the whole sum substance. The self and the not-self reappeared as attributes of substance, which Spinoza named thought and extension. All the phenomena in the universe, mental or material, were but modes of the infinite substance. The result of his thinking was pure pantheism. He reached a sort of mechanical unity, but he left no place for the affirmation of distinctions. His Ethics was large enough to accommodate everything, but in such a way as to preserve the individuality of nothing. A thought is valuable in proportion to its capacity to take hold of things as they are. The old opinion that heat was caloric, served as a working hypothesis for the mind a long time. In the view of those who held it, it was satisfactory and adequate. But it never really got hold of heat, because it contradicted the nature of heat. The astronomers thought, for a long time, that they had come into relations of knowledge with the stars through the Ptolemaic conception of the heavenly bodies. They were mistaken, however. Their theory did not fit the real celestial order at all. As a work of genius, Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the most remarkable productions ever formulated by the human intellect, but it conducted the mind away from truth, rather than into relations with it. Locke began his work as a philosopher, as Descartes began his, by looking into his own mind. Descartes began by casting out everything that could be doubted. Locke began by making an inventory of what his mind contained. Descartes wanted to find out how much he could know, as measured by what remained after throwing out everything that could be doubted. Locke sought to see how little he could know, by putting the sensations and impressions he found in his mind on the witness stand, and getting them to tell how they came to be there, and where they came from. Descartes began by a study of the intelligence, the instrument of knowledge. Locke began by a study of the facts which, by some means or other, had found their way into his intelligence. Descartes got rid of every belief that could be doubted. Locke ran every idea out of his mind that had been imported from the outside world, in order that he might see if the mind had any constitutional power to produce any. Descartes, having dislodged all inherited beliefs, such as took for granted the existence of God, man, mind, and outer world, found some mental laws, capabilities, and tendencies left, which compelled a man, if he thought at all, to think in a given way; and if he thought on given lines, to think to a given conclusion. Not being able to get these laws out of the mind, he called them innate ideas. They were in the mind by structure and constitution.

After Locke had carefully examined the contents of his mind, he declared they were all imported from an outside realm. Nothing he found in the mind was indigenous to the soil. When all foreign importations were removed, nothing remained but an empty vessel. The mind was nothing but a receptacle, into which the senses dumped such objects as they happened to find lying round loose in the outside world. It had no more power to understand or turn into thought what was brought in than a piece of white paper had to read and interpret what was written upon it; or than a kettle to recognize the liquid making up its contents as water. It is like a table of wax; any sort of letters may be graven upon it, but the table cannot read them.

Locke proposed to find out what the mind could know by counting and tabulating the things he found in his own intelligence. This is very much like trying to understand the nature of light, by considering the blue things and green things and red things the light discloses. All bodies, it is said, which the light enables us to see, attract each other in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the squares of their distance. The law of gravity, which regulates the bodies light reveals to us, is not the law of light. We can never understand the nature of light, or the laws of light, by the study of things which light enables us to see. If all knowledge is but the sum of the impressions which the external world has made on the mind, then the cause of knowledge is matter, and knowledge is but the image or reflection of material things. Knowledge, then, would sustain the same relation to the outside world, that the shadow of a tree does to the tree. One would come as near lifting up the tree by its own shadow as lifting up the truth by Locke’s system of sensational philosophy.

Impressions are simple, atomic. They come into the mind, one after another. They cohere in no unity. They are held together by no necessary relation. They are separate, one from the other. If there is no primary, innate faculty; no abiding and indwelling mental activity, that lies behind, and determines and co-ordinates the objects which nature supplies through the senses, converting them into rational, orderly knowledge, then we can never get hold of truth. We are shut up to hopeless ignorance.

VI.

Berkeley, in order to escape the materialism to which Locke’s philosophy led, accepted his theory of knowledge, but destroyed his outward, material world. In his view, there was no matter, nothing but ideas. The impressions conveyed through the senses into our minds are but reflections of the ideas of God.

