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The Science of Universology appeared in 36 installments in the free religionist paper, The Index, between January 4, 1877 and June 19, 1879, following the conclusion of a debate between Andrews, Benjamin R. Tucker and William Batchelder Greene regarding Proudhon. It is essentially a third book-length examination of Andrews proposed universal science, following two volumes published in book form:
- The Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato: The New Scientific Universal Language (1871)
- The Basic Outline of Universology (1872)
(An early discussion of universology appeared in the Spiritual Telegraph in 1857.)
Andrews’ mature projects—Universology, the Pantarchy, the New Catholic Church, Alwato and Tikiwa, the Colloquium, etc.—are an often baffling manifestation of both his individual eccentricity and his ability to synthesize elements from so many of the social scientific projects around him. That results in some very interesting moments, like those here in which Andrews engages with Greene as a philosopher, rather than simply as an interpreter of Proudhon’s credit projects. It also results in a lot of prose where Andrews’ wide reading and his fascination with the supposed significance of minute details combine in daunting and dizzying fashion. In the end, it is hard to consider Andrews anything but a gloriously persistent crank, but one of the tasks still to really be accomplished in our examination of the origins of anarchism is to come to terms with the ways in which figures like Andrews so clearly spoke to something in the radical milieus, gaining considerable influence and shaping that early history in important ways.
The Science of Universology
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The Science of Universology
Stephen Pearl Andrews
I
The discussion, in The Index (closed with the issue of August 10, 1876), between Mr. Benjamin R. Tucker and myself, in respect to Proudhon, leads to the opportunity, and in some sense to the necessity, for an attempt to give to the readers of The Index some fair understanding of the nature of universology. Col. William B. Greene, who has been alluded to by both Mr. Tucker and myself, and for whom, as one of our great minds, I have the utmost esteem, as the friend of Mr. Tucker, requests of me, in a card in The Index of September 7, to make such a presentation; and to this course the editor of The Index has kindly added his own personal invitation. So encouraged, I will endeavor to do what is required of me, fully aware of the difficulty of the effort to assign to a “condensed statement” what would more appropriately be the burden of a text-book.
Condensed statements are far advanced and severe thinkers, and the majority of the readers of a journal even so elevated in rank as The Index can hardly, it is probable, be classed in the latter category. Considering, therefore, that I can hardly hope for an appreciation of what I shall have to expound from more than a portion of those to whom it will be tendered, I shall carefully avoid any abuse of the privilege accorded to me, even at the risk of some misapprehension from the want of more elaboration.
For the merely preliminary statement of what universology is, the reader is referred to the last half of my reply to Mr. Tucker (Index August 10). That statement will enable the reader to know about the subject. But to know about a thing is one thing, and to know the thing itself is quite another thing. I am now to undertake to enable one to know universology itself in some measure,—still, however, a very primary, and incipient sense; to give to the reader that insight at least which will enable him to judge whether it is the kind of thing which it would interest him to pursue further, by the study of the more extended expositions contained in books published and to be published on the subject. I must, at the same time, however, occupy a portion of the very limited space which I feel is assigned to me, in simple declaration of the true nature and immense scope and value of the new sciento-philosophy. If I had my readers in class, at an organised university, held by any consideratlons to the exhaustive study of the whole subject, it might be more logical, and it might seem to be more modest, to leave them to come to their own conclusions, in due time, as to the application and true estimate of what I have to teach; but grown people are no longer children, to be set to their tasks, irrespective of their own judgment of the ulterior uses and value of what they are to be taught. The propounder of new truth for them, has the double task of imparting the knowledge, and of maintaining the interest of the learners through the preliminary drudgery, by assurances and by encouragements drawn from an occasional picture of the charms of the new realm into which their laborious first steps are about to induct them.
In the article I have alluded to, I have spoken of universology as a method in science and philosophy. It is, In fact, all of these,—a method, a science, and a philosophy; and, as it is more specifically a philosophy within and of the sciences, It is also best described by the new coinage, sciento-philosophy. It will be but, perhaps, to begin by considering it as a method, and by contrasting it inferentially with the methods which have hitherto prevailed.
Swedenborg speaks of continuous degrees, and of discrete degrees; and of the former as lower, and of the latter as higher, in rank. A continuous degree, in the progress of thought, would be the farther on evolution, and the greater perfection of knowledge, by a process or method already initiated, pursued, and prevalently known. A discrete degree, in this domain, would be the discovery of a fresh initiation, and the inauguration of a new method. Universology is a discrete degree, or differs in this manner, by a discrete degree, from everything which has been known as science or philosophy in the past, and must stand or fall upon its own merits. The first thing, therefore, of which the inquirer is to be warned, is that he must avoid confounding it with a mere expansion of something which he already knows. He must consent to study it on its own grounds; and for that purpose must begin by acquiring some insight into its domain and its method.
The domain covered by universology, in the first instance, is as new as the method and is one which has been overlooked and neglected by the thinkers of all schools. I say, in the first instance, because when it has been elaborated, on its own ground, and in its own way, it then invades the fields of all past thinkers; surveys them by new and improved instruments of measurement; accepts, rehabilitates and perfects all old systems; annexes them to the new, and ends in a grand reconciliation of all human conceptions. It is, then, the philosophy of reconciliation or integralism. We need therefore, to begin by defining the peculiar domain of universology, as well as its method; and in so primary an exhibit as this, it will not be necessary to keep them formally distinct.
As to domain and method conjointly, suppose, then, that we take our departure from Hegel. He divides the universe, as the totality of the subject matter of human contemplation, into three grand departments or domains. These are (disposing them in our own order, not his), 1. Nature; 2. Mind (or human nature); and 3. (an intermediate) “Logic,” the domain of Laws and Principles. In other words, there is first an outer or objective world, the domain of physics in the largest of the senses ever attached to that overloaded and overworked technicality; in a word the domain of “Nature,” occupied by that whole immense army of investigators who strive to arrogate to themselves the name of scientists; hence the region of science or the sciences, excluding psychology. There is, then, secondly, Mind expanding vaguely into metaphysics, or that which is beyond or aside from physics, and especially including and allied with psychology, or mental philosophy. Thirdly, there is the intermediate or third realm, called “Logic,” for the want of a better same, but meaning a thousand times more than school logic, which is hardly more than a branch of the mere science of mind; somewhat as common salt, having given its name to “the salts,” in chemistry; proves to be no salt at all, itself.
There are, then, we may say, three worlds: 1. An objective or outer world, called “nature”; 2. A subjective or inner world, called “mind”; and 3. A middle, intangible, abstract world, more difficult of appreciation, called “logic,” being the domain of the pure reason, of laws and principles, or of abstract truth and truths, which are neither the outer world of nature nor the inner world of mind merely as such.
Let us conceive these three worlds after this manner: I look at my face in a mirror. The image which I see, apparently back of the mirror, may stand for Nature. It is my objective world. I, myself, who cast the image, may stand for mind, I am my own subjective world. But intermediate between the subject and the object, which have grown to be familiar terms in philosophy, there is a third object, so limpid and level that it is invisible to the eye of the ordinary observer, and goes for nothing; while yet it is that object itself, the mirror, which by its peculiar properties is the central and main functionator in the whole scene. The mirror is, then, the analogue of that intermediate world, poorly described as logic, and which is the peculiar home and seat of transcendental science and philosophy and, in the last analysis, of everything which is entitled to the name of either science or philosophy.
It is this which is peculiarly the realm of German or the so-called transcendental metaphysics, a domain which, so far from being exhausted (as our superficial sciolists in science would make us believe), is only just opened up or initiated by those greatest thinkers who have ever lived in the past, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, worthily supplemented by our own Stallo, Hickok, and the Frothingham. The glare of material successes in the world of “science” obscures, just for the present, the more solid values of absolute philosophy, somewhat as the vulgar nouveaux riches temporarily bedazzle and obscure the higher-style merits of a true aristocracy.
“Nature,” or matter, is then objective, “mind” is subjective; and “logic” is intermediate. These three items of discrimination answer to or correspond with the meanings of the three universalizing prepositional words out, without, or outside of, in, within, or inside of, and between. Hegel begins with the betweenity, as origin, and proceeds to the without, from which he reverts to the within. I have chosen to change the order, for our present purposes, so far as to begin with the without, proceed thence to the within, and revert to the between. Betweenity is relation: and the science of relation, abstractly and universally, is logic, in the broad Hegelian sense of the word. The relational department of grammar is the prepositional; and the universal summing up or generalization of the prepositions of grammar occurs in and as between the three prepositional words, without (outside of), within, and between. This is why we are conducted by Hegel’s first grand distribution of the universe to this seemingly minute and trivial domain, the prepositions, and to a particular group of them; and this kind of connection between great things and small may give a suggestion of the scope and character of universology.
Observe, in the next place, that two of these three worlds, or departments of universal being, can be thrown into a single class as distinct in kind from the third one; and so a binary division substituted for the ternary one. Matter and mind, the objective and the subjective, are alike, or constitute one class in the fact that they are both concrete (grown together), thick, or real-like, as having body or substance; while logic, the intermediate realm, is abstract (drawn asunder), thin, filmy, or unreal-like. It is this bifold distribution which Herbert Spencer adopts as the basis of the total classification of the sciences, placing matter and mind, or universal physics and psychology, in one class as “the concrete,” and the abstract domain, on the other hand, as “the abstract.” Hegel in distributing the universe, and Spencer in distributing the sciences, are dealing virtually with the same subject-matter, since every domain or department of being is represented in or by the science of that domain; and with this mere change from the threefold to the twofold first branching, they two are brought into harmony with each other. It will be a great convenience if I may be allowed to be so technical as to call “the concrete” by the new term concretismus, and “the abstract” by the corresponding new term abstractismus, this termination -ismus being taken, as by German usage, to denote a domain, or as equivalent to our English termination -dom.
The abstractismus is then, as a whole, what Hegel means to cover by the term logic, including as he does quantity and its science, mathematics, under that head, as a branch of logic. Here again, however, Spencer differs, and divides the abstractismus into (1) logic, and (2) the mathematics. These and a thousand other disharmonies among philosophers, in the extension of their terms or the meanings of words hinder and discourage the student even more than the difficulty of the ideas; and it is part of the need of a universology, that it should remove these obstacles, and bring order out of chaos, as between the several achievement of its predecessors, in the whole field of knowledge.
The science of the concretismus we may now call concretology, and the science of the abstract, abstractology; and we may say, inversely, that the concretismus subdivides into “nature,” (or matter) and “mind”; as the abstractismus does into logic, in the Spencerian sense, and the mathematics. It is obvious, therefore, that the twofold, the threefold, and the fourfold method of distribition can each be justified, a fact admirably demonstrated by Proudhon, in his Creation de l’ Ordre; but he has not shown, as it belongs to universology to do, the precise plan, properties, and values of each of these methods, and their relations to each other, in an absolutely exhaustive classificatory system. It will suffice here if I call attention to the fact that these varying orders of the division of things necessarily relate to the series of primal number, one, two, three, four,—one being taken for the undistributed totality; and if I affirm that in the relations of these first numbers lies the nut of all classification then, we have the authority of Mr. John Fiske for the dictum that “all knowledge is classification.”
The without, the within, and the between, taken merely as words, are, as I have said, prepositions; more strictly speaking, spatial prepositions, passing readily into adverbs of place; but as ideas, they are geometrical, or more properly morphological, discriminations, and the most general or universalizing possible discriminations of that classs; that is to say, of the statu or spatial, which is the governing order. We are thus carried back of words to the realm of form, for the objective source of those grand primal divisions which make the basis of Hegel’s philosophy, and which are, in truth, the appropriate primal divisions of the universe, and so, in a sense, to the bottom region of philosophy.
But neither Hegel nor any of the philosophers has traced either these or any other of their fundamental discriminations into their relation with words, or forms (figures, diagrams), or with any objective realm whateoever. They have brought them, therefore, to no objective test, which would determine how far they were right, would correct them when wrong; and would serve as means of facilitating the acquisition and right understanding of the ideas themselsee. Metaphysics or philosophy has thus remained a something apart from all objective or properly scientific knowledge; true, perhaps, but disconnected with real things, and only attainable by a class of minds which could hold bald, naked ideas before the mind, analyzing and combining them in a thousand ways, unaided by the slighteet reference to anything tangible by the senses.
Universology differs precisely at this point, and holds no idea to be constituted into a term of true knowledge, until it can be construed into its appropriate objective representations. lt brings the abstruse and far-off truths of metaphysical philosophy out and down into the realm of common knowledge by means of their analogy with common things. Inversely, it refers all common things by the same analogy, back to those logical and metaphysical counterparts in the realm of pure ideas. It is, therefore, a unification of science and philosophy, a lifting of science and the sciences into unity, by the discovery of their fundamental and unifying principles; and on the other hand a scientizing of philosophy by bringing it forward into the details of all the sciences. In a word, universology is neither, philosophy, in its former purely abstruse and metaphysical signification, nor science, in that lower sense which excludes metaphysics; but it is a new and third thing, which by a new and simple and far-reaching discovery bridges over the wide chasm that has hitherto separated science and philosophy; constituting first a universal and all-inclusive one science, and thn identifying it with logic in the Hegelian sense, and so again with metaphysics in the more generic and indiscriminate meaning of the word. Hence the term sciento-philosophy seems requisite to describe it; a term which also, in a less specific sense, is applicable to the generalizations of science made by Comte, Spencer, Haeckel, and others.
Let us now return to the threefold distribution of the universe, substantially equivalent to that of Hegel. For the two extremes we may say matter and mind, or the objective and the subjective,—the two sets of terms not being synonymous, but sufficiently nearly so, for this incipient allusion. For the middle or intermediate term we have already before us a variety of expressions or namings; thus logic (Hegel), the abstract (Spencer), abstractology, and, as that which is most simple and most certainly right, the betweenity, or the between.
This realm of the abstract, as including a group of the sciences, Prof. Louis Elsberg, in his classffication of the sciences, denominates “logics,” he recommending the termination -ies, for the abstravt sciences in the place of -ology. which he reserves for the concrete, aud Prof. Michael A Clancy, a pupil and teacher of the universological school, insists on the single word “language” for this department of being, in that immensely large sense in which it signifies all intermediation and communication whatsoever, whether vocal or otherwise. He may be inclined to intervene in this discussion, so far as to give his reasons for this preference, amounting with him to a fixed opinion based on universological grounds.
In this latter view of the case, this first threefold distribution of universal things is greatly simplifled, and is merely to be stated as (1) matter, (2) mind, and (3) language. It may be appropriate to state here, that the first specific outgrowth of universology is a universal language—Alwato (Ahl-wah-to),—the immense scope of which seems fully to justify Prof. Clancy’a idea that language fills the entire domain intermediate between matter and mind.
But setting aside this latter view, for the present, and eonfining ourselves to the term abstractismus, as naming the domain of this betweenity, it in turn divides, not with Spencer and Elsberg into two merely, but into three grand subordinate domains; the lowest of which, repeating “nature” or matter, is catalogic, or the whole grammatica-logical domain; dipping backward more especially into the science of mmd, the middle one of which is mathematics, repeating the betweenity; and the third or highest one of which is analogic, the new abetract science which universology brings to light, and which leans rather to the outer or material world, while yet originating subjectively, and repeating mind.
