IDEALISM.
THUS is the unspeakable but intelligible and practicable meaning of
the world conveyed to man, the immortal pupil, in every object of
sense. To this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature conspire.
A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not
the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists.
It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that
God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain
number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and
woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity
of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make
on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make,
whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in
the firmament of the soul? The relations of parts and the end of the
whole remaining the same, what is the difference, whether land and sea
interact, and worlds revolve and intermingle without number or
end,—deep yawning under deep, and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout
absolute space,—or, whether, without relations of time and space, the
same appearances are inscribed in the constant faith of man? Whether
nature enjoy a substantial existence without, or is only in the
apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and alike venerable to me.
Be it what it may, it is ideal to me, so long as I cannot try the
accuracy of my senses.
The frivolous make themselves merry with the Ideal theory, if its
consequences were burlesque; as if it affected the stability of nature.
It surely does not. God never jests with us, and will not compromise
the end of nature, by permitting any inconsequence in its procession.
Any distrust of the permanence of laws, would paralyze the faculties of
man. Their permanence is sacredly respected, and his faith therein is
perfect. The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of
the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed,
but like a house to stand. It is a natural consequence of this
structure, that, so long as the active powers predominate over the
reflective, we resist with indignation any hint that nature is more
short-lived or mutable than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the
carpenter, the toll-man, are much displeased at the intimation.
But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the permanence of natural laws,
the question of the absolute existence of nature still remains open. It
is the uniform effect of culture on the human mind, not to shake our
faith in the stability of particular phenomena, as of heat, water,
azote; but to lead us to regard nature as a phenomenon, not a
substance; to attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem nature
as an accident and an effect.
To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view,
man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they
never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith.
The first effort of thought tends to relax this despotism of the
senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows
us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. Until this higher agency
intervened, the animal eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp
outlines and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason opens, to outline
and surface are at once added, grace and expression. These proceed from
imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular
distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest
vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer
seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best moments of
life are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the
reverential withdrawing of nature before its God.
Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 1. Our first
institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from nature herself.
Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain
mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes
us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a
moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.
The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a
pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach
and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The
men, the women,—talking, running, bartering, fighting,—the earnest
mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized
at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the
observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new
thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in
the rapid movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects,
(make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In
a camera obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own
family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn
the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs,
and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time
these twenty years!
In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference
between the observer and the spectacle,—between man and nature. Hence
arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the
sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized,
that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.
2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a
few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp,
the city, the hero, the maiden, not different from what we know them,
but only lifted from the ground and afloat before the eye. He unfixes
the land and the sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his primary
thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by a heroic passion,
he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to
things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems
nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being
thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he
invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the
Reason. The Imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason
makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of
subordinating nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets.
His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand,
and uses it to embody any caprice of thought that is upper-most in his
mind. The remotest spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest
sundered things are brought together, by a subtle spiritual connection.
We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and
all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus,
in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he
finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her
from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her
ornament;
The ornament of beauty is Suspect,
A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.
His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to
a city, or a state.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,
That works on leases of short numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.
In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent
and transitory. The freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its
resemblance to morning.
Take those lips away
Which so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes,—the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would
not be easy to match in literature.
This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the
passion of the poet,—this power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to
magnify the small,—might be illustrated by a thousand examples from
his Plays. I have before me the Tempest, and will cite only these few
lines.
ARIEL. The strong based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.
Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo, and his
companions;
A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.
Again;
The charm dissolves apace,
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.
Their understanding
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores
That now lie foul and muddy.
The perception of real affinities between events, (that is to say,
of ideal affinities, for those only are real,) enables the poet
thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the
world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.
3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his own thoughts, he
differs from the philosopher only herein, that the one proposes Beauty
as his main end; the other Truth. But the philosopher, not less than
the poet, postpones the apparent order and relations of things to the
empire of thought. “The problem of philosophy,” according to Plato,
“is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned
and absolute.” It proceeds on the faith that a law determines all
phenomena, which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. That law,
when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty is infinite. The true
philosopher and the true poet are one, and a beauty, which is truth,
and a truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not the charm of
one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, strictly like that of the
Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has
been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has
been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being
has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and
recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In
physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its
cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of
observation in a single formula.
Thus even in physics, the material is degraded before the spiritual.
The astronomer, the geometer, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and
disdain the results of observation. The sublime remark of Euler on his
law of arches, “This will be found contrary to all experience, yet is
true;” had already transferred nature into the mind, and left matter
like an outcast corpse.
4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget invariably a
doubt of the existence of matter. Turgot said, “He that has never
doubted the existence of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for
metaphysical inquiries.” It fastens the attention upon immortal
necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas; and in their
presence, we feel that the outward circumstance is a dream and a shade.
Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think of nature as an
appendix to the soul. We ascend into their region, and know that these
are the thoughts of the Supreme Being. “These are they who were set up
from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he
prepared the heavens, they were there; when he established the clouds
above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep. Then they were
by him, as one brought up with him. Of them took he counsel.”
Their influence is proportionate. As objects of science, they are
accessible to few men. Yet all men are capable of being raised by piety
or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these divine
natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine. Like a new
soul, they renew the body. We become physically nimble and lightsome;
we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and we think it will never
be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death, in their serene
company, for he is transported out of the district of change. Whilst we
behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth, we learn the
difference between the absolute and the conditional or relative. We
apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space are relations of
matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous will, they have
no affinity.
5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,—the
practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,—have an
analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein;
that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man; the
other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God; Ethics does
not. They are one to our present design. They both put nature under
foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, “The things that are
seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal.” It puts
an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that may
be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is, —“Contemn the
unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities, dreams, shadows,
unrealities; seek the realities of religion.” The devotee flouts
nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain hostility and
indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and Plotinus. They
distrusted in themselves any looking back to these flesh-pots of Egypt.
Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they might all say of
matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty, “it is the frail
and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which he has called into
time.”
It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science,
and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the
external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding
too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all
culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature,
but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn
and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my
beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the
true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all
right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of
human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts
the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent,
which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call
visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The
belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this
faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first.
The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this,
that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most
desirable to the mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both
speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and virtue, take. For,
seen in the light of thought, the world always is phenomenal; and
virtue subordinates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in God. It
beholds the whole circle of persons and things, of actions and events,
of country and religion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after atom,
act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but as one vast picture, which
God paints on the instant eternity, for the contemplation of the soul.
Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial and microscopic
study of the universal tablet. It respects the end too much, to immerse
itself in the means. It sees something more important in Christianity,
than the scandals of ecclesiastical history, or the niceties of
criticism; and, very incurious concerning persons or miracles, and not
at all disturbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts from God
the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the pure and awful form of religion
in the world. It is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what it
calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union or opposition of other
persons. No man is its enemy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of
its lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is a doer, only
that it may the better watch.