In Hume, the empirical theory of knowing found a disciple who did not hesitate to affirm all that was involved in it. Locke said there was an outward world, and knowledge was its image. Berkeley said there was no material world; that knowledge was the reflection of God’s ideas. Hume said there was neither outer world nor inner; that there was nothing but impressions, sensations, ideas, in perpetual flow and flux. He claimed that all ideas which could not be resolved into impressions were false. He declared we could have no ideas of substance, because, if perceived by the eye, it must be a color; if by the ear, a sound; if by the palate, a taste. And because we could not think of substance as a color or a sound or a taste, we could therefore have no idea of it whatever. Belief in a permanent external world was rendered irrational by his theory of knowledge. Nothing is more vital and irrepressible than belief in one’s own existence, but even this could not be retained in accordance with the teachings of Hume’s philosophy. “Whence,” says he, “could the impression of the idea of self be derived? What impression could create this idea? This question it is impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction and absurdity, and yet it is a question that must necessarily be answered. For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some perception or other; heat or cold, light or shade, pain or pleasure. I cannot catch myself at any time without a perception, or observe anything but a perception. When my perceptions are removed at any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may be said truly not to exist.”

The sensational philosophy which promised so much, which appeared so eminently practical, that took to itself such an air of common sense as it got about obliterating innate ideas, was seen at length to be utterly impotent. It corresponded with absolutely nothing in heaven or in earth. The very impressions it admitted, passed through it like drops of water out of a fisherman’s net. Where the impressions came from or where they went to, it furnished no means of knowing. God and world and cause and law and self might be, but the human mind could never know whether they were or not. The human observer stood before a procession of images, sensations, perceptions going by like an unending circus troupe.

In Hume may be traced the entire breakdown of empirical philosophy as a method for getting at the truth. He recognized this himself. “When I turn my eye inward,” he says, “I find nothing but doubt and ignorance.” “The understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.” “We have, therefore, no choice left, but betwixt a false reason and none at all.”

VII.

The most remarkable thing in the whole search for truth, is that anybody after Hume should have attempted to find it with Hume’s principles. Yet the two best known writers who have lived in England since Hume’s day, have rested their dogmatic doctrines on the foundations laid by the sensational philosophers. Hume’s impressions and ideas became John Stuart Mill’s permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling, and Herbert Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable. In our time Herbert Spencer has undertaken the herculean task of explaining matter and mind, time and space, society and morals; of showing what they are and what they are not, by the same principles which Hume himself demonstrated to be incapable of explaining anything. Spencer’s units of knowledge are vivid and faint manifestations of the Unknown. How the unknowable remains unknown, after vividly and faintly manifesting itself, we are not told. Mr. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknown are old acquaintances with new names.

Locke knew them as impressions and sensations. Berkeley recognized them as ideas of sense and imagination. John Stuart Mill was on speaking terms with them as permanent possibilities of sensation and feeling. Mr. Spencer gives them another baptism and another name. He calls them vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable. While they have been changed in name, however, it must not be supposed that they have undergone any change in nature or character. They stand apart, the one from the other, just the same as ever. They are just as foreign to the mind, where they vividly and faintly manifest themselves, as were the impressions of John Locke. They flare and flicker, rise and fall, like the jack-o’-lantern lights of legend and tale. One light is not of a piece with any other light. The lights follow one another in such quick succession, first vivid, then faint, that one cannot tell from the momentary flames and flashes what is intended to be advertised. That something is trying, by various pyrotechnic displays, to get itself revealed seems to be evident. But there is such hurry on the part of the something that makes the manifestations, such a disorderly whirl and changing of lights, that the observer is totally bewildered; and, being under the necessity of making some account to himself as to their meaning, concludes that they are vivid and faint illuminations of the unknowable. Hume’s procession of sensations and ideas has by Spencer been converted into the fire-works of the unknowable. With Hume’s physiological theory, the mind could know nothing but its own sensations. Spencer’s vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable are equally as incapable of furnishing any rational basis for belief in mind or matter, law or cause, self or God. To ask the human mind to believe the encyclopedic, dogmatic system of philosophy he addressed to it, after insisting that all our knowledge is but the sum of vivid and faint manifestations of the unknowable, is as irrational as trying to build a cathedral on a London fog bank. Underneath every one of Spencer’s general terms, the indestructibility of matter, the continuity of motion, the persistence of force, there is nothing but sensations, vivid or faint manifestations of the unknown.