It now appears that mathematics is the middle of the betweenity; and, as such, it is peculiarly the central, germinal, or originative sphere of universal being. Universology pivots, therefore, upon mathematical discriminations. The primal differences of number and form furnish the type for all true classification, whether of matter or mind. The middle ground yields the new clew to the acquisition of all knowledge. This is the new domain, and departure from it the new method referred to. “Science” finds in matter the field for its spacial exercitation; philosophy in mind, and its allied metaphysical domain,—even the logic of Hegel more strictly falls here, though I began by conceding it the middle ground: aud the true betweenity, or the middle ground proper, is this new domain of thought and being, which holds tenaciously to mathematical analogies; and sciento-philosophy belongs, strictly speaking, to this realm.
I have so far, therefore, merely conducted my “condensed statement” to its proper beginning-point. In another article, which I hope may not be long delayed, I will endeavor to make obvious what I mean by the mathematical analogies, and to give such illustration as to render the general field of analogie comprehensible.
Proudhon, in the work I have alluded to, made a noteworthy effort to bring the abstrusities of philosophy out into the clearness of scientific expression; but he came short of making the definite discovery of the virtual identity between the broadest speculative discriminations, and the simplest, most immediate, and most specific of mathematical differences.
II.
I took pains in a preliminary article (Index, Oct. 26;) to show that sciento-philosophy is neither Metaphysics properly so called, or as heretofore understood, nor Physics in that broadest sense in which it contrasts with Metaphysics,—what Elsberg calls Physology; but that it concerns specially that intermediate region in which the domain of matter is coterminous with the domain of mind, and where, as it will appear, the laws of matter and the laws of mind are translatable into each other, by means of this betweenity: if, indeed, they be not rather identified as one and the same. More strictly speaking, it is analogic as a direct derivation from mathematics, which, as before shown, is the centring domain of universology. Analogie is so to say, the metaphysies of physies symbolized inmathematies, and its particulars consist of laws and principles, recurring like an echo in every domain.
All laws and principles whatsoerer are derived from, and relate themselves back to, the primal discriminations or first elements of the mathematics, and all classification is derived from those laws and principles.
This identity of the laws and principles of all domains institutes recurring samenesses of distribution everywhere, no matter how diverse the nature of the substances, or things, or domains so distributed—an infinite variety in unity,—all traceable back to definite underlying mathematical origins. To make this matter simple, let me say, referring to the previous article, that, if the total universe is constructed upon the plan there exhibited of having a Without. a Within, and a Between, so each of these universicula, or sub-universes, is in turn constituted upon the same plan and has its Without, Within, and Between, down to the least possible instance of universological subdivision. Two observations are here called for; first, that the universe, or sub-universe, not merely is so constituted, as if by the fiat of a god, but that it must be so constituted by an inherent necessity; it being inconceivable that it, or anything, should be constituted in any other way since everything, to be anything must have its Without, its Within, and its Between and secondly, that from this mode of the constitution of universal things it results that there not merely is but that there must be Universal Analogy, from a repetition of the same mode of distribution within the whole; and within each part and part-icular, or little part, down to the least Part, within the totality of things. It is this which Swedenborg means when he says that “all things are contained in the least thing”—not all things, strictly, but all laws and principles. In other words, the constitution of a pea embodies all the principles which are embodied in the constitution of the universe. While this statement may not be apprehended or acceded to at once by the reader, in its total largeness, he will at least admit that Outerness, Innerness, and Betweenity of those two are conditions which necessarily effect equally the smallest and the largest things; and that it is, therefore, at least conceivable that whole, part, and least part should be subject, in some sense, to one and the same law of distribution, and also he may be able to perceive that, if such analogy exists, it must be possible by means of it to reason from the minor to the major, reversing the syllogistic which reasons only from major to minor.
Analogic is the science of this identity of law in diversity of spheres. It goes back, for its origin, at least in the direction of largeness, to the primal distribution of the universe into matter, mind, and their intermediation; and of this intermediation into catalogic, (logic, grammar, etc.), mathematics, and analogic, as shown in the preceding article—back therefore to mathematics as the middle of the betweenity of universal things
Each whole and each part being thus distributed in a like manner, the sameness of distribution between any two parts, or between any parts and the whole, is called analogy. And as everything is characterized by it, this analogy or sameness of law is called Universal Analogy, and the particular parts or members of any two such domaing which answer to each other, or fill the similar place, are called analogues of each other. The right understanding of the meaning of these two terms, analogy and analogue, is the key to the science of analogic.
The members in the distribution of any domain whatsoever may be taken as the pattern, and the corresponding members of the other domains be referred to them as analogues; but the mathematical domain is the most simple, determinate and certain, and within it the geometrical or morphological, which furnishes diagrams or pictures to aid the imagination; whence the fact arises that the mathematical analogies serve best for the secure basis of the new science. It is for this reason that in the previous article I promised to give some idea, specifically, in this, of the nature of this mathematical basis of scientific analogy.
We will dismiss for the moment our former beginning point, in the difference between the Without, the Within, and the Between, returning to it after a little, and take now another beginning point in the difference, in a sense even more primitive than the other (logically speaking), between nothing and something, or what Kant calls negation and reality. Named in this manner, they are metaphysical terms, and neither Kant nor any of his commentators, not even Hegel, who has begun his philosophy at this point, has related them to anything mathematical or realistic.
It will not be difficult to perceive, however, the moment it is mentioned that the zero of mathematics is the mathematical nothing or negation, or the negative factor department, or member of the mathematical domain, and that one—repeated it may be as many ones or units—is the mathematical something or reality, or the affirmative factor, department, or member of the general field of mathematics, or of number. And so soon as this objective and obvious alliance is formed between the speculative thought of the great metaphysician and this most common and quasi-objective sphere, the arithmetical sphere, what was before half mystical, and at all events obscure, becomes patent and comprehensible for every grade of intellect.
We have now established analogy between a metaphysical discrimination (negation and reality) and a mathematical discrimination (zero and affirmative numeration),—the metaphysical discrimination being universal, or belonging to no particular sphere (philosophoid), and the mathematical discrimination being special, or belonging to the particular domain of number (scientoid), the metaphysical discrimination being, on account of its broad generality, vague, indeterminate, unsatisfactory; and the mathematical discrimination being, by virtue of its specialty definite, determinate, and satisfactory. It is this kind of terminal conversion into opposites, or beginning at the other end for the sake of clearness and certainty, this commencement in the analytical details of something which is manageable and familiar instead of the far-off and universal,—this adoption of the scientific in place of the speculative method, which converts philosophy into sciento-philosophy proper, and founds the science of universology by means of analogic.
Those two great universal principles, permeating all spheres, called negative and positive, take their origin from and revert for elucidation to the commencement of count in the difference between zero and one, and might have been called zero-ish and unit-ish; and all other universal principles whatsoever, I again emphatically aver, take their origin from the simplest of mathematical discriminations.
Kant calls that aspect of universal being which so divides into negative and positive the domain of quality. He then proceeds to the proper domain of quantity, and divides it into one, many, and all. How many persons have ever recognized in these formidable metaphysical aspections our simple and familiar grammatical distribution of nouns into singular, plural, and collective, or the still more familiar mathematical idea of single, manifold, and compound, as in the one, the manyness, and the sum composed of the one and the many, on the school-boy’s slate? But of what practical use is a universal which has no particulars, a broad speculative discrimination which is never brought down into special applications? Who has distinctly perceived that the integration and differentiation of Spencer are no other than the one and many of Kant, in a more specialized form? Here again we are establishing analogies between different spheres and are recurring, for that purpose, to a simple and primary mathematical distribution. This line of thought is do new and for some so difficult, merely from its newness, that it is better to risk being obscure from brevity than cumbersome from prolixity. Hence I shall make my occasional articles on the subject purposely short.
III.
In the first of two previous articles (Index, Oct. 26, 1876), I sketched the place which Universology holds in the possible universal scope of knowledge, and fixed its centre in the Mathematical Analogies. In the second article (Index, Nov. 23,1876), I defined and illustrated what is meant by mathematical analogies. In the present article I shall go forward to another special domain, that of Language (as ordinarily limited), and shall begin to make applications of the new method of distribution and classification.
An important technicality of the Universal Science is this word “Domain.” It is, of course, nearly synonymous with realm or region; but it is used somewhat specially to denote the region of things, and the subject-matter, covered by a Science. Every Science has a Domain, and every Domain of Being has a corresponding Science, in this sense. The Domain of Universology is the Universe in its entirety, or with reference to its universal laws, principles, and facts. The domain of zoölogy is the animal kingdom, that of crystallography is crystals, etc.; and these minor sciences are, therefore, from one point of view, merely branches of universology, as their domains are parts of the universe. Each particular such domain is then called a universiculum, or little universe; and it has been shown, as a leading fact of universology, that the same system of distribution prevails in each universiculum as prevails in the universum proper; so that a universal analogy permeates all.
It was also shown that the universum proper subdivides or is distributed into three primary and principal departments: 1. “Nature,” the Without. 2. “Mind,” the Within; and 3. “Logic” (or Language, in a certain enlarged sense), the Between, including the knowledge of Laws and Principles.
We are now to take up and consider Language as it is usually understood, treating it as a little universe, and applying to it the same distribution into a Without, a Within, and a Between.
The Without, the Within, and the Between of Language should coincide with the same discriminations in respect to the Universe at large. The withoutness or externality of language is obviously its mere Utterance (or Outerance), its vocal constituency irrespective of meaning or sense. Such is the speaking of a parrot (for the speaker), and what is heard by us when a foreign language is spoken of which we are ignorant (for the hearer). In both eases the sounds composing language are uttered and heard, as effectively, it may be, as if they were understood; but no meaning is conveyed by them, or no meaning which is reciprocally understood by the speaker and hearer. Such speech or language is inanimate, destitute of soul, mind, or meaning, and coincides therefore with the material or outer world such as it would be if mind were totally wanting; that is to say, if there were no intelligent observer in the universe. Even when language is charged with meaning, and when the outer world does contain the observing mind: still we may, by an abstracting effort of thought, discriminate this Outerness of speech from its meaning, and this outerness of being from the mind which observes it; and we then have two outernesses which respectively coincide with each other; or in universological technicality, they are said to be analogues of each other.
The Within or Mind of Language is its Meaning. Meaning and Mind are, indeed, etymologically the same word. To mean is to intend, and to mind is to fasten the mind upon, and both go back to the Latin mens, the mind. The meaning of language coincides then with “Mind,” as the Hegelian third part of the Universe. In other words, the meaning of Speech-language is the analogue or an analogue of Mind in the world at large, or, inversely, Mind at large is an analogue of the Meaning of Speech-language.
Finally the Betweenity of language is the Underlying body of Laws and Principles involved in the outer body of language, which the Mind discovers there, and brings to light, as the subject matter of a new and special scientific consideration. Language may be spoken as utterance or outerance, and so have a material body; and it may also be understood by those who hear it, and so be freighted with meaning, the Mind or Soul of Language; and still the grammatical and logical laws in accordance with which the utterance has been spontaneously, made and the meaning conveyed, not have been reflectively discovered, abstracted, and consciously constituted into a new scientific domain, different from and, as it were, between the outer body and the inner soul of Speech. This middle ground of language, when so discovered and abstracted, coincides with the Hegelian Logic, the corresponding Between it, or Relation-domain of universal things. This medial domain of language is, therefore, an analogue of “Logic,” or “Logic” an analogue of it.
It was previously observed that the Without and the Within of the world, Matter and Mind, make conjointly the Concrete (technically the concretismus). So in respect to Language, the verbal body of speech, the phonic vocabulary, and the mental embodiment of the meanings of the phonic words, unite in the total vocabulary or copia verborum. This taken collectively is the Concrete of Language, and the science of it must therefore be Linguo-concretology, a science not heretofore distinctly conceived of or named, and of which we must seek the appropriate limits.
Obviously the central department of this great new lingual science—linguo-concretology, or the outerness of language—is Lexicology, or Dictionary-science; and the words to be defined in the dictionary are again analogous with body, matter, or “Nature” (within this outer sphere) and the definitions of the words which are their meaning, are analogous with “Mind” (as now recurring in this outer sphere). But the dictionary is only a central department of the concretismus of speech or language. Above the dictionary, but of the same character, is the Encyclopædia, of the total en-circl-ing of lingual matters, but still in this concrete sense; and below the dictionary are the spelling book, the primer, and the alphabet. Aphabetics and Phonetics are, therefore, not a branch of grammar, and have never been definitely placed in the grammar book. They are on the contrary, the elementary department of Linguo-concretology, to be classed with the dictionary and encyclopedia—in so far, at all events, as we neglect, as the learned world has hitherto done, the inherent meanings of sound, and the law of their classification.
Etymology is a term of double meaning. It has an old-fashioned established grammatical sense, as when Grammar is said to consist of Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody. But of late years, and since the development of Glottology or Philology as a district science, Etymology has been used as the name for the study of the concrete materials of language at large, a domain outside of grammar and more nearly coinciding with Linguo-concretology as here defined. It is the study of words, their origin and development, irrespective of their position in actual discourse. From this point of view the outerness of this concrete of Language coincides with German Philology, or Philology as hitherto developed in the learned world (going from word to meaning); and the innerness of this same concrete coincides with Idiological Etymology (going from meaning to word) now undergoing development as a science, in the University of the Pantarchy, and by the Academy of Glottology. A report on this subject will be found in the fourth and forthcoming volume of Johnson’s Cyclopædia, w. Word-building.
The abstract domain (the abtractismus) of Language, above referred to as the Betweenity, contains the two allied and parallel sciences, grammar, and school or syllogistic logic. Grammar, in this subdivision, is relatively concrete and empirical, and Syllogistic (which term we may adopt for this restricted kind of Logic), is relatively abstract, ideal and rigorous. In grammar we have our propositions, subjects, objects, predicates, etc., loosely and empirically constituted, and more with reference to the realism of the words. In Syllogistic we repeat all these in a new sense, these terms being taken strictly, and with absolute reference to the idealism of the words. This whole domain, the Betweenity of the tongue-world, coincides, it must be remembered, with Logic in the Hegelian sense, as the Betweenity of things at large. We are directed, therefore, by the Analogy, to look for a corresponding division of the Hegelian Logic into an outer, relatively concrete, and empirical division of this universal Logic, to coincide with Grammar; and for another division of the same, interior, relatively abstract, and à priori, to coincide with Syllogistic. We find precisely this difference between the Kantian and the Hegelian Logics, respectively.
We must, therefore, to be specific, now call this domain of the Major Logic, as a whole, the Kantio-Hegelian, and not merely Hegelian, as we have done hitherto.
