Ideal Culture
Thursday, 17.
The new courses of lectures at Harvard University are advertised by the new President. They are a novelty in our college culture. A marked peculiarity is the announcement of a course to be given by Emerson, on the Natural History of Intellect; by Dr. Hedge, on Theism, Atheism, and Pantheism; and by J. Eliot Cabot, on Kant. The course, or any part of it, is open “to graduates, teachers, and other competent persons, men or women.”
It is hoped, also, that Hutchison Stirling may be added to the list of lecturers,—an acquisition certainly that Harvard should be proud to secure, both for its own and the credit of metaphysical studies on this side of the Atlantic.
The English mind seems to have held aloof from pure metaphysics,—from German Idealism, especially. Berkeley, its finest thinker since Bacon, was for a long time misapprehended, if, indeed, he is fairly appreciated as yet. Boehme, Kant, Schelling, were unknown till Coleridge introduced their ideas to the notice of his contemporaries—Carlyle those of Goethe, and the great scholars of Germany.
“Great, indeed,” says Coleridge, “are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to the perusal of philosophical systems, an habitual aversion to all speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident and immediate.
“There are others whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles, which had been alarmed and shocked by the injurious and pernicious tenets defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French Fatalists, or Necessitarians, some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the mysteries, and, indeed, of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; and others, to the subversion of all distinctions between right and wrong.
“A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to system and terminology provided it be the method and nomenclature to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume, Hartley, Condillac, or, perhaps, Dr. Reid and Professor Stewart.
“But the worst and widest impediment remains. It is the predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that corruption introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming Eclectics, who, dismissing, not only all system, but all logical consequence, pick and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select whatever words can have semblance of sense attached to them, without the least expenditure of thought; in short, whatever may enable men to talk of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of everything that might awaken them to a moment’s suspicion of their ignorance.”
Fifty years and more have passed since this criticism was written; and, with slight change of names for similar things, it still holds for the popular estimate put upon metaphysics by too many scholars of our time. If Coleridge, Schelling, Hegel, and the rest, are still held in disregard by persons in chairs of philosophy, we may infer the kind of culture which the universities favor. What he also said of intellectual culture in his country and time, holds scarcely less true as regards ours; and this in a republic, too, which in theory educates all its citizens.
“I am greatly deceived if one preliminary to an efficient popular education be not the recurrence to a more manly discipline of the intellect on the part of the learned themselves; in short, a thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the characters of our future landowners, magistrates, and senators, are to receive their shape and fashion. What treasures of practical wisdom would be once more brought to open day by the solution of the problem. Suffice it for the present to hint the master thought.
“The first man on whom the light of an Idea dawned, did in that same moment receive the spirit and credentials of a lawgiver. And as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession of that antecedent—the maker and master of all profitable experience, which exists in the power of an idea—be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of the senses. Without this, experience itself is but a Cyclops walking backwards under the fascinations of the past; and we are indebted to a lucky coincidence of outward circumstances and contingencies, least of all to be calculated on in a time like the present, if this one-eyed experience does not seduce its worshippers into practical anachronisms. But, alas! the halls of the old philosophers have been so long deserted, that we circle them at shy distance, as the haunt of phantoms and chimeras. The sacred grave of Academus is held in like regard with the unfruitful trees in the shadowy world of Maro, that had a dream attached to every leaf. The very terms of ancient wisdom are worn out; or, far worse, stamped as baser metal; and whoever should have the hardihood to re-proclaim its solemn truths, must commence with a glossary.”
The Dialectic, or Method of the Mind, constitutes the basis of all culture. Without a thorough discipline in this, our schools and universities give but a showy and superficial training. The knowledge of mind is the beginning of all knowledge; without this a theology is baseless, the knowledge of God impossible. Modern education has not dealt with these deeper questions of life and being. It has the future in which to prove its power of conducting a Cultus, answering to the discipline of the Greek thinkers, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle.
As yet we deal with mind with far less certainty than with matter; the realm of intellect having been less explored than the world of the senses, and both are treated conjecturally rather than absolutely. When we come to perceive that Intuition is the primary postulate of all intelligence, most questions now perplexing and obscure will become transparent; the lower imperfect methods then take rank where they belong and are available. The soul leads the senses; the reason the understanding; imagination the memory; instinct and intuition include and prompt the Personality entire.
The categories of imagination are the poet’s tools; those of the reason, the implements of the naturalist. The dialectic philosopher is master of both. The tools to those only who can handle them skilfully. All others but gash themselves and their subject, at best. Ask not a man of understanding to solve a problem in metaphysics. He has neither wit, weights, nor scales for the task. But a man of reason or of imagination solves readily the problems of understanding the moment these are fairly stated. Ideas are solvents of all mysteries, whether in matter or mind.
’Tis clear
Mind’s sphere
Is not here;
The Ideal guest
In ceaseless quest
Pursues the Best:
The very Better
The while her fetter,
Her desire
Higher, still higher;
Ever is fleeing
Past Seeming to Being;
Nor doth the sight content itself with seeing,
As forms emerge they fast from sense are fleeing,
Things but appear to vanish into Being.
So the Greeks represented thought in their winged god, Hermes, as the father of speech and messenger of intelligence; they conceiving the visible world as a globe of forms, whereby objects of thought were pictured to sense, and held forth to fancy,—a geometry of ideas, a rhetoric of images.
Sallying forth into nature, the mind clothes its ideas in fitting images, and thus reflects itself upon the understanding. Things are symbols of thoughts, and nature the mind’s dictionary.
Mind omnipresent is,
All round about us lies,
To fashion forth itself
In thought and ecstacy,
In fancy and surprise,
Things with ideas fraught,
And nature our dissolving thought.