“The doctrine of the indestructibility of matter,” he says, “has now become a commonplace.” “Matter never either comes into existence, or ceases to exist.” How are we to know this, with minds incapable of any other knowledge except such as is made up of vivid and faint manifestations of the unknown? Who ever had a sensation or a manifestation of the indestructibility of matter? This is an idea involving all past time and all future time, and all the laws and forces by which matter is regulated and conserved. How could an image of the indestructibility of matter be photographed on the sensitive plate of the mind? To do this it would be necessary to compress all past time and all future time into one moment, and all matter into one single square inch or square yard of space, so that the impression of it could be made. To believe in the indestructibility of matter, with Mr. Spencer’s theory of the mind’s capacity to know, is delirium and insanity. It is to believe in something that the mind, by its very nature, cannot even get an impression of. It is believing that the ocean can be carried in a thimble without any bottom. Any man who should utter this publicly, and sincerely, would be put in the insane asylum. He says again, “the very nature of the intelligence negatives the supposition that motion can be conceived (much less known) either to commence or to cease.” The nature of the intelligence is such that all the knowledge it possesses is made up of sensations and manifestations of the unknown. How can the continuity of motion be conceived? To do this, we must have a conception of all past time and all future time. It is an idea as transcendent as the idea of God.

Mr. Spencer claims that the power the universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable; that space and time are wholly incomprehensible; that matter, in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as space and time; that all efforts to understand the essential nature of motion do but bring us to alternative absurdities of thought; that it is impossible to form any idea of force in itself, and equally impossible to comprehend either its mode of exercise or its law of variation; that we are unable to believe or to conceive that the duration of consciousness is infinite, and equally unable to know it as finite, or to conceive it as finite; and that the personality of which we are each conscious, and of which the existence is to each a fact beyond all others the most certain, yet is a thing which cannot truthfully be known at all: knowledge of it is forbidden by the very nature of thought. All this is perfectly consistent with his theory of knowledge. This is the point to which David Hume, his master, conducted the human mind in its search for truth. But Spencer is not logical; he had a theory of being that contradicted his theory of knowing. So he reasons first one way and then another. He says, elsewhere in his First Principles, that common sense asserts the existence of a reality; that objective science proves that this reality cannot be what we think it; that subjective science shows why we cannot think of it as it is, and yet are compelled to think of it as existing; and that in this assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable in nature, religion finds an assertion essentially coinciding with her own. That we are compelled to regard every phenomenon as a manifestation of some power by which we are acted upon. That though omnipresence is unthinkable, yet as experience discloses no bounds to the diffusion of phenomena, we are unable to think of limits to the presence of this power, while the criticisms of science teach us that this power is incomprehensible. Analyzing the above declarations, we find that Mr. Spencer knows there is an ultimate reality. Then it has being. It acts upon us. Then it has the attribute of action. All phenomena are manifestations of it. Then it has power. All phenomena are manifestations of an inscrutable power, by which we are acted upon. Then it has causal energy. We are unable to think of limits to the presence of this power. Then it is omnipresent. So the unknowable, inscrutable something has being, power, activity, causal energy, and omnipresence. But how are we to grasp these universal, transcendental attributes of the unknowable, with an intelligence incapable of receiving anything but simple, separate, unrelated, broken impressions and manifestations? It takes as much mind to believe in the unknowable, with the attributes of power, activity, being, causal energy, and omnipresence, as to believe in a self-existent God, with the attributes of power, wisdom, justice, truth, and love.