The Kantian Logic is, then, characteristically à posteriori, empirical, or based on the observatlon of logical facts; and the Hegelian Logic properly à priori, apodictic, or based on the contemplation of necessary truths. The one is convolted from the happenings of the outer world of observed laws; the other is evolved from the inner consciousness of the abstract and analytical thinker. The one is factual (if we may adopt a mucb-needed but unauthorized word), and the other is (if we may revive and make technical an old English word) veridical. This important difference is curtly stated by Hegel himself in the Introduction to his Logic, where he calls Kant’s System of Logic Objective and his own Subjective; and it is incidentally referred to without elaboration in almost-any hand-book of philosophy. For example, in Schwegler’s History of Philosophy (Seelye’s translation), we read: “If we should take the laws of intelligence from experience as Kant did his categories, we fail in two respects,” etc. (p. 283). And again, speaking of Hegel: “Starting from the simplest conception of reason, that of pure being, which needs no further establishing, he seeks from this, by advancing from one conception ever to another and a richer one, to deduce the whole system of the pure knowledge of reason. The lever of this development is the Dialectical Method.” (p. 347.)
We are now called upon to observe the fact, that the Abstractismus, which we began by treating as the Betweenity, has now ceased to be so, since we he united, Matter and Mind (the Without and the Within) under one designation, as the Concretismus. We have, therefore, now only two terms under comparison. The primitive Within and Without; are now combined as the Without or First Term of a new and higher style three-fold arrangement. They are, now, the Concrete basis or foundation, while the Abstract (ismus) retains still the second position, and is waiting to become, again, the Betweenity of the new three-step ladder, so soon as the third and higher step, hitherto wanting, shall be supplied.
This new and third or higher step is Evolution. We may speak now, therefore of, 1. The Concrete, 2. The Abstract, and 3. The Evolutionary—as the higher threefoldness of universal Being. Mr. Spencer, who founds Classification on the discrimination between the Concrete and the Abstract, and who has also especially distinguished himself in the domain of Evolution, has not, it is true, given us the authority of his name for the collocation of Evolution within such a trio, or trigrade scale of domains. He has, on the contrary, left it unclassified, to stand quite alone, as if it were something exceptionally unique. That it is appropriately the third term of this trio of discriminations will abundantly appear by the following analogies, and other adduced considerations. It must, however, be observed that Spencer, Darwin, Wallace, and others of their schod, are as yet only dealing with a primary and interior department of Evolution (Naturismal), and that the fitness of this assignment of Evolution to this trio appears most fully by reference to a higher (Scientismal) and especially to the highest (or Artismal) department of Evolution itself—departments not heretofore developed—in Sciento-Philosophy. The new technicalities here introduced in parentheses will be explained in the next following article.
[IV]
Evolution is to be added, as previously shown, to the Concrete and the Abstract, as a third term, or third member of a trio of fundamental discriminations. It is semi-concrete and semi-abstract (still without being the Abstract-Concrete of Spencer, which is merely a branch of the Concrete). It is Concrete as to the materials involved, within or among which the evolution takes place; and it is Abstract in respect to the laws guiding, or involved in, the process. If we were to say that the Concrete is One, and the Abstract Two, then Evolution is Three, as a new Concreting of the One and the Two.
Let us now denominate the Concrete, this (as it were) new domain of “Nature” (now including, also, “Mind” or Human Nature) the Naturismus, as embracing all natural objects, bunched, concreted, or grown-together; let us call the Abstract the Scientismus, as peculiarly the domain of Scientifics properly so-called; and let us then call the Evolutionary the Artismus—of universal being—the region of what is accomplished, or of what is wrought or is being wrought into “the thing of beauty” which is the Cosmos. In this sense Nature has her own domain of Artism, or of ideal perfection achieved, or undergoing the process of achievement, and this is Evolution.
We may now leave the domain of language, and pass over to that of the human body, taken as a type of living bodies generally; and so of Biology, the science of living things. The human body has also, necessarily, as everything else has, a Without, a Within, and a Between. The withoutness of the body is the fleshy envelopment of the bony structure, essentially what in the animal carcass is called the meat (the muscle, fat, skin, and other tegumentary substances). The within of the body is the viscera (viscerismus), or in the blunt language of common life, “the inwards,” as the without might then be called the outwards. In fine, the betweenity of the body is the bony framework itself, or what is known as the skeleton.
But here, as in the cases of the Universe, at large, and of language, previously considered, the Without and the Within fall together into a single larger class of being, what, in this case of the body, we denominate “the Soft-Solids.” The bony framework, by itself, then substantially contains the true “Solids”: and a third department now comes in, to complete the new trigrade arrangement; namely, “the fluids” of the body. This last class signifies nutrition, or life, circulation, growth, change, in a word Evolution, or dynamis expressed in new conditions.
We find ourselves here in the presence of the most externally simple, primitive, and obtrusive of physiological discriminations. Every student of medicine recalls the fact that the first idea taught him in this department of science was the distribution of the materials of the body into Solids, Soft-Solids, and Fluids. (Even this little change in the order of their mention, by which the Solids are now the first to be named, has a significance, which I will indicate subsequently.) It will be new, however, when we are required to observe, as we now are, that the skeleton of the man is the abstract man (as to his body); in other words, that the skeleton coincides with, or repeats, within the human body, “the Abstract” of Spencer in his classification of the domains of universal being, furnishing the Sciences; that the Soft-Solids of the body coincide, in like manner, with, or repeat, “the Concrete,” and that the fluids of the body are, in like manner, analogous with “Evolution.”
This as between the human body and the world of being taken as a whole. But, again, as between both these and language; it now appears that the Grammatica-logical domain of language (the form) coincides with, or repeats, the skeleton, within the human body, and the Abstract in being, at large; that the lexical domain of language (the matter) coincides with the Soft Solids in the body, and the Concrete in the world at large; and, finally, that Etymology, or phonetic growth and decay, the internal history of language, coincides with the fluidic circulation within the body, and with Evolution in the world at large. If we were to say the evolution of the world at large, the evolution of language, and the evolution of the human body, we should have no great difficulty in being comprehended. Hearers or readers would understand, without a word of explanation, and would spontaneously recognize that there is something in common, in these various spheres of being, which authorized us in applying the term evolution to all and to each of them. The point of newness here is in determining what this common element is, and in arriving at the observation that it is identical or coincident with some sort of fluidic condition such as is most favorable to change; the culmination of which state, I may add, is in that unstable equilibrium of prox-elementary substances which is peculiarly adapted to the advent of life—and, also, to that of the death of the prior conditions.
It is a greater strain upon existing habits of thought to recognize that a skeleton is literally an abstract man; and so, a type, sample, or analogue of Abstractness, universally. Indeed, the idea that there are types, symbols, or real analogues of things, in Nature, has been heretofore a poetic, or, at best, a mystical or cabalistic, rather than a philosophico-scientific conception, or discovery. We are now to accustom ourselves to look for these types and symbols on every hand, until the universe which we are inspecting will undergo a magical change to our view, as if the light were being turned upon the interior of a great cathedral, so that we rapidly sense the wonderful correspondence of architectural details and the unity of design, in phenomena which had previously lain in shadow, and appeared as a confused mass of unrelated parts. It is Universology which will be the new and revealing light to the understanding, and Universal Analogy—the answering of infinite resemblances, in becoming contrasts, in subordination to the rule and plummet—will be the architectural plan which is the burden of the new revelation. It is this inherent permeation of a universal symbolism, as new scientific discovery, resting on, and derived, in an orderly manner, from a few simple principles, which constitutes Sciento-philosophy, in a higher or transcendental sense; and to the further exposition of which the patient attention of the reader is solicited. It is by this means that we shall lay the foundation for a new and wonderful system of classification, uniform in character, while yet adapted to all the sciences.
We have already found a pou sto, or a starting point of scientific certainty, in the perception that everything must have a Without, a Within, and a Between; that the Without and the Within fall together as a Concreteness, while the primitive Between remains, or is developed, as Abstractness (the Skeleton); and that a new and third term then declares itself as a Fluidity, a condition of change, and the sphere, therefore, of Evolution.
We have also got on a scientific track when we recall human attention to the fact that all our broad philosophic discriminations have their origin in the simplest class of our ideas, and that they can be brought back to their origins in connection with primitive, and especially with primitive mathematical forms of thought. Affirmative and Negative mean merely yes-y and no-y; synstatic and analytic mean one-y and two-y; static and dynamic (or better motic) mean stay-y and go-y, etc., etc., until we shall have exhausted the list of these governing terms of thought, reducing the formidable technicalities of all philosophy to such a bald simplicity that we incur the opposite danger of falling into some contempt for making much ado about such trivialities. When the world find that they have been talking prose, all along, they may fall, for the moment, to value the excellences of good prose. The question arises: What of it! if this is all you mean by your high-sounding phraseology? A third stage of reflection will bring us, however, to perceive that the most important things are always the most simple, at least from one point of view; and that such words as prime, radical, elementary, and principle relate to simplicity, beginning-point or origin; and are, therefore, of this childlike or incipient character. Indeed, in philosophy, as in art, it will be found that the most important if not the most difficult step is to regain a certain lost natural simplicity in the mode of looking at things.
What, then, we are now led to inquire, are the primitive and simple ideas which underlie and gave origin to the two formidable sciento-philosophical technicalities—the Concrete and the Abstract—which Spencer, as we have seen, makes to lie at the basis of the classification of all the departments of human knowledge. It may be a little startling to get for reply, that the real discrimination of thought here is simply that which we ordinarily express by the seemingly unimportant little Anglo-Saxon words, thick and thin.
Thick and thin are terms designative of Form. With them, therefore, we make the transition to a new department of being—not the world at large, not language, not the human body, not anything that we have previously considered, but—that of figure, shape, or form the admeasurement of which furnishes the science of Geometry, the central science of the Mathematics; which was shown, as previously dealt with, to be itself the middle of the betweenity, of the universal scope of being. It is, at all events, to this domain of form to which we are to look for the most definite instances and illustration of Analogy.
To the thickness and thinness of Form (geometrical solidity and superficiality, the Concreteness and Abstractness of form) both static, there must now be added a third variety which is Motion. Motion, though it may not have been precisely so conceived of or defined, is no other than changing Form, Form itself being taken in that largest of senses in which Position is one of its subdivisional departments; so that fluidic or fluent form is motion, which again is the developmental or evolutionary aspect of form; for the most general type of motion is Circulation, Revolution, Evolution, or, in a word, Volution (roll or turn); and so motion is the third term in this trigrade scale of these fundamental departments of Form.
To restate, with a slight change or order: Thin or geometrically superficial or “plane” form is the Analogue of the Abstract. Thick, geometrically “solid,” or stereometric form is the Analogue of the Concrete: and fluent form, motion—dissolving and reconvolving scenery—is the Analogue of (dissolution and) Evolution.
It is now quite important to observe that these same discriminations transfer themselves by a spontaneous recognition of the inherent analogy from the domain of Form to the domain of Substance—from the Geometrical to the Chemical realm,—and that scientific discovery here consists merely in the intellectual recognition of what our minds have instinctnally or naturismally already accomplished. The same word, thick, which, geometrically speaking, is “solid”; that is to say, having three dimensions measurable in feet and inches, means, substantively (or chemically speaking) Colloid, pasty, or non-crystalline, but of a “solid” consistency (mark the difference now in the meaning of Solid.) So, thin, which before meant having two dimensions only, measurable also in feet and inches, now means diaphanous or crystalline (or would more correctly mean that, though with the usual inaccuracy of processes naturismally accomplished this meaning is here usually carried over and confounded with the third term, next to be stated). Finally, fluent, which was before applied to dissolving and reappearing forms merely, is now applied to a second variety of substancive consistency called fluid—the Colloid and cystalline being confounded under the one name of solid (consistency); while yet they are the analogues of Soft Solids, and Solids, respectively, in the Physiological domain.
This commingling of transcendental philosophy, logic, grammar, anatomy, physiology, morphology, or geometry, hylology, or chemistry, etc., may seem at first to tend more to confusion than to elucidation; but it is no small matter to obtain principles which are common to them all; and it is by this road that we shall bring philosophy down into the particular realms of all the sciences, and raise all the special sciences Into the sublime sphere of universal philosophy.
[V]
To restate, in simpler terms, somewhat of what has been previously stated: The Without, the Within, and the Between of Universal Things are represented by Matter, Mind, and Law, respectively, yielding the three corresponding sciences “Physology” (Elsberg) or materiology—the science of all material things, Psychology (better called, in this large sense, Mentology), and Logic, in more than the Kantio-Hegelian sense, including all that, in conjunction with Mathematics and Philology—as prefigured in the double meaning of the Greek Logos, which means the Word, first as the logical reason or meaning of words (whence logic), and then in the common linguistic or grammatical sense.
Secondly, the Without, the Within, and the Between of the human body (as a type of Universal Things) are represented by the Flesh (the fleshy mass or brawn enveloping the skeleton), for the without, the “Inwards,” viscera or viscerismus, for the Within, and the bony Skeleton, for the between. A more precise statement will be required here as we proceed. Nothing can be more natural, indeed indispensable, than that we should speak of the material world as something without, or outside of us, and of the mental world as that which is within. Auguste Comte, with no theory of correspondences or analogy to maintain or recur to, uses habitually “the Without” as synonymous with the Objective World, and “the Within” as synonymous with the Subjective World. Other writers and speakers unconsciously do the same, and thereby imply a much larger scope of correspondences, extending, as in fact, it does, to the total distribution of all things, and to the unity of the sciences.
It results, then, in the first place, that the Flesh (of the human or other animal body) is the Analogue or repeater of Matter, or of the Objective or Outer World at large; or, inversely, that the Objective World is the analogue or repeater of the Flesh of the animal body; that the Viscera of the animal body are an analogue of Mind as the Inner or Subjective World at large; or, inversely, that Mind is the analogue of the Viscera; and that the Bony Skeleton or framework of the animal body is the analogue of Logic, as one of the three grand divisions of universal things; or, inversely, that Logic, in the world of universal things, is the analogue or repeater, in that total sphere, of the skeleton within the human body.
Secondly, it results, that the Flesh of the human body, and Objective Matter in the world at large, are analogues or repeaters, in their separate spheres, of the Outerance or Utterance of language, as abstracted from meaning; or, inversely, that the Outerance of language is their analogue; that the Viscera of the body, and Mind among universal things, are analogues, in their separate spheres, of the Vital Meaning of words and speech; or, inversely, that Vital Meaning in language is their analogue; and that the Bony System of the Body (with its articulations or jointings) and Logic, in the general world of being (with its “categories”) are analogues of Logic in the more limited sense and Grammar, in language; or, inversely, that the Grammatica-logical Domain of language, is the repeater of the Bony Skeleton, in the body, and of Logic in the extended meaning of the term.
Thirdly, it results that the Soft Solids of the body, including the flesh and the viscera, the General Concrete World, including matter and mind, and the Lingueo-Concretismus, including the Outerance or Utterance of language and its meaning are mutual analogues, or repeaters of each other, in their several spheres; that the Solids of the body, including mainly the bony skeleton under another presentation, Logic in the world at large (special abstract) and the Logic and Grammar Domain of language are likewise analogues or mutual repeaters; and finally that the Fluids of the body, including mainly its circulations, Evolution in the Cosmical universe, and the Fluency of Speech, extending to etymology, rhetoric, music, and song, are, again, also analogical with each other.
