Genesis and Lapse
Sunday, 25.
“Before the Revolution of 1688,” says Coleridge, “metaphysics ruled without experimental philosophy. Since the Revolution, experimental psychology has in like manner prevailed, and we now feel the result. In like manner, from Plotinus to Proclus, that is, from A. D. 250 to A. D. 450, philosophy was set up as a substitute for religion; during the dark ages, religion superseded philosophy, and the consequences are equally instructive.”
“The great maxim in legislation, intellectual or physical, is subordinate, not exclude. Nature, in her ascent, leaves nothing behind; but at each step subordinates and glorifies,—mass, crystal, organ, sensation, sentience, reflection.”
Taken in reverse order of descent, Spirit puts itself before, at each step protrudes faculty in feature, function, organ, limb, subordinating to glorify also,—person, volition, thought, sensibility, sense, body,—animating thus and rounding creation to soul and sense alike. The naturalist cannot urge too strongly the claims of physical, nor the plea of the idealist be too vigorously pressed for metaphysical studies. One body in one soul. Nature and spirit are inseparable, and are best studied as a unit. “Either without the other,” as Plato said of sex, “is but half itself.” Nature ends where spirit begins. The idealist’s point of view is the obverse of the naturalist’s, and each must accost his side with a first love, before use has worn off the bloom and seduced their vision.
Goethe said of Aristotle that “he had better observed nature than any modern, but was too rash in his inferences and conclusions”; and he adds, “we must go to work slowly, and more indulgently with Nature, if we would get anything from her.”
Inspired by his example of dealing thus reverently and lovingly with nature, the great naturalists of our time are reading secrets hitherto hidden from less careful and pious observers. If the results thus far have not satisfied the idealist, it becomes him to consider that his methods are the reverse of theirs, and that when they shall have tracked Life in its manifold shapes and modes of working in nature up to Spirit, their office is fulfilled, their work complete, and their discoveries are passed over to him for a higher generalization and genesis. “A physical delineation of nature,” says Humboldt, “terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world is opened to our view; it marks the limit, but does not pass it.”
Whether man be the successor or predecessor of his inferiors in nature, is to be determined by exploring faithfully the realms of matter and of spirit alike, and complementing the former in the latter. Whether surveyed in order descending or ascending, in genesis or process, from the side of the idealist or of the naturalist, the keystone of the arch in either case is an ideal, underpropped by matter or upheld by mind.
“If men be worlds, there is in every one
Something to answer in fit proportion
All the world’s riches, and in substance this,—
Person his form’s form, and soul’s soul, is.”
Man, the sum total of animals, transcends all in being a Person, a responsible creature. “The distinguishing mark,” says Aristotle, “between man and the lower animals is this: that he alone is endowed with the power of knowing good and evil, justice and injustice, and it is a participation in this that constitutes a family and a city.” Man is man in virtue of being a Person, a self-determining will, held accountable to a spiritual Ideal. To affirm that brute creatures are endowed with freedom and choice, the sense of responsibility, were to exalt them into a spiritual existence and personality; whereas, it is plain enough that they are not above deliberation and choice, but below it, under the sway of Fate, as men are when running counter to reason and conscience. The will bridges the chasm between man and brute, and frees the fated creature he were else. Solitary, not himself, the victim of appetite, inmate of the den, is man till freed from individualism, and delivered into his free Personality. “Ye must be born again.”
The conflict between man’s desires and satisfactions declares his defection from Personal holiness. While at one personally with himself, life suffices, his wants are seconded as they rise, and his self-respect preserved inviolate. But lapsed from personal rectitude, fallen out of and below himself, he is at variance with things around as within, his senses deceive, his will is divided, and he becomes the victim of duplicities, discontents, the prey of remorse.
“’Tis a miserable thing,” says Glanvil, “to have been happy; and a self-contented wretchedness is a double one. Had felicity always been a stranger to humanity, our present misery had not been. And had not ourselves been the authors of our ruin, less. We might have been made unhappy; but since we are miserable, we chose it. He that gave our outward enjoyments might have taken them from us, but none could have robbed us of innocence but ourselves. While man knows no sin, he is ignorant of nothing that it imports humanity to know; but when he has sinned, the same transgression that opens his eyes to see his own shame, shuts them against most things else but that, and the newly-purchased misery. With the nakedness of his body, he sees that of his soul, and the blindness and disarray of his faculties to which his former innocence was a stranger; and that which shows them to him makes them. No longer the creature he was made, he loses not only his Maker’s image, but his own. And does not much more transcend the creatures placed at his feet, than he comes short of his ancient self.”
Whose the decree
Souls Magdalens must be
To know felicity,
The path to it
Through pleasure’s pit,
Soft sin undress
Them of their holiness,—
Hath heaven so writ?
Happier the fate
That opes heaven’s gate
With crystal key
Of purity,
And thus fulfils life’s destiny.