Spencer’s theory of knowing is destructive, while his theory of being is constructive and transcendental.

VIII.

The intelligence, as the organ of truth, must be large enough to find truth and contain truth. No sane man would undertake to dig down a mountain with a toothpick. Mr. Spencer devoted page after page to the discussion of cause, time, space, force, and ultimate reality, while holding a theory of knowledge that made the very thought of these inconceivable. The very things that he labeled as knowable contained a substrate the mind could never get at. Knowable things, then, could not be known as they were; hence if they were known at all, must be known as they were not, which made the mind’s knowledge error. All who accept Mr. Spencer’s theory of knowledge are shut up to absolute ignorance or absolute error. If we are to know the truth of reality, of mind, of external existence, we must have knowing faculties up to the style of the truth we are to know. If we are to know light, we must have eyes capable of taking in the light, of analyzing it, and turning it into vision. The disposition to limit our power to know, by telling us, on the strength of Mansel and Hamilton and Kant, that all our knowledge is relative, is innocent enough when stripped of its seeming wisdom. It is true that we can know no more than our knowing faculties permit us.

We cannot know more than we can know. We are not absolute and omniscient as to our capacity to know. All we can see is what we can see with our eyes. We cannot see with our fingers or with the back of our heads. All we can hear is what we can hear with our ears. We have no other organs with which to hear. All sounds that vibrate at the rate of sixteen times to the second up to thirty-eight thousand times to the second, we can hear. Whatsoever sounds vibrate at a lower rate than sixteen times to the second or at a higher rate than thirty-eight thousand times to the second, we cannot hear, because such sounds are not related to the ear. But the eye, being adjusted to and related to much finer wave lengths than the ear, can see waves that vibrate up as high as seven hundred and twenty-seven trillion times to the second. The eye cannot see waves shorter than seven hundred and twenty-seven trillion vibrations to the second, because such waves are not adjusted to the eye. The waves the ear cannot hear are not sound waves. The waves the eye cannot see are not light waves. There are no sound waves in the universe the ear cannot hear, provided they are near enough to come into contact with it. There are no light waves in the universe that the eye cannot turn into vision, if they strike the retina. Are we going to fall out with the eye, and discredit the beauty it does see, because it is not as large as the rim of immensity, and cannot see everything disclosed by the light of suns and stars at once? Are we to hold the ear in contempt after it takes in the harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart, because it cannot hear all the music the stars are making as they move through the heavens?

Whatever is real and true the mind can know, because the mind is correlated to the real and the true. It cannot know what is unreal and untrue. It cannot know that two and two make five, because that is unreal and untrue. It cannot know that a crooked line is the shortest distance between two points, because that is unknowable. It cannot know that it is more rational to tell a lie than to tell the truth, because that is unknowable and untrue. There is much that is unknowable, but whatever is, we may be sure is irrational and unreal. Whatever is true in being, cause, time, space, mind, matter, force, motion may be known. The finite mind cannot know it at once, and can never, throughout all infinite time, directly take it into the intelligence; but it is knowable, because the underlying, fundamental, prior thing in the universe is mind, the mind of the absolute and eternal One. All things are set in order and reason. The external universe is the expression of mind, and is therefore intelligible. The human intelligence is the expression of the same mind, and is therefore capable of grasping and turning into thought the intelligible order without.

According to the theory of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, and Spencer, any knowledge whatsoever is impossible. If the knowing subject and the knowable object, the two factors of knowledge, can only come together in a mechanical way, as basket and potatoes, kettle and water, paper and letters, then the very conditions of knowledge are denied, and we are shut up to blank, square ignorance.