Fourthly, it is to be observed, that we have carried these same analogies, more or less fully through several other domains; namely, Form and Substance, or Geometry and Chemistry.
We are now prepared to enter upon a more formidable task, and to apply the laws of analogy thus partially discovered and illustrated, to the domain of Mind, itself, to the study of which we revert, however, armed with a new weapon, in the possession of so much of analogy as we have already established. Mind, itself, must have, it now appears, a Without (of its own, or within itself) a Within and a Between. This, indeed, is, in one sense, a fact recognized and established by Hegel, whose first division of Mind is into the Objective Mind, the without-ness mind, the Subjective Mind, the within-ness mind, and the Absolute Mind, or the between-ness mind. But what Hegel virtually does in this classification is to discriminate between the mind of Collective humanity, or Society at large, which is the objective mind, from his point of view, the mind of the individual man—his subjective mind—and mind independent of this discrimination—his (Hegel’s) Absolute Mind. Taking the more restricted view of Mind, and confining ourselves to that of the individual man, we may then study its withoutness, or study It, in other words, from the point of view of matter, with Bain and the whole modern school of physio-psychologists; or we may study its withinness, or study it from the point of view of mind as such the introspective or metaphysical method; or, in fine, a third way of comparing the two former views, the betweenity of their points of view is open to us, and is adopted by Phrenology.
It is not, however, in either of these senses, but in a still more restricted sense, in that of mind as such, and that as confined to the individual, that I mean, just here, to consider the subject of mind; passing afterwards back to the broader discriminations. Within the individual mind studied as mind, or from the strictly subjective and psychological point of view, we have still to discriminate this typical division of mind into a Without, a Within, and a Between.
The Without of the Psychologic Mind is the Spontaneity of the mind; unconscious mentation: or, if we discard this new technicality, we are driven to the paradox of saying unconscious consciousness. Carpenter affirms unconscious cerebration. Hegel calls this lowest and outermost form of mind the Soul, which as he shows, first exists in a quasi-identification with the body, and so, we may add, with Matter or the universal without. It includes, with other activities, the vital instincts which preside over the formation and functional activities of the body. Swedenborg affirms that, at Conception, the soul enters the womb, and builds or constructs its own body. From the point of view of the body and the outer world the soul is that which is inmost, but from the point of view of the mind (the withlnness of universal being) which is our present point of view, the soul is the outerness of Mind, from which the mind as it becomes conscious and then self-conscious withdraws itself, or recoils, more and more interiorly. This act of withdrawal is a reflection, a bending-back, upon its own self-centring entity, of that which had gone forth into a sort of blind, thoughtless identification with the maternal environment.
The Within of the mind in this sense is, therefore, Consciousness, also rightly called Reflection or the reflective Consciousness. This is the phenomenismus of the mentismus; the domain or realm of the distinctly recognized phenomena of mentation. It is the domain or realm covered by Hegel’s first great but introductory work, entitled The Phenomenology of the Mind. He furnishes in it a history of the phenomenal Consciousness in its progress from mere perception up to philosophical knowledge.
The Betweenity of the Mind, in this sense, that which intervenes between the Spontaneity and the consciousness, while yet it clasps and embraces them both, is the Mind proper, the subject-matter and domain of the common and well-recognized science which unfortunately we must continue to call “Psychology,” giving it inappropriately, in view of these distinctions, a name derived from the Greek word for the soul.
(Mentation for the processes of activity and mentismus for the realm are then applicable to the general aspecting comblnedly, of the without, the within, and the between of the mind.)
These three great departments of the individual psychological mind will be more distinctly apprehended if we go a step farther and divide each of them into its own without, within, and between; thus I. The Spontaneity or Soul subdivides into 1. The Unprompted or Unsolicited Spontaneity, moved by the mere casual influences of outer Nature—“the natural soul” of Hegel; 2. The Prompted or Solicited Spontaneity, moved by some inner or mental prick of motivation—“the feeling soul” of Hegel; and 3. The Betweenity—and—mutual clasp of the former two—“the real soul” of Hegel; II. The Consciousness subdivides into 1. The Simple Consciousness, objective—The Object; 2. The Self-consciousness, subjective—The Subject; and 3. The Rational Consciousness—Subject-Object; III. Finally, the Mind proper (psychology) subdivides into, 1. The Susceptibility, 2. The Intellect (Sense, Understanding, and Reason), and 3. The Will (—Hickok).
The Objective or outer Consciousness again subdivides into 1. Sensation, its outerness or without; 2. Observation, its notice-taking, or within, like a sentinel posted for an outlook; and 3. Comprehension, the take-together (according to the etymology) of the former two, their betweenity, relation, and mutual clasp or embrace.
Sensation is the impression from the direct impingement of the external objective world upon mind having its capacity for consciousness, which capacity this impingement is instrumental in arousing into action. Sensation is, therefore, the Outermost, or the Special Without of the entire mind proper (the proper domain of “Psychology”), and it is often put therefore in the place of the Object, of which it is strictly only the outerness. Consciousness, on the contrary, of which both object and sensation are strictly only outer and still outer unfoldings, standing as a Within in original antithesis with Spontaneity or the Soul, as a Without, acquires a general representative meaning of withinness, and so comes to be habitually contrasted, as a Within, to Sensation (strictly only a ninth part of its own self) as its Without. Hence it happens that Sensation, Consciousness, and, as their betweenity and mutual clasp or embrace, Intelligence (covering vaguely the intellectual domain) come to stand, in a sort of general epitome, for the Without, the Within, and the Between of the Mind. Such interblendings and overlappings come from the constant expansions and contractions of these imaginary spheres of thought, and also from the felt necessity of epitomizing numerous discriminations, and representing them all in a sort of miniature expression.
For an exhaustive treatment, however, these convenient epitomes of thought do not suffice. They are themselves, con-fusions (pourings together) and they tend to produce confusion. We need here ample caution at every step; and one of the clues that will help to safely guide us is Etymology, revealing the law of metaphor. For example, the betweenity of mind, in this new sense, is Intelligence (the tie-together-inter-ligence), the lowest form, or commencement of which is Perception (the taking-in-through-per-caption or ception), as the end of a string must be taken in through the loop formed for it, as the first step towards tying, netting, or knotting it. Perception is, therefore, the middle of the betweenity, in this connection; and this accounts for the fact that nine-tenths of the forces of all metaphysical philosophy have been expended upon the consideration of Perception, or upon the question of: How do we begin to come to know things? how, in other words do we thread the needle for all the subsequent intrications, nettings, knittings, or con-nections of the mental process and faculty?
One of the worst Confusions, from the habit of epitomizing, in treating of the mind; from lack of radical and clean-cut discrimination; and from the lack of proper technicality should here be pointed out, and emphasized; and I am glad to find it done to our hand. For a cautious, well-considered, and all-Important discrimination between (individual) mind at large and consciousness, as only part of the mind, the reader is referred to an admirable philosophical tract, by William B. Greene, entitled The Facts of Consciousness and the Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, published in the work of Mr. Greene, entitled The Blazing Star, The Jewish Kabbala, etc., p. 112 et seq.
In respect to the precise definition of Consciousness, there is a perplexing diversity of conceptions. Hickok, instead of conceiving it as the total Innerness of the mind, or indeed as any special faculty or action of the mind, regards it as a light within the mind, within the radiance of which all the mental phenomena become obvious to the thinking subject. See Empirical Psychology, p. 89. He does not inform us from what source this light emanates. The conception of consciousness “is not,” he tells us, “of a faculty, but of a light; not of an action, but of an illumination; not of a maker of phenomena, but of a revealer of them as already made by the appropriate intellectual operation.” (p. 90.) But that which is so revealed is precisely that which Greene denominates Consciousness; and there is, therefore, this approximation to accord between these two philosophers. “The Content in Sensation,” he adds, “appears under this illumination as the objective, and the agency accomplishing this work, appears in the same light as subjective, and thus both the object and the subject, the not-self and the self, are together given in the same revelation of consciousness.”
[VI]
In the conclusion of the last preceding article, I had quoted Hickok’s definition of consciousness, as making it a light within the mind, illuminating the total field of the mental activities; and Greene’s definition making it to mean the nut and core of those activities; the true withinness of all mentation, in being the actual recognition, by the ego, of itself, as perceiving subject and of the object perceived, in a mutual embrace, interpenetration, and relationship of unity and duality, or difference—the embracing and the embraced making a third complex totality which is the Consciousness, in its complete expression or fulness. I have, I find, expressed here Mr. Greene’s thought quite in my own forms of phraseology; and I will take the occasion to add, that the unity, the duality, and the trine signifying the union of the unity and the duality, as here indicated, are a favorable illustrative instance of what I mean by Unism, Duism, and Trinism; but, not now to insist on this more technical view of the matter, we have in the Subject, Object, and Subject-Object the Within, the Without, and the Between of the Consciousness —itself being, as we have seen, the Within of the mind at large.
I believe I may add Mr. Henry James as another distinguished American thinker who has discussed this subject, and who, with characteristic originality, has insisted on the identification of the Subject and Object with their difference in the fact of Consciousness; but I speak here from memory, and cannot quote the book and page.
I also recall the following excellent statement to the same effect from Morell’s History of Speculative Philosophy: “I am conscious of self and of not-self; my knowledge of both in the act of perception is equally direct and immediate. On the other hand, to make consciousness a peculiar faulty, by which we are simply cognizant of our own mental operations, is virtually to deny the immediatecy of our knowledge of an external world.” (Vol. II., p. 13.)
The view of Hickok may be reconciled with this other view, with something added, perhaps, to each, in the following manner, one which every analogy, and the ultimate analysis of being itself will sustain and confirm. Let us conceive, as above indicated, the perceiving subject and the object perceived in a close relational embrace, in respect to which they are in a sense one, their difference being extinguished, and yet in a sense two, or still different; and that the relation between them is stata-motic, co-operative or co-actionary; the mechanization tending to evolve sparks, or to excite, so to speak, the molecular physics of mind, generally. Let us then conceive that this total consciousness or innerness of the mind, operating as a One-in Severalty of Subject, Object and their mutual relationship or conjunction, generates a mental Heat, Light, and Actinism (or mento-chemical activities and forces), which three are coincident with the “Love,” “Wisdom,” and “Operation” of Swedenborg; love or the feeling principle being the analogue of heat; wisdom the seeing and knowing principle, the analogue of light; and operation or activity, the analogue of actinic agency (the trinism of the solar ray). These three principles thus complete, as we may say, the Mental Spectrum; and consciousness, this innerness of the mind, thus appears as a true Spectral region of mind, and contrasts with the Outer Spontaneity or Soul (the Greek psyché) as with a palpal region—the whole region of Spectra (or Specters) according with the eye, with light, and with the sense of sight, as the region of mundane Solidities accords with touch or with palpation or the sense of feeling. It appears, therefore, that Sight is the Spectral, Specter-al, ghostly or Spiritual Sense, and is also specially allied with Consciousness; and that touch or feeling is the palpal, externo-real, mundane or materialistic sense, and specially allied with Sensation at large, and with the Spontaneity of the Soul, as the outerness of the mind. Hence it is that the single word Feeling, transferred to the Inner experiences, comes to mean all the Sensuous, and Sentimental side of mind, allied also with heat, (the heat of the passions, etc.); and that Sight, insight, the mind’s eye, comes to mean the light of the mind illuminating the Consciousness.
We may now perceive how it is, analogically, that the mechanizing or co-action of the Subject-Object, as a One-in-Severalty, generates that Spectral Light within the mind, to which Hickok confines the meaning of the word consciousness, while the entire relational embrace—Subject, Object, and their conjunction or copulation—is included in the meaning of the word as defined by Greene, James, Morell, and others. And we may perceive also, how, while the co-action in that embrace generates or strikes the light, it is only in that light that the subject first recognizes itself as distinct from the object—the activity having originated in the unilluminated Spontaneity of the Soul. This self-recognition of the ego, in the Spiritual light within the mind, is the primal act of the Wisdom Principle. “I think therefore I am”—Descartes. The Ego equals Ego—the point of departure for all knowledge—Fichte. Spirits, says Swedenborg, copulate and generate their kind, but their Sons are Thoughts, hence allied with vision, and their Daughters are Affections, hence allied with the sense of feeling. Sight is a masculoid sense; feeling a feminoid one. Wisdom is the distinctive characteristic (in Mere Preponderance) of masculism; love is the distinctive characteristic (in Mere Preponderance) of feminism. Let us return from this digression.
Spencer defines consciousness, in so far as he defines it, in a very different way. Besides confounding it in a purely general sense with the totality of the mind, as pointed out by Greene (Blazing Star, p. 116), he more specifically identifies it with the network of mentation, or the complex of thought, and other mental-relationships. “Consciousness,” he says, “is that inter-relationship between mental states, by which the mind in reviewing them, is enabled to pass from any one of them to any and all of the others.” Hickok enumerates still other definities of the term consciousness, as it has been used by various writers. Some confound it with the personal identity, although this survives through various states of unconsciousness; some make it to be a distinct faculty of the mind for knowing the operations of all the other faculties; and some regard it as a medium in which all other mental acts and states are connected; although, as our author observes, this is still to explain nothing, and really to have said nothing to any purpose, (p. 89.)
Spencer, with some inconsistency, has, however, also presented and approved the better thought of Sir William Hamilton, as condensed by Dean Mansel, in this pregnant quotation, which verges on, while it just comes short of being, the statement of the whole truth, on the subject; “Consciousness,” says Mansel, “is impossible except in the form of a relation. There must be a subject or person conscious [of his own selfhood and of an outer world and an Object, or thing of which he is conscious]. There can be no consciousness without the union of these two factors [of the conscious ego and the object]. And in that union each exists only as it is related to the other. The subject is subject only so far as it is conscious of [itself as perceiving subject, and at the same time, of] an object; the object is object only so far as it is apprehended by a subject; and the destruction of either is the destruction of consciousness itself.” First Principles, p. 78. I have added, in brackets, what ought not to have been omitted; what makes, as it proves, a vital difference at one of the fountain-heads of philosophy, and the lapse of which, in the philosophy of Spencer, is so opportunely and tersely pointed out and emphasized by Greene. The sentence of Mansel, without my insertions in brackets, might be taken to mean all that which Mr. Greene and myself concur in regarding as vitally essential in the definition; but it might also be constrned to mean something very different, omitting the true gist of the whole matter. This other, faulty, and utterly inadequate understanding of it, is that which Mr. Spencer adopts, when he says: “The very conception of consciousness, in whatever mode it may be manifested, necessarily implies distinction between one object and another.” First Principles, p. 76.
Mr. Greene says, rightly and profoundly: “The subject is known to itself in consciousness, always as subject and never as object. It is, therefore, not true that everything known to the subject is objective.” In the act of consciousness, as such, the distinction is never between one object and another, but always between the subject and the object. “When the subject is conscious of an object as object, it is also, and in the same act, conscious of itself as subject.” Even Hegel sins constantly, in terms, when he talks of the subject as its own object. Such language is permissible poetically or imaginatively, but not as analytically precise. If the mind does aught to justify this conception, it is never in the primal act of consciousness, but as recall in memory of what had transpired; and the rôle of the subject, as so recalled in the memory, may, without objection, be called an objectivation of the subject; as we reproduce on the stage, actions which were originally spontaneous. It is not, in any case, the original doing.
This misapprehension of the true nature of consciousness is the binge and the very pivot of the hinge upon which the modern (naturismal) sciento-philosophy has swung away from the prior spiritualistic and quasi-theological development. This slide of Mr. Spencer from the true view of the facts of consciousness is not an accident nor an incident, but is, on the contrary, the essential and characteristic feature of his entire system; making it hemispherical and essentially sectarian, instead of spherical or integral; and the hemisphere of knowledge which it represents is that of Matter, as contrasted with that of Mind, as to the point of view; it matters not whether he be treating of matter, of mind, or of both, It is the point of view and its consequents which characterize any system of thinking. The system of Spencer, and his disciples and associates, as also that of Comte and the “positivists” is, when tested in this manner, rightly classed as materialistic; and no efforts of Mr. John Fiske, or of the followers of Comte can permanently reverse such verdict. But this imputation should not be approbrious. We needed a materialistic philosophy, to be elaborated wholly upon its own grounds, and to serve as a definitive emancipation of the human mind from the grip of mere dogmatism. The new and now prevalent system, poor enough considered as an ultimate philosophy, is rich in scientific generalizations, and invaluable for its influence in cultivating and popularizing the free spirit of inquiry. Even as philosophy, it represents one-half the truth, the objective half faithfully and well; and hence its statement was an absolutely necessary prelude to the ulterior, double-sided, integral, and final form of philosophy.
But the time has now fully come when the demand is urgent for the higher and reconciliative philosophical gospel—a form of philosophy which shall do absolute and impartial justice to the true Subjective and the true Objective (not the pseudo-Subjective and Objective of Comte, which are, however, legitimate and Important subdivisions of the true Objective); to the Spectral and the Palpal; to the Ideal and the Real; to the Spiritual and the Material; to the Celestial and the Mundane hemispheres of being. For this philosophy I have chosen the name Integralism , as Comte has denominated his system Positivism. I mean that which is simple or single and all-embracing in its origin; which is two-sided in its first disparting, then many-sided, out to infinity; returning into a higher or complex form of unity, the Unity of the Singleness and the Doubleness (or many-ness), in the jointness-and-severalty of the Total Constituency (Unismal, Duismal, and Trinismal stages, or momenta, respectively). This is simply Mr. Greene’s perception of the primal act of Consciousness, as a relation, generalized to all possible relationships, and found to be the universal law of being.
It has been the simplest and most natural thing in the world for philosophic materialists to make the mistake of supposing themselves still spiritualists (in some sense). We are now prepared to see precisely how the mistake occurs. In any primal division into a Withoutness, a Withinness, and a Between, each of these departments immediately subdivides into a Withoutness, a Withinness, and a Between of its own, so that nine departments have then occurred, instead of the primitive three; but the schemative distribution being the same within each primative third as it was within the primative whole, whosoever has unconsciously floated or slid into one of these thirds, proceeds to apply the primitive and correct method of reasoning, in a way to bring out, seemingly, a complete system of truth; to bring out, really, a system of truth, as to its schemative arrangement of parts, in an image or semblance of the larger truth; but, in fine, to utterly distort and falsify the larger truth itself, by putting a part for the whole. Hence the critical and vital importance of fixing, absolutely, the exact point of the primal disparting into branches or domains, and of the fact that it is primal, and must, therefore, exhaustively include all the phases of the subject-matter to be investigated. To miss this certitude is to miss all certitude, in everything following, except that of the schema, which may be removed, like a ladder, to whatsoever new position, and be found true, in its several parts, to itself, without giving any information as to whether the right house or the wrong house is ascended. Hence the great indebtedness we are under to Mr. Greene, for having fixed so certainly the true nature of Consciousness, and for having philosophically and forever vindicated the title for the Subject in Consciousness, and its consociate sphere of entities, to be regarded as a distinct half of the whole dominion of consciousness.
But Mr. Greene himself is also deficient, insomuch as he has failed to generalize this character of the special relation of subject and object in the act of consciousness into the type and character of every relation, in every act whatsoever; insomuch as be has failed to discover any Universal Canon of Criticism on all our thinking; and insomuch as he has consequently failed to found the new and reconciliative philosophy of Integralism. Something of what is meant by a canon of criticism may be inferred from the use herein made of the distinction between the Without, the Within, and the Between.
[VII]
The whole of the last preceding article was a partial digression, Inasmuch as it was subdivisions! of the Consciousness or spirit; whereas, we are dealing mainly with the primal distribution of the mentismus into the Soul, the Consciousness, and the Mind; but this special matter of the subject and object, in the operations of the conscious spirit was so closely trenched upon by the course of the discussion, is so centrally involved, analogically, in the whole subject-matter, and is so intrinsically important, that it could not be well avoided, and will be from time to time recurred to. The direct drift of our investigation is, nevertheless, to establish the parallelism, or more properly the repetative coincidence between the without, the within, and the between of different spheres of being; and, from now on, more immediately as concerning the human body and the human mind, taken as two such spheres.
Let us return to the human body. We are prepared, now, to become somewhat more precise in our discriminations. What was before stated as to the body, making its without to be the flesh, its within to be the viscera or vitals, and its between to be the bony skeleton, we must now take to have been an epitome, somewhat inexact in character, resulting from the fact that it represents the condensation of two such trios into one. To be more specific, and more specifically incipient; that is, to confine ourselves precisely to the first of the two trios in question, the Without of the body is what Dr. Lambert, the distinguished physiologist, classes together as the Head-and-Trunk-Walls, and what, for the want of a better single word, we may call the Hull or Husk of the body, by analogy with a ship. The Within of the body is, then, the viscerismus, extending to and especially including the breathing or wind apparatus, or breath; the whole analogous, we may say, with the cargo of the ship, with a special extension of the idea, to include the sails or wind apparatus, and the breeze or breath-like spirit which plays in the sails. The Between of the body is not now to be taken literally, as that which merely intervenes between the within and the without, but as that middle view extended, on both sides of itself so as to embrace the without and the within in one perfectum; in a special sense the whole body, or ship.
It will be remembered that the without of the mind was shown to be the Spontaneity, and also called, after Hegel, the Soul. By the analogy now instituted, the Soul is the Hull (and if lost, or castaway, then the Hulk) of the mentismus: or, to change the figure, it is the chalice or cup which holds a more precious freightage which is the consciousness, or the conscious spirit. To retain the ship analogy, this freightage is the cargo, extending to and including the sails and the wind (or lungs and breath). The wind and breath are the universal analogues of “Spirit.” The Within of the mind is the Consciousness with a special and characteristic extension to and partial identification with the Spirit, as will be presently more fully shown. Finally, the whole or resultant Mind, or the Mind proper, is the Betweenity and its embrace of the Spontaneity and the consciousness, which may be now otherwise designated as the soul and the spirit.
We find ourselves, a length, therefore, in the presence of the old and well-established theological, but always heretofore very vague and indefinite distribution of the feeling and thinking man, into Soul, Spirit, and Mind. These present namings are, on the contrary, vigorous and technical; and may not accord with the first impressions, from the side of popular usage. The term soul is very diversely employed, and will continue to be so, no doubt, notwithstanding this technical assignment. It is often used as synonymous with the total mentismus. It is also, familiarly, and perhaps most usually, but hardly as a strict term of philosophy, put for precisely the opposite meaning to that here assigned to it; namely, for the perceiving Consciousness; or for its withinness, the Ego; or Subject, as distinct from any object; as when Mr. Greene says, alluding to Spencer: “A philosophy that ignores the human Soul is usually characterized as a materialistic philosophy, just as a philosophy that ignores God is characterized as an atheistic philosophy.” Blazing Star, p. 128.
All this shows how utterly indefinite the use of the term soul hitherto is; but we certainly need some term to denote that outerness of the total mind (the mentismus) which is most invested in or interlaced with external nature, and which, as it were, repeats Nature, within the mind. I rest on the authority of Hegel for this use of the word soul. It is also, I think, quite certain that he had the authority of the primitive Greek conception and usage; for by the Greeks, Psyche was very closely allied with Nature. It was she who was the lover of Cupid; and who was enticed into his magic palace; but who was even untrue to him; but who when deserted by him, roamed through the earth in search of him, that is to say, of sensuous pleasures or love. Cupidity and cupidism, the love of gold and the love of voluptuousness, or animal lust, as the objective counterparts of the soul, certainly imply that the term soul is used to denote the mind’s outerness, or its intimate relation, almost its identification with the natural world. It was Proserpine, not Psyche, who was the Greek idealization of the interior spirit of the mind; who came and went like the breath; or who interchanged her residence, regularly and periodically between her subjective or inner, and her objective or external abode. See Bacon’s Essays, p. 360.
There is, at least, an equal degree of indefiniteness and uncertainty in the use of the word Spirit; and there is a special explanation needed as to why this term is appropriate to the entire Consciousness, as the innerness of the mind, as contrasted with the outer Spontaneity or Soul. The true and complete analogue, in the body, of this innerness of the mind, is as we have seen, the vitals or viscera plus the Breath, which comes and goes, into and out from the vitals (like Proserpine’s visits to and from the Plutonian regions), and which in an eminent sense feeds and sustains them. The trachea (or windpipe) is, as it were, the stem of the Superior Vitals, the Heart and Lungs; or, in a more refined sense, the breath itself is that stem, and may, therefore, be appropriately put forward, representatively for the naming of the whole visceral region or the inner man entire. This is the solution of the seeming incongruity of the use of the term Spirit for the total Reflective Consciousness of the mind. The word spirit is from the Latin spiro, to breathe; as pneuma, the Greek word for spirit, means also, and more primitively, the breath (a less figurative or mythical word than Proserpine, for the same idea). Indeed in every language, the words denoting spirit are mere adoptions, or adaptations of or from the words for breath; and it must not be forgotten, and cannot be too strongly emphasized, that all words denoting mental discriminations are derived from words having the prior meanings of bodily or material discriminations; and that for the purposes of our present current of investigations, there is hardly any other clue so important as this etymological one.
After all, it may be convenient and permissible, and to some minds less objectionable, to use the term Soul in a general sense for the entire mind (the mentismus), and then to specify, The Mundane or Spontaneous Soul, for the mind’s outerness, The Intelligent Soul for the Spirit or Consciousness, and the Mind-soul or Mental-soul for the mind’s perfectum, the resultant mind, from the union and co-action of the former two. Still again we may say the Psychic Soul, the Conscious Soul, and the Psychologic Soul. It is less important what the terms are than that some terms should becomfsfixed and settled for these all-important discriminations. In another article I shall introduce another set of synonyms for these ideas from Swedenborg. Still, for ready reference, and with the explanations now made, I believe the technical and habitual use of the old instructually evolved terms Soul, Spirit, and Mind will prove most satisfactory; although this use of Mind, for a third of the whole domain, will necessitate the frequent use of the new technicality mentismus for the whole domain, when philosophic accuracy is aimed at; although, of course, Mind will continue to be used, popularly, in this general sense.
At all events, I must insist on the vital importance of obtaining, in some way, fixed technicalities for these primal divisions of the mind; and that no proper science of the mind at large (mentology) is even founded until that is effected. It is, indeed, curious, that at this late day, mental science is so little constituted that different writers have no means of rendering themselves mutually intelligible to each other, in talking about mental discriminations and phenomena, even the primary and most general ones. They have no certainty that they are talking about the same things when they use the same words, nor that they are talking about different things when they use different words; and one-half the time of the reader of any book on this class of subjects is consumed in learning, if he can, the author’s peculiar use of terms. Such indicia are characteristic of the uncertain preliminary stage in the evolution of any science.
To recur to the various uses of the term Soul, it may be noticed that even in common habit it is often used to denote the merest external personality, as when we number a population as containing so many souls; an expression which would include all the idiots, as well; who have not even a well-constituted shell or hull of the mind; and no proper consciousness, or true spirit, nor mental perfectum.
The human mind is throughout double-aspected, not now referring to that dual character, technically known as the duality of the mind, especially elaborated by Wigan and Lambert, and represented by the two hemispheres of the brain; but to a difference affecting both brains, or what we ordinarily call the brain; quite at large—that is to say, as between the outward-tending presentation and the inward-tending presentation. The former of these, sensuous, observing, worldly-minded, mundane, looks towards the outer world, and relates the mind to its phenomena, qualities, and character. The latter, spiritual, reflective, thoughtful, pietistic, transcendental, somnambulic or trance-like, looks towards the inner world, the spirit and spiritual world, as contrasted with and opposed to the outer or mundane sphere, and relates the mind to the phenomena, qualities, and character of the inner or subjective world, at large, whatever we may find that to mean. Next to the difference of sex there is no other difference among mankind so all-pervading and dominant, as that which divides them into External Minded and Internal Minded people.
In this first very broad distribution of mentalities it may now appear why abstract intellectual people are classed with pietists and Spiritualists. Swedenborg uses the term rational-spiritual to cover the natural relation of these two seemingly remote aspects of mind. With the French un homme d’esprit is not a spiritualist, but an intellectualist. Comte means by the spiritual class of society, his priesthood of the future, the scientists, and philosophers. It is in this broad aspect of the subject that the term Spirit becomes adequate to signify the internal as against the external-mindedness of the individual or the race.
External-mindedness is, therefore, a sort of Outer Consciousness inhering in the Soul; and Internal-mindedness is the Inner Consciousness, or true consciousness, inhering in the spirit. External or worldly-minded men find it impossible to comprehend spiritual-minded men, and spiritual-minded people have nearly the same difficulty as regards the others. The worldly-minded are again, by the analogy, Objective minds, and the spiritual-minded are Subjective minds (for although subject and object are strictly subdivisions! of the inner consciousness the distinction is repeated in the outer consciousness).
I have now to add the leading point of importance resulting from this discrimination, so much to be insisted upon, of the subject and object, thus made specially representatives of the withoutness and the withinness of mind. Mr. Greene and the other writers quoted in the last preceding article, points out the nature of the subject-object-relation, as it occurs within the individual mind. In the close of that article, I said that Mr. Greene had failed to generalize the spirit of that relationship. What I mean by such generalization is, in part this: As the human mind and the human body, and all the other things we have considered have, each, a Without and a Within, as their primal differentiation, so these should be, to be true to the plan of being so indicated, a corresponding two (and three) foldness in the constitution of the World itself. There should be, therefore, and if the principle holds good, there must be a Spirit World, similar to that talked of by Swedenborg and the Spiritists, which is also a Subjective World, not in the sense that it is merely within you or me, but that it is a Withinness-sphere, holding the same relation to this outer mundane sphere which the subject holds to the object, in the constitution of the individual mind.
It also results that the Subjective state of the individual mind represented especially in trance, is in natural rapport with this interior or subjective world. In this manner, the fundamental doctrine of spiritism, which has hitherto rested almost wholly upon observational and intuitional grounds, gains a foothold in fundamental philosophy.