Things come together to form knowledge, as things come together to form a tree, and not as house, calico, pins, lace, shoes, and blankets come together to form a store. An acorn is a living something. It is not a tree, but within itself are the germs of a tree. When grown, it may be said to have forms, as root, trunk, and branches. These were potentially and ideally contained in the acorn. But their realization and active expression involved a process, in which the ideal forms, tendencies, and forces contained in germ in the acorn met and united with the elements of the outside world. Suppose we consider the acorn the subject, and the particles in soil and rain and atmosphere capable of making a tree as the object. What happens when an oak with all its beauty stands out upon the hillside? This subject and object have come together in unity, in an organism. Suppose Locke should have undertaken the work of understanding how a tree came to be, instead of how knowledge came to be. We will say he began by analyzing a full grown tree. After thorough examination of its contents, he finds that all the parts of the tree, carbon, water, etc., are found outside of it in the external world.

He finds that the tree is composed of various atoms, all of which may be found in the soil and in the atmosphere. He concludes, then, that these atoms from soil and atmosphere, began to move up to and down to the acorn. The acorn, passive meanwhile, lets them fall on it. So, of their own free will and accord, the atoms kept piling themselves upon the acorn, until in the process of a hundred years there was a tree. Now a brick column might be carried up after this fashion, but not a tree. The prior and fundamental thing in an oak tree is the acorn. It contains an active, organizing life principle. Falling into the soil, this folded life power begins to stir. It lays hold upon the elements about it, digests them, assimilates them, and turns them into an oak. The mind is to the raw material of knowledge, what the acorn is to the raw material of oak. Through the senses the raw material is conveyed into the mind. It is then appropriated, assimilated, digested, and turned into knowledge. The active, organizing, combining power that turns the raw material presented by the senses into knowledge, does not come from the outside world. It is constitutional, fundamental, original. Just as the organic forces of the plant take up the elements from the outside environment upon which it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power of the mind takes the matter of sensation and turns it into the whole called knowledge. Knowledge is a unifying process. It combines the manifold into one. It reduces multiplicity to unity. All that is real and all that is true in the heavens above or in the earth below, in mind or in matter, in time or in space, in man or in external world, are capable of being reduced to unity in knowledge.

Knowledge is the subjective unity in the finite mind that corresponds to the objective unity that lies within the infinite mind. Nothing less than a universal synthesis satisfies the finite mind, because it is a copy of the infinite mind. The finite self-consciousness is a copy of the infinite self-consciousness. The infinite mind knows all things at once; the finite mind comes to knowledge through a gradual process. It can never, through all eternity, know all the infinite mind knows, but it can eternally advance in knowledge, and comfort itself at every stage of the process with the thought that nothing in the mind of the infinite and absolute one is foreign to it, or in contradiction with its capacity to know. In thinking, the finite mind is at home in its father’s realm, and because this realm stretches out illimitably every way should not oppress us or discourage us. For this the finite mind can know, that throughout the limitless domain of God there is order and truth and reality.

Thus standing face to face with truth, and being endowed with intellectual capacities capable of recognizing it, grasping it, in its unity and in its particulars, it is proper to inquire the object and the purpose of it. It is the revelation which the infinite mind has made to the finite. It is the language of God, in which he has embodied his thought. It is the word of the universal spirit. Man is a spirit, and he is to grow and come to the full realization of himself by partaking of the word of God. Truth has been revealed for no other purpose than to make men. Sir William Hamilton represents truth as game, and the method of getting truth to a chase. He says the exercise of our powers involved in the process of getting truth is better than the game we seek. Lessings says, “If the Almighty, holding in one hand truth, and in the other search after truth, presented them to me and asked me which I would choose, with all humility, but without hesitation, I should say, give me search after truth.”