[VIII]
We are by no means treading upon entirely new ground, when we divide, as we have done, the entire domain of the mind (the mentismus) into a Without, a Within, and a Between. We have for so doing the illustrious authority of Emanuel Swedenborg, than whom, as yet, no mental scientist can take higher rank. As is appropriate to the mere mentalist, which Swedenborg was subsequent to his illumination, he uses the word Man as synonymous with Mind, or as if man were mind (mentismus) and nothing else. His terms for this threefold division, accordingly, are 1, The External Man, 2, The Internal Man, and 3, The Interior Man.
“In every person there is,” says this wonderful author, “an internal and an external man; the internal man is called the Spiritual man, because it dwells in the light of heaven; the external man is what is called the natural man, because it dwells in the light of this world only.”—New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, 38,179. Again, “The interior man is the middle between the internal and the external man; by means of the interior man, the internal communicates with the external, and without such medium no communication could possibly exist. The interior man is called the rational man, and is a mediatory communication between the celestial, spiritual, and corporeal principles.”—Arcana Cœlestia, 1702. Again, “The internal man is formed of things celestial and spiritual; the interior or middle man of things rational; the external man of things sensual, not such as belong to the body, but such as are derived from bodily things; and this is the case, not only with men, but also with spirits.”—Arcana Cœlestia, 978.
These technicalities of Swedenborg we may take as substantially synonymous with the Soul, the Spirit, and the Mind, as previously defined upon other grounds; and when thought more convenient, I shall not hesitate to substitute the Swedenborgian expressions. There are in other respects, also, exceedingly important correlations to establish between Swedenborg’s thought, and the similar universological discriminations; and the universological method will enable us to interpret his writings throughout, into simple and ordinary modes of expression; or into the new technicalities when these are indispensable.
Swedenborg’s mode of exhibiting the closer relation of the soul or of the external man to mundane things, and the greater remove of the spirit or internal man from such things—using his weird Biblical symbolism—is this: “The Internal man is called the firmament; the knowledges in the internal man, the waters above the firmament; and the scientific* appertaining to the external man are called the waters beneath the firmament” (Gen. 1., 6).—Arc. Cœl. 24. All this must seem sufficiently mystical to the unaccustomed reader. A few words of explanation will render it clearer. Water is an emblem, as it is indeed, and will be shown to be, a true scientific analogue of mental lucidity, and hence of “knowledges” and “scientifics.” By the firmament is meant the aerial world over our heads, with the seemingly fixed or immovable sky, which by the ancients was supposed to be really such. Under this ancient conception, the waters that came down in rain were supposed to be from a reservoir above the fixed sky. We now know these waters to be vaporous or diffused into absolute transparency, within the aerial firmament, not above it, but still above the earth’s level, that is to say within the atmosphere or breath-sphere of the planet. This breath-sphere is, then, the analogue of spirit or breath generally. It is, therefore, by the analogy, both firmament and internal man; putting the planetary structure for the human structure. The twofold lodgement of the hydrosphere still holds good notwithstanding our scientific advancement in knowledge, one part and kind of it being in the atmosphere (or firmament), and the other (oceanic) beneath the atmosphere (or firmament). The waters diffused in the atmosphere hence come (with our author) to mean the kind of mental lucidity or of knowledges which inhere in the Spirit, or in the Internal Man, and the waters beneath the firmament to mean, ordinary scientifics, such as belong to the soul, or to the External Man.
The atmosphere or firmament means, with Swedenborg, always the Superior and Spiritual Condition; which he also always identifies with the internal world or man. That “up” or “on high” or “the highest” means with him the same as the Within is shown by the following passages: “Highest denotes the inmost, because interior things with man, who is in space, appear as superior things [higher up], and exterior things as inferior [lower down]; but when the idea of space is put off, as is the case in heaven, and also in the interior [or spiritual] thought of man, then is put off the idea of what is high and deep, for height and depth come from the idea of space; yea, in the interior heaven, neither is there the idea of things interior and exterior [a Within and a Without] because to this idea there also adheres somewhat of space; but there is the idea of more perfect or imperfect state [the analogous spiritual ideas], for interior things are in a more perfect state than exterior things, because interior things are nearer to what is divine, and exterior things are more remote thence; this is the reason why what is highest signifies what is inmost.”—Arcana Cœlestia, 5146; Divine Love and Wisdom, 103.
I have quoted these passages not merely to explain the previous quotations from Swedenborg, but for a more serious purpose. Swedenborg’s whole method and system of thought is well Illustrated here. He brings into comparison two different worlds of mental operation, one of which—“the scientifics of the external man”—involves the conditions of external space and time; and the other of which—“the knowledges of the internal or spiritual man”—transcends the conditions of space and time. He then affirms, however, that these two systems of thought, while wholly different in substance, are so correlated with each other, by an identical schema of distribution, that they are as it were copies of each other, the resemblance of the copies being what he calls Correspondence. Correspondence, he says, “is between those things which appertain to the light of heaven, and those things which appertain to the light of the world; that is between those things which appertain to the internal or spiritual man, and those which appertain to the external and natural man.”—Arcana Cœlestia, 3225. “There is a correspondence between all things in heaven [the superior spiritual state and world] and all things in man [the inferior natural state and world].”—Heaven and Hell, 87–102. “There is not given the least thing with man, with which there is no correspondence.”—Arcana Cœlestia, 4791. We are thus brought to the seeming entrance to a broad highway which is to conduct us unerringly from the field of ordinary, external scientific knowledge, to the complete understanding, In every detail and particular, of the whole body of spiritual knowledge. The case is like that in which the word uprightness means, originally, a fact of position in space, perpendicularity to the earth’s surface, but has come to mean also, by a spiritual transfer, honesty of individual character, from a perceived analogy between the two ideas, although in wholly different spheres; so of inclination in space, and in the mind, etc; and we are told by our author, that all spiritual and ideal things are related to natural and material things in a similar way; and, so definitely, that we have only to discover and adhere to this law of metaphor, what he calls correspondence, and what I have called analogy, to be able to translate, with perfect accuracy, all the facts and phenomena of the natural world into their corresponding facts and phenomena in the spiritual world of thought; and inversely.
Having brought us to this immense expectation, Swedenborg does indeed, exhibit, in the aggregate, numerous and remarkable instances of striking coincidences between the overt facts of nature and the inner facts of consciousness; and so between the facts of this outer mundane world, and what we may readily conceive to be the facts of a subjective and spiritual world, somewhere extant in the universe; but, in the main, he fails to feed the appetite he has excited. He comes wholly short of maintaining, in any logical or scientific sense, his fundamental proposition. He establishes no systematic and exhaustive correlation between natural and spiritual phenomena. Called by the nature of his own basis to make good this universal relationship, he gives the go-by to the outer sphere, that of “Scientiflcs,” and glides up and away, like a balloon, into the spiritual-aerial firmament, which, by his own analogies, alternates between the extraordinary lucidity of the clear sky, and the cloudiness, fogginess, and mistiness of the lower atmosphere; and thence he dogmatizes the doctrines he draws from such inspiration as he finds there without substantiation, or any method of test. He has hitherto almost wholly escaped criticism, for the reason that his mode of conception and exposition is so peculiar, and his writings so voluminous, that nobody but ardent disciples, who are rarely critical, has had the persistent hardihood to read and master hit works and their contents; and perhaps I may add, that, that difficulty being overcome, few would be competent to the task of a just appreciation of such an immense and extraordinary body of doctrine.
I have, however, no criticism to make upon Swedenborg, in any unfriendly spirit. I have the pleasure of knowing that some of the most advanced accepters of the “doctrines of the New Church” have long felt an interest in the confirmations of Swedenborg’s teachings, which they think they foresee will result from my labors. The confirmations will surely come, in an almost unlimited abundance; but the strictures and rectifications will come also; addressed far more distinctly than Swedenborg’s own utterances to the rational faculty in man—which characteristic is the boast of New Churchmen. It is very usually the case that Swedenborg is right, even when his proofs are left utterly wanting; and in such cases, his disciples should feel grateful for distinctive verifications; but let us keep to the truth, lead where it may; and should any system of doctrines be partially recast by the advent of a universal science, its materials will all be saved, and any readjustment of them, and things complementary of the system, from new sources, can only serve still better the purposes already attained. Neither Swedenborg, at all events, nor his friends for him, can decline any criticism which his own fundamental principle justly entails upon him.
Universology is, at bottom, nothing else but a vigorous intellectual grasp of this fundamental principle of Swedenborg, (which is also that of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Oken, and Fourier); but which he failed to carry out on the scientific plane,—a work which we shall see, in the end, has to be accomplished, before a complete delivery can be made of the truths of the spiritual plane; and especially before the responsive identity of the two planes, by correspondence, analogy, or the true law of metaphor, can be demonstrated. This last is the main point at issue, and its achievement the only thing which can elevate “the doctrine of correspondences” into the dignity of a universal science. Universology accepts this crucial test, and will claim for itself scientific rank, only in so far as it is able to bring all mental, moral, and spiritual phenomena into a definite correlation with natural and objective phenomena.
Swedenborg definitively abandons science when he informs us that in the spirit-world scientifics cease to be valued; and virtually, as a consequence, that spiritual knowledges, must be delivered, from that world, as self-evident; that is to say, dogmatically, and not, therefore, in correllation with their objective counterparts in the natural world. We are thus baffled and disappointed in the expectation he has raised. We, at least, are of this world; and a revelation to us, as a rational and scientific revelation (as is claimed) must stand by Swedenborg’s fundamental principle, and not by any defective and unsatisfactory application of the principle; and still less by its absolute abandonment.
To foreshadow the criticism which must come to dogmatic Swedenborgianism, by an appeal from it to Swedenborg’s own fundamental theoretical basis, let us recur to one of the preceding quotations (Arcana Cœlestia, 5146; Divine Love and Wisdom, 103). Having posited the principle of an absolute correspondence, out to the minutest detail, between all things of the spiritual world and all things of the natural world, and as between all the parts of each, giving the basis of a universal science, not merely for spiritual matters, but for the comparology of all the special sciences (Heaven and Hell, 87—102)—having laid down this magnificent platform, and subjected himself to Its test, he says, dogmatically, that “highest denotes inmost [the within],” and “because interior things, with man who is in space, appear as superior [upper or higher], and exterior things [the without] as inferior [lower down].” In other words, he affirms, as the entire truth of the matter, that In and Above always coincide in our human thought, and inversely, Out and Below; “for,” he adds, “interior things are in a more perfect state than exterior things, and exterior things are more remote thence.”
It may not be obvious at first how much of a whole system of doctrine depends upon the truth or erroneousness of these utterances. That is not now important; hut let us confine our attention to their literal exactitude, or want of it. Undoubtedly, in a very great measure, and from a very important point of view, they are justified by the facts of Nature; but are they universally true? or only from a certain point of view? And, from other points of view, perhaps equally important, are they not diametrically opposed to the truth; and the opposite statements, in that case, alone true? If, for example, we were ascending the steps in the vestibule of a church or temple, as we advanced upward we should also advance inward; and we should be going towards the altar or high place, the supposed seat of goodness? and the opposite of all this would be true, if we were to recede. So, indeed, if we conceive the dome of the sky with its floor on the earth, as such a temple, ascension from the mineral to the aerial spheres would accord with the previous analogies; and this conception of universal nature as a temple has an important place in the whole scope of analogy, or illustrative symbolism. But it is deficient in the fact that it is only an aspect and not the whole of nature.
Is it true, for instance, if instead of the temple idea, as erected on the earth, we take the earth-ball itself; either, that as we go within the earth we go up, and as we go out from the earth’s centre we go down (or just the contrary); or that the deep interior things of the earth are superior in quality, and things on the surface, including the whole human family, inferior in quality to the “stocks and stones” which lie beneath and more within? The test proves at once the Inadequacy of the dogmatic rule; and, nevertheless, it has a large sweep of truth, and its own true rank of importance. But, when a whole aseries of moral consequences is made to rest upon an analogy, it behooves us to be sure that we have rightly understood and limited the analogy itself. So when such immense seeming contradictions occur in nature, as that there are two ups and two downs, one set from the earth, and another set from the sun —geocentric and heliocentric, it behooves us to know very definitely which up and which down we are talking about.
IX.
I must still recur to Swedenborg. Some of the most important ideas embodied in Universology are derived directly from him. Among these is that of the Grand Man. Every consociation, or community of persons, held together by whatsoever bond, as a family, a church, a sect, a political party, a nation, is according to this idea necessarily conceived of in “the sensuous imagination,” as in the form, of a man; that is to say of the human body. It has its head, its hands, or executive arm, its feet, or runners, etc.; and especially we may say now that it has a Without, a Within (or interior circle), and their Between. Even an ideal personage, like Brother Jonathan, or John Bull, is submitted to these conditions, in order to be conceived of by us at all. (Boston is, I believe, called “the hub” of one of them; that is to say the Within, the core, the centre, the heart, or the like.)
Society has, therefore, no less than the individual, its body and its mind, and these have their without and their within, if not so distinctively, still no less truly than the individual. This is true, in a larger sense than any I have mentioned, when applied to the whole mind and population of the planet, not merely now living, but who have lived and will live. It is this which Comte calls “Humanity,” and which he also names, in the spirit of the idea of Swedenborg le Grand être (the Great Being). Spencer has treated the same idea in his essay entitled “The Social Organism”; Draper has applied it to the rise and fall of nations, by analogy with individuals; and Fourier applied it to the planetary population, indiscriminately, as to its worlds or spheres, but chiefly in the mundane sense. It struggled in the minds of Hobbes, of Pascal, of Condorcet, and of numerous others. It is implied and assumed, rather than distinctly propounded, by Hegel as the basis of a Science of History; and the anonymous author of Vestiges of Civilization, grasping this thought and demanding this analogy to be made good, avers that “History is still written in America biographically; in Britain empirically; in Germany scholastically; in France alone philosophically. But nowhere, as yet, is it written scientifically.” (p. 15.)
But more specifically, characteristically, and broadly than any other, Swedenborg has seized on and propounded this idea of the Grand or the Greatest Man; the reproduction in collective humanity, by analogy or coincident repetition, of the individual. But in accordance with his general drift, he sees the arena for the special display of this larger human personality, not in this mundane sphere of being, but in the spirit world; and the perfected, orderly, and harmonious development of Society in that world is what he calls Heaven. Still, by his principles, he would have accepted the perfect, orderly, and harmonious development of Society, anywhere, as a miniature or lower form of Heaven; down to such adjustment of the faculties and functions of the individual mind; which is Heaven within us, according to the words of Jesus.
Heaven, as an idea restricted to the spirit world, Swedenborg divides into three,—high, highest, and lower; or spiritual, celestial, and natural. This, then, is his account of the Grand Man: “The three heavens together constitute the grand or greatest man.” Arcana Celestia 4880. “All who are therein are in Heaven, but all who are not, correspond with the various corruptions and diseases of the human body, and are in hell.” Arc. Cel. 4225. “The Grand Man is Heaven. In the head of the grand man are those who are called celestial; from the breast even to the loins are those who are called spiritual; and in the feet [or lower limbs, the apendicular portions] are those who are called natural.” Apocalypse Explained 708. This correspondential distribution of the body is more closely stated at other points, but this answers for the general view. “Not only those things in the body which are external and visible, according to their functions and uses, correspond to the grand man, but also those things which are internal and not extant to the sight; consequently, both those things which are of the external man and those which are of the internal man. The Societies of spirits and angels to which the things of the external man correspond, are in a great part from this earth; but those to which the things of the internal man correspond are for the most part from other earths.” Arc. Cel. 4330.
The attentive reader will observe that instead of Internal, External, and Interior, or Within, Without, and Between, we have here another division of the human body brought into view, into that which is Uppermost, Middle, and Beneath; and that almost the same terms and specifications are now applied by Swedenborg to this second series of discriminations as had been applied to the former. He is justified in what he does in this regard by inherent correspondences between the two series; but his method of presenting the subject is confused and unsatisfactory, he failing sufficiently to distinguish the two series, and to point out their differences, as well as their correspondential identity.
Observe, in the next place, that Swedenborg not only confines the Grand Man to the spirit world, but that virtually and practically, so far as his own writings inform us, and are concerned, he restricts the extension of this ideal grand personage still more; namely, to the Spiritual or Middle Heaven of those three which constitute Heaven at large, nearly omitting the Celestial Heaven above and the Natural Heaven beneath. Throughout Swedenborg’s illuminated writings nothing is more obvious than that he almost constantly dominates or modulates in that realm which he himself distinctly specifies by the term spiritual or by the analogy, in the realm of the Heart and Lungs. He virtually cuts off both the celestial or ruling domain above (about which he gives us the least possible information) and the ultimate or terminal world, analogous with the extremities of the body (about which he gives us even less), and confines himself almost wholly to the breath-region, or the middle. He does, indeed, make his bow of deference to the head when he says, occasionally and, as it were, parenthetically, that the intellect is the supreme faculty, and that the brain is the realm of principles, and the heart and lungs only that of principiates (or things acted upon, and resultant from, principles); and he confers great honor, in the same incidental way, on the limbs and extremities, when he says, in the same incidental manner, that all [realized] power resides in ultimates; but, for himself, he recoils at once from both extremes, and centres himself upon the region of the Chest, which our readers may now begin to perceive, is, in a preeminent sense, the Spiritual domain of the human body. The solution of this analogy is this: the Within (which we have already identified with the spiritual realm), coincides with and is, in a special sense, repeated by the Chest; the Without coincides with the Extremities in like manner; and the Rational Domain, the Between, coincides with and is specially reproduced by the Head, which is developed out of the Median Line of the body.
It would seem that it was Swedenborg’s own personal position in the Grand Man, taking himself as authority, which rendered it impossible for him to have more than a glimmering view of the true distribution of the Grand Man; and that is the reason why every one must feel the utmost meagreness of detail, in this particular, in his writings; for, as he did rightly perceive, “angels [inhabitants of the head] know in what province of the grand man they are, but spirits [inhabitants of the chest or torso] do not.” Arc. Cel. 4800.
This intuitive utterance, which I presume Swedenborg did not himself perfectly understand, I interpret as meaning, in simple terms, that clean-cut intellectualists, those who dwell in the head, have the truth of things clearly defined to them; while those who dwell in the region of the heart and lungs (of the affections, and of inspirational knowledge merely), are liable to have their mental perceptions obscured by clouds and mists and fogs, though they may be as great as a Jesus, a Plato, or a Swedenborg, though their spiritual perceptions may be at times transcendently clear, and though, as in the case of Jesus, the great Heart—man—their sympathetic rapport may take hold of and sway the world for ages. Despite of all this, however, the religion of the integral and reconciliative co-action of all the faculties, with the pure intellect presiding over all, will be the religion of the adult manhood of the world.
Everybody, each one of us, dwells in some part of the Grand Man, in the thinking and directing head, in the feeling heart, in the executive hand, in the upholding foot, or in some special tissue, viscus, membrane, fibre or cell, which is the social habitat of the individual; and it will be one of the results of universology to ascertain and fix the place of each, in this grand rational anatomy, as distinctly as geography now determines one’s locality on the earth’s surface. The individual may make excursions, may even be a traveller by profession, may go from part to part with the circulation, but some point is sure to be his appropriate home. Every individual character has, so to say, a centre of gravity, a dominant propensity, which settles his destiny, in the midst of all incidental deviations; and he finds, or constantly tends to find, his true position in the economy of the whole.
But, heretofore, the Grand or Greatest Man has never been rightly defined. Swedenborg, at his greatest, still confines him to the Spirit-world, to the virtual exclusion, or at any rate to the entire neglect, of this outer mundane world, and Comte confines him to this outer mundane world to the exclusion of the spirit-world. Let us begin by amending all this, and include in our definition of the Grand or Greatest Man, at least, the entire scope of Rational existences. Let us, in distributing his parts, instead of a subdivision of heaven, make a correspondential distribution of this grand totality of rational spheres. The exo-naturismus of our universological Grand Man (repeating more largely Swedenborg’s natural heaven), will then be the mundane rational world which we now inhabit, prior to the event we call death, which is the entire grand être of Comte; the endo-naturismus of the same is, then, the entire spirit-world of Swedenborg and the spiritists (or spiritualists); especially “heaven”; we need not trouble ourselves at present about “hell,” as we are mainly considering what is normal, and as hell, with Swedenborg, means what is diseased and abnormal. (This entire spirit-world then repeats, more largely, Swedenborg’s Spiritual Heaven.)
These two (the exo- and the endo-naturismus) coincide with the without and the within of the human body—the “soft solids,”—or, by the other analogy, with the limbs and trunk; and, in either sense, they, conjointly, make the naturismus at large. There remains, by the first analogy, “the solids” of the body; and, by the second, the Head (the “hard-headed” scientists) to fill the rôle of Swedenborg’s Celestial Heaven, which he makes to be the head of the Grand Man. This is, then, the Scientismus of our distribution; and, in our enlarged programme, this thinking head of the Grand Man, this scientismus of the total rational career and destiny, is not something hid away in the spirit-world, or merely so; but is, instead, the universologized pantarchal régime of the future, rising above both the mere mundane and the mere spiritual, presiding over them, reconciling and adjusting them, through science and special scientific discovery adequate to that end, and being therefore truly the culmination and head, or the Hovering out and fruitage of the tree of human progress.
The third of this trio, the Artismus of this growth of the ages, the analogue of the circulation within the body, in one of the aeries of analogy; and of the totality or completeness of the body (head, trunk, and limbs) in the other series, is evolution in the one view and Integralism in the other view. This whole showing is an epitome, and is liable to such obscurity as is incident to a “condensed statement.” It confounds as Swedenborg has done, but with something more of discrimination, two series of analogy, which in a full treatise should be very clearly discriminated in detail.
There has not been, heretofore, and there is not, as yet, apart from universology, any genuine reconciliation and integration of the materialistic and spiritualistic theories, methods of thought, and orders of mind, any more than of the two corresponding worlds. We have seemed, from time to time, to be brought to the verge of such a reconciliation by the subtle thought of some philosopher; but we have somehow slid past it, and found ourselves again in the camp of one or the other of two hostile armies. If Swedenborg had adhered to and carried out his basic principle of a correspondential identity between the two spheres, the point would have been gained and the compromise effected; bat he proved to be, in fact, as exclusively a mere Spiritualist as Spinoza or Comte was a mere materialist. If we look to the other side there is the same fulness of promise and short-coming of performance. Alexander Bain has stated the true view on this subject in a way to leave nothing to be desired. “His confession of psychologic faith was well summed up by him in his Mind and Body; the Theories on Their Relation, published in 1873. He utterly rejected the notion of two substances, and held human nature to be ‘one substance with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental; a double-faced unity.’ With this he maintained philosophers should deal, ‘as in the language of the Athanaslan Creed, not confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.’” And yet Alexander Bain proves to be in fact a mere materialist.
This doctrine, as stated by Bain, is the much-vaunted Monism of Haeckel, and quite generally of the naturismal sciento-philosophers of our day; and adhered to it would be all right. It is Mr. Greene’s account of the relation of subject and object in consciousness, generalized to the relation of body and spirit. But it is never adhered to, in any fairness or impartiality. We have only to read on a few pages to discover that any one of these gentlemen is as fully committed to the supremacy of matter, as Swedenborg is to the supremacy of spirit. We cannot trust the casual mental aperçu and specious fine statement of any author to decide on his habitual point of view. It is a matter of organic leanings, rather than of definition. We must follow up his exhibit and make, as it were, his personal acquaintance, and sense his character, apart from his sayings, much as we do that of individuals in society. The doctrine of equality between the two spheres, as heretofore uttered, on either side, and as commentated on by the exposition, is like the confession of the equality of the sexes, of which we have heard, and which runs after this sort: The man and the woman are one, and that one is the man; or, if there is a sturdy Amazon in the case, that one is the woman. “One substance” indeed, “with two sets of properties, two sides, a physical and a mental”! But, read on a little and you shall find that the mental is a mere derivation from, and a pure dependency upon the physical, while the physical is something very substantial and independent of the mental; that is to say, the proposed adjustment is all a one-sided affair after all, and no genuine reconciliation in any just sense of the term.
Bain’s double-faced unity of Matter and Mind (or that of his reviewer) is admirably explicit; and is exactly the universological point of view; pains being scientifically and religiously taken to maintain always the absolute equities of the adjustment. Such a procedure would habilitate Swedenborg for the Spiritualities, as completely as Tyndall for the materialities; would redeem our leading thinkers, on both sides, from their abject sectarianism or narrow-mindedness, in rejecting every thing which is not of their own school; and would conduct to that grand mental comprehensiveness, and judicial mental posture which I designate by the term Integralism. They would, in other words be whole men, instead of segments of men.
Of the double-faced unity, which is, indeed, the elementary form of all Being, the Principle which is illustrated in the Unity is Unism; the Principle which is illustrated in the Double-facedness is Duism, and the Principle which is illustrated in the Totality—the embracing Unity (of the simple Unity and the Double-facedness)—is Trinism. Hence it results that Unism, Duism, and Trinism are the three fundamental Principles of Being, and so of all things.
X.
Having now sketched the Grand or Greatest Man, as the total mentismus or mind-realm of the total universe, aggregated and organized in a manner of which the constitution of the human body is a material and visible type, let us reconsider the within and the without of this immense idealization (and their intermediate) upon a still larger scale than any which has been hitherto presented. Before, when considering the human mind, I adverted to Hegel’s division of mind into the Subjective mind— that of the individual, as a special withinness,—and the Objective mind—that of the many persons in society as its special withoutness. But Hegel was contrasting the individual mind with the social mind in the limited sense of mundane human affairs, or, at the most not ex professo, extending his scope to the pneumatological and divine spheres,—spheres which philosophy must take into account, as phenomena of thinking, whether their reality be assumed or denied. We are now to extend our generalization to those spheres, especially to the divine sphere (for the present) in conjunction and contrast with the human sphere of affairs, and to establish their proper relationship.
What is it which we think when we think God, and what is it which we think when we think man, as a mind? What, in other words, are the highest philosophical aspects of these contrasted ideas? I reply that the God-thought is the thought of a withinness of the total mental sphere, of a central and pivoting mind as contrasted with a withoutness of the same mental sphere, consisting of the many individual minds of men, and other orders of being, which constitute the mental environment of the divine mind. God is the presiding mind in a conclave of minds. Hence he is called a king, a lord, and a father, words which denote this pivotal and presiding relationship.
Observe, however, that this Kinghood taken as the withinness reverses the order which made the individual mind, generally, the within and the sphere of society to be its withoutness. All individual minds, except the mental pivot, are now aggregated, and as a whole become the withoutness, relatively to the pivotal as the withinness. This is always the case from the socialistic as contrasted with the individualistic point of view. Individuality of lead is substituted for the diffusive or distributive aspect of individuality. The monarchical idea is put in the place of the democratic idea; but they have this in common, that whether we start from the common individual or from the representative individual, as the within—the standing-point of observation—the common mass of individuals as society at large, is the matrix of the conception, and Is in both cases, therefore, the without.
The Kantian group of the categories of quantity sums up as One, Many, All. In accordance with what has been said, the One may be any one of the many taken singly, or it may be a single, central, and representative one, which is the case now under consideration. Instead of numerical units, think geometrical points, and one particular point as centering and representing the entire group of points, no matter how restricted or extended. Or again think, instead, the group of material atoms which constitute a given body, with a centering and representative atom. It is in this manner that astronomers take the geometrical centre or the central atom of the Sun to signify the whole Sun. It is in this manner that Louis signed himself “France.” It is in this manner that God is, representatively, “All In all.” It is in this manner that pivots, in all spheres, stand for the sphere of things pivoted and represented. In this manner the representative One is a withinness, and the indifferent manyness is its withoutness, matrix, or environment; and it is in this way that the God-idea is the within of the Grand Man, and the many-headed-personaltty of humanity the without. The category of unity is thus the divine category; the category of manyness is the human category; and the category of all-ness is the betweenity of these (mediatoral), as this word has to be used, with a variety of modification, first for that which intervenes; then for that which clasps and holds in the larger or complex unity; and then for the representative totality of the first two factors, and of itself included.
In the human body it is the punctum vitæ, in the base of the brain and at the decussation of the nerves, which is the representative unit; an Idea which cannot now be adequally elaborated.
We may now pass to the deeper significance of these preliminary ideas. The mathematical unit, which centres a group of units in the sum, the geometrical point which centres the group of points, the material atom which centres a star or sun, the punctum vitæ which centres the human body, are analogues or repeaters of each other. Each of them is the representative one, as a within, centering the circumferential aggregation of its sphere, as a without. The geometrical point centering and representing its group of points may be taken as representative, in turn, of all the other cases; and I shall therefore mainly advert to it. Observe now that this Central Point is nowise different, in its own essential nature from any other point in the group. It is only a mere point, as they are mere points. It differs from them positionally, merely. It is not, in other words, absolutely different, but relatively different only. It is not different in kind but different in condition, or the degree of its promotion. Among all the points of the group, there is Equality of Worth with difference of Rank. Fundamentally, substantially, essentially, inherently, the points of the group are all equal, each to the other; superstructurally, formally, existentially, apparently, they are different. The order of their arrangement alone, with the function incidental to their position, makes their difference. By means of this difference, the central point outranks and reigns over all the rest, and all the others rank high, we may assume, in proportion, as they approximate the centre, or gather round the throne.
But we have seen that the God-idea is simply such as that of this centering-point in the group of points. The God-mind is simply the supreme or paramount mind in the given group or consociation of individual minds, from the smallest such up to the total rational universe, the Grand Man, of whom such godlike personage would be the punctum vitæ, or focus of life—not, however, by virtue of any inherent and essential difference between him and the humblest individual of the whole group; but positionally and functionally, merely. Mr. Beecher is the God-man of Plymouth Church. Mr. Cook reigns supremely at the Boston Tabernacle. The Czar of Russia is called God by many of the common people of Russia. This, It would seem, was the idea which Jesus entertained of the meaning of Godhood. When the Jews were shocked by his open claims of partaking the divine nature, and accused him of blasphemy, he repelled their charge by appealing to their own Scriptures to the effect that distinguished and representative men were therein called Gods; meaning thereby, as we shall see presently, that Godhood is simply supreme Manhood, in some sphere of being.