Mallbranche says: “If I held truth captive, like a bird in my hand, I would let it go again, that I might chase and capture it.” Müller says: “Truth is the property of God alone. Search after truth belongs to man.” Such sentiments indicate that the men who uttered them had no correct idea of the real nature of truth, or of man’s intellectual nature, the necessary food of which is truth. It is true that the search after truth gives exercise and pleasure to the intellectual faculties, as search after bread gives exercise and health to the physical powers. But an eternal search for bread is not sufficient to keep man’s body robust and strong. The very condition upon which he will be able to keep up the search for it is, that he regularly and steadily partake of it. A tree, had it intelligence and emotion, would, doubtless, enjoy wrestling with the storms, and throwing its roots into the earth and its branches into the heavens, making levies upon earth and sky for its own nourishment; but if it did not constantly turn the elements it found into its trunk and branches, it would not be able to wrestle long with the storms, or forage long upon the earth and sky.

To claim that the intellectual faculties are always to search for truth, and that the search is better than the truth, is tacitly to assume that truth is not for them; or, if for them, and should ever be found, would be as useless as a poor, tired, half-dead fox overtaken by the hunters in the chase. Searching for truth is doing; partaking of truth is being. The search gives agility and skill; the partaking of truth gives wealth of character. To hunt game with no other object than that which comes from the sport of the chase is degrading. To shoot birds only for the purpose of seeing them fall is mean and wicked. So, to search for truth with no other purpose than that which comes from the exercise of the search, is unworthy the intellect that was given, not only to find truth, but to grow rich and God-like by partaking of the truth.

Man’s need for bread, we saw, led to the establishment of commerce, and commerce did far more than secure to man food and clothing and shelter. It brought men together and discovered themselves to themselves. Power lent itself to the uses of man’s social nature, awakened and developed by commerce, and made it possible for men to come into relations with one another, not simply in states and nations, but on all the earth. The need for bread helped to the formation of society, the nature of power and the applications to which it lent itself widened the social domain into a universal brotherhood, to which man, as a spirit, was correlated. But many saw bread only in its relations to hunger, and power only in its relations to wealth and worldly dominion. So, many see in truth no purpose except the practical and material ends to which it can be put. In the esteem of the utilitarians, it was well enough that learned men consecrated their genius and their industry to the study of the subtle subject of heat. It was well that they discovered the real nature of heat, and saw that it was not caloric, but a mode of motion. Because this opened the way for our railroads and steamboats and quick methods of transportation, which have contributed so much to the world’s wealth. It was well that the impracticable and theoretical men, who had nothing better to do, spent ages studying the nature of electricity, and finally discovered that there were certain metals for which it had affinity, and that it had speed equal to thought itself. For these studies have enabled the practical and substantial men to order their corn and meat by telegraph, and the practical housewives to order their roast beef by telephone. It is well that people who had no practical turn of mind spent years in considering the structure of the human frame, and the plants and minerals capable of ministering to it, for in this way the doctors have got ideas by which they are enabled to keep us practical men alive, so that we can trade longer, and build more factories and eat more victuals.

Now it is true that the knowledge the intelligence comes to by insight into the relations and nature and truth of things, can be turned to practical account. But the truth the mind finds by study was not primarily intended to open the way for steam cars and telegraphs and the production of wealth. These things are incidental. Truth is the provision God has made for the intellect. The knowledge of the stars has helped man to sail the sea and to take his bearings on any part of its surface. But the practical account to which this knowledge has been turned is not to be compared, in value, to the effect it was intended to have on the human mind, strengthening it, ennobling it, and harmonizing it with the divine mind.

_RIGHTEOUSNESS._

“While smitten with the fatal wanness of approaching doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence descends the steep slope to the gulf of devouring time: lo! at the other extremity of space, when the last cloud has but now faded in the deep sky of the future, azure forevermore, rises resplendent the sacred galaxy of the true stars—Orpheus, Hermes, Job, Homer, Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretius, Plautus, Juvenal, Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc, Christopher Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus, Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakspere, Rembrandt, Kepler, Milton, Molière, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Piranesi, Beccari, Diderot, Beethoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington: and the marvelous constellations, brighter from moment to moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shine in the clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends, with the boundless dawn of Jesus Christ.”