The point herein of paramount importance is that the true God-idea makes God to be not essentially different, not different In substance and kind, from Man, nor Man from God; that It Identifies them in quality and real being, each with the other—their difference being merely one of the greater and less unfoldment of the same faculties, attributes, nature and powers. If this be true, then every human being, as to the inmost potentiality of his being, is equal with God and is God. The same may be said of him, as an individual being, as is said of the abstract logos in the first chapter of John. This thought does not degrade the divine but elevates the human aspect of things. Jesus, whose intuitions on this central doctrine of religion were deeper and truer, it seems to me, than any one’s else was thus, and could only thus be justified in saying, in one breath, to his disciples: “I and my father are one”; and in the next breath: “I am the vine and ye are the branches.”
These are wonderful dicta, with a direct and a reverse signification. They mean directly, that God is essentially and inherently one with, and so only equal with, my personality, and I am essentially and inherently one with, and therefore, only equal with, your personality; and, inversely, that I am essentially and inherently one with and so equal with God, and you .are essentially and inherently one with and so equal with me; and so finally you are inherently and essentially equal with God, as beings of the same nature and possibilities,—not equal position ally and functionally, but with such differences only as characterize the root, the vine, and the branches —one in kind but different in organic relation and in development.
Jesus thus labored to inculcate what may be called the democratic element in theology; but with eminently bad success. The world was not prepared for that idea. The opposite idea of the absolute and unlimited supremacy of one mind, in all senses, over all other minds, accorded with Oriental despotism and Caesarism then prevalent over the known world; and that side of the complex thought which haunted the mind of Jesus alone survived in traditional theology, and has come down to our day in the churches. That was the unismal and simpler form of the conception. The development of the democratic or duismal side of the thought had to wait till the eighteenth century, and get itself then expressed as a political, and not as a theological idea. The politics of the universe will be further considered in the next following article. We must accustom ourselves to some shocks of existing well-bedded opinions. Swedenborg curiously says that bed means, by correspondence, doctrine, because as the body rests in its bed, so does the mind in its doctrine. We need not be surprised, therefore, if when the morning comes, we are summoned to get up; and if some shall be more sluggard than others in answering the call; for “there shall be two in one bed; the one shall be taken and the other left.”
XI.
Before dismissing the consideration of the God-idea, let me observe that the seeming contradictoriness of the equality, in a sense, and of the inequality, in another sense, of the pivotal or central point and the circum-stantial or environing points of a group, makes it a difficult conception; or a complex idea, such as simplicity of mental constitution is apt to find difficult. Hence au illustration is needed. We have a similar complexity in the American theory of the political constitution of society, in which it is held that inherently every citizen is the equal of every other citizen, while yet the man elected to any office is recognized as officially the superior of the others. The President of the United States is the pivotal man, the highest in rank, the supreme man in this sphere of affairs, and is duly and spontaneously honored as such, in the face of the opposite theory that all men are equal. The Catholic Church makes a similar discrimination between the official infallibility of the Pope, and his fallibility, in common with all other men, as an individual; and so of the official and the merely personal conduct, morally, of the priesthood.
The idea which was propounded in the preceding article, then, is that the theology of Jesus was, and that the ‘true scientific theology is, that there is inherent equality, and even identity of character between God and Man; with an official difference of rank merely, resulting from the central position assigned to that which is inmost—the God-position—in the ideal constitution of universal things.
We may now take a step farther on, and affirm that there is still a third sense, in which it is alike philosophically legitimate to affirm the superiority and supremacy of Man over God, of the Human over the Divine. It is a bold proposition, considering existing theological prejudices, to affirm that God and Man are in any sense equal; and a bolder one to affirm that the true Man-idea is higher than the God-idea. Yet this is distinctly what I mean—but only in a given sense which shall be presently defined. It is distinctive of the scientific method that it discriminates different points of view; and adjusts whole ranges of thought to the given point of view from which they take their departure, countervailing oftentimes whole ranges of thought which are equally legitimate, from another and opposite point of view. In this manner the whole heavens may be viewed as we naturally (naturismally) view them from our standing-point on the earth; or we may view them along with the astronomer—inverting the whole order—from the sun, as the sciento-ideal standing-point of observation.
In what sense then can it be said that Man is higher than God? Legitimately, scientifically, demonstrably, and undeniably so said? In that sense—whatever it may come to mean, when the analogies shall all be carried out—in which the Diverse is higher than the Unitive; in which the Perispheric is higher than the Centric; in which Heterogeneity is higher than Homogeneity; in which Two is higher than One.
God is the eternal unchangeable one, ro ev of the old Greek philosophy; him In whom “there is no variableness nor shadow of turning”—in the Hebrew conception. Man, as the contrasted pole of the conception, is the Many, essential Variableness, Infinite Diversity—and that Infinite Variety in Unity which is the higher and the highest conception, embraces God and Man in their joint relationship; and “the scientific method in theology” authorizes us to inquire into and establish all the phases of that relationship.
To recur to the American theory of the political constitution of society. There is here also this third idea, announced and made distinctly emphatic; that the common citizen, or rather the many-headed public, is the superior, the true sovereign in relation to all so-called governors whatsoever; the true source of power, the supreme lodgment of authority. Per contra, the governor or officer of whatsoever rank is, from this point of view, the servant of the people. Government exists only for the people. This is the American doctrine, the Occidental doctrine, the modern doctrine, the advanced or progressive doctrine, technically, the scientismal doctrine. The people exist only for the government. That was and is the Asiatic doctrine, the Oriental doctrine, the ancient doctrine, the retrogressive or conservative doctrine; technically, the naturismal doctrine.
Let me repeat then, that we have in America (and in a less pronounced way in Europe also) a mixed condition of affairs, an Asiatic and traditional theology, with an Occidental and partially scientized system of politics.
We have never heretofore had the American system of theology. Theology is merely the theoretical, political system of the universe. It is the theory of God’s government of mankind (in the enlarged sense. Including all “subordinate” rational existences). Theology and politics are therefore identical in essence, differing only in the sphere or domain of their application. They should, therefore, be in some sort of theoretical harmony with each other. But by- the Asiatic and despotic conception, which as yet absolutely dominates all theological conceptions, Man exists solely “for the glory of God”; whereas, if the analogy of our Western political conceptions holds good, then God exists only for the well-being and happiness of the rational universe.
There is, however, a fourth aspect of the analogy which restores to God his supremacy; only, however, still, in a modified sense. It is again Jesus who furnishes the key-word to this new aspect of the great subject of personal relationships in these beautiful words: “He that would be greatest among you let him serve.” In the sphere of service or uses, the official and governmental function is magnified; and so the American finds the way of honoring and glorifying the presidential function, while at the same time boasting of “the sovereign people,” and proclaiming that “the governors are merely the servants of the people.” There is nothing shocking from this point of view, in the idea of the duties of God.
In all this treatment of the subject, I have made no unauthorized or surreptitious assumption of the existence of God. As I have defined the God-idea, God must exist, and inevitably, therefore, does exist: first as an abstractable aspect of Universal Being; and afterwards, personally, in all pivotal personality, whether as manifested in Buddha, in Jesus, or elsewhere. The concreting or incarnation of abstract aspects or principles of being in the real, and so of the God-idea in actual personality is as philosophical as it is Orthodox.
But the worship of a personal God, or of incarnated God-hood, is merely an enlarged hero-worship. It is the worship or worthship, or the recognition of the worthship of superior and pivotal manhood. In this transitional and emphatically scientismal age (incipiently so), the tonic or key-note of opinion is the more and more absolute denial of hero-worship. Hence the idea of the personality of God suffers likewise,—an idea which dominated without question during the naturismus of the evolution of human life on the planet. When abstract principles shall have been fully vindicated as fundamental, and more governing than personality, another revulsion will occur; and in and during the artismus, the long stretch of the “Paradise Regained,” or of the “High Harmony” of the human career on the planet, hero-worship, in a modified sense, on the higher, critical, and discriminating plane, will return, and will, more thoroughly than ever, permeate the whole social structure. Every kind and variety of merit will be sought out, distinctified and honored, as embodying some abstract principle already abstractly recognized and appreciated. Gods many and lords many will constitute the true and truly divine aristocracy of that more blessed day; because in that day the only title to honorable office will be the greater capacity and willingness truly to serve. The necessity in us to worship, is merely the spontaneous urge In us, first to divine and then to discriminate the genuine superiorities of individual being.
The intuition divines and the reflective or scientific intellect discriminates. Allow me for a moment to intervene in the very able, lucid, and important discussion just now occurring between Mr. Gannett and Mr. Abbot on this matter of the Intuition and the scientific intellect. The intuition (so it seems to me from the analogies) coincides with and repeats the senses. The etymology of the word indicates this. It means perception by the eye, but, representatively, direct perception by all the senses. We should have the word extuition for the use of the outer senses, and intuition for that of the inner senses. What the testimony of the intuition is good for may therefore best be inquired about by inquiring what the use of the senses amounts to, and in how far they are to be relied upon. Undoubtedly they go for something. They give us, except in cases of disease, a true testimony as to appearances, from that, whatever it is, which is the object of them; and for ordinary purposes we accept their testimony. But we learn by reflection on our farther experiences, that there is (at least often) a truth of appearance, and a truth of inherence which are exactly opposite to each other; as expressed in the universological formula: Antithetical Reflection of Inherence and Appearance.
For example, in running along a coast in a boat, the coast seems to fly back from ns, while we seem to be at rest; while yet precisely the opposite is the inherency of the truth of the subject. So we seem to see the sun rise, whereas we learn by astronomical study that just the contrary has happened; namely, that the eastern horizon has sunk to precisely the extent to which the sun seemed to have risen. We may now discriminate three stages of knowledge in respect to these facts. First, there is the naturismal stage, in which the simple, childlike, trusting mind accepts in good faith the testimony of the senses; or, internally, of the intuition. Second, there is the scientismal stage, in which the primal testimony of the senses, having become suspect, is submitted to tests and convicted of fallacy, and the opposite statement is enthroned. And finally, there is the third or artismal stage, in which it is perceived that there is a kind and portion of truth contained in the primitive testimony of the senses, and another and counterparting kind and portion of truth contained in the revisional verdict of the scientific intellect, and that the totality of the truth embraces and reconciles them both, while yet discriminating them most sharply, and assigning to each only that kind and degree of validity to which its true nature entitles it.
But—and herein is the supreme or governing character of the Scientific Method—this work of discrimination, and assignment of relative values (its own included) is exerted by the revisionary action of scientism. It is as certain as that our heads are at the tops of our bodies, and not worn under our arms, that the intellect is the supreme faculty in man; and the sooner the world wakes up to the full recognition of this great truth, the sooner humanity will graduate out of its non-age and enter upon its adult and manly and final development. The case is not cited here as a mere rhetorical illustration, but as a true scientific analogy, and as an instance of that which will guide us into the totality of solutions, or in the words of Jesus, “into the knowledge of all truth.”
Some startling results arise out of these views. First, it would seem that the special and awe-struck worship of God, as the back-lying source of things, the undifferentiated mental unity, the protoplasmal stage of mental evolution, the ideal one person out of whose generative loins came all the visible creations, and preeminently man or the rational universe,—that the supreme and continuous special worship of this undifferentiated unitive being belongs characteristically and specially to the infancy or primitive stage of mental evolution,—quite as children appreciate personality before they can recognize principles; and that it falls, therefore, legitimately, at a certain period into relative unimportance. It would then seem that in a second stage of mental evolution the category of Plurality (and the inter-relationship of parts) becomes, in an orderly way, paramount over the category of mere primal indiscriminated Unity, and that the business of the race for a term of time is to become acquainted with Laws and Principles; to lay aside its childish veneration of paramount personality; to discover, announce, and celebrate its own individual and distributed values, and to proclaim the equality of man with man, and logically of man with God also,—an atheistic age from the point of view of the old theology,—a religion in its own eyes, of the abstract truth, lead where it may. It would then again seem, that in a third stage of the same grand career of rational unfoldment, the pivotal personality idea will be again called in, under modification; principles will be recognized as embodied in persons, in an ascending hierarchy of diverse excellence; society will gather around some supreme pivot or group of pivots themselves pivoted; and the grand orchestral harmony of all human affairs will be evolved, with the cordial and devout readoption of so much of the primitive God idea and mystical worship, as the intuitions chastened and sifted by the intellect may then retain.
The God-idea is the pivot idea of universal being, or the rational pivotation of the universe; but, primally, it is, still, indefinite pivot. It is the general, or rather universalized idea of centre, which may still be any or everywhere; for God, while inmost and central relatively to the totality of being, is, at the same instant, and in contradiction of that idea, endowed with the attribute of omnipresence. The God-idea is not, therefore, the idea of any determinate or fixed centre.
The idea is, hence the homogenismus, and the indeterminate homogenismus of the universal rational conception. Man, on the other hand, that is to say, the multiplicity of individual beings, is the heterogenismus and the determinate heterogenismus of this same universal rational conception. Man is mathematically definite. A census of mankind is among the practical possibilities; but the census of the God-idea has proved to be impossible; hence Polytheism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, as different aspects of the homogenoid and indefinite truth in this behalf. The higher development of the God-idea tends, however, towards and ends upon the unit; as the higher development of the Man-idea tends toward multiplicity, or rich abundance of population, culminating in “the innumerable hosts of heaven.” Fewness is the Divine, and Manyness is the Human pole of the Numerismus (the universal domain of number). The struggle between the Triune and the Unit is the finality, as yet attained to, of the theological contest.
Now nothing is more familiar at our day among thinkers, than the Spencerian generalization of evolution, which I abridge, for the moment, into the formula of: A change from an indefinite homogeneity to a definite heterogeneity. We have only to glance at the connections to perceive that the true and necessary order of the evolution of the universal rational conception is from the predominance of the God-idea to the predominance of the Human idea in the unfoldment of social opinion and affairs. Another glance at the actual state of the world will show the same thing. There is, however, the Ulterior third stage of reconvergency and reconciliation unnoted by Spencer, unless we find it implicitly contained in the meaning of the word “coherent” which I have omitted from the formula.
XII.
In the last preceding article I attempted the analogical identification of the divine and the human, as to their essential substrate of being. There are the two poles of mental being. The two poles of being itself, in its total existential aggregate, are mind and matter, or inversely matter and mind; at which point this elaboration began, by assuming Mind as the within and Matter as the without. Let us now proceed a step farther, and discover, if so be, the underlying identity of these two as well; not so much in the sense of Spinoza, who posits substance as beneath both matter and mind, calling it God, and affixing both matter and mind to it as foreign and accidental attachments, as in the sense of Hegel, who makes the absolute—his word for the substrate unity (instead of Spinoza’s substance)—to be a process, involving two opposite aspects,—as if we should say matter and mind, in the closest uniting embrace, while yet they are distinctive or separable momenta of the one process.
Let us recur to the illustration of a group of geometrical points, or of material atoms, or to a constellation of stars. We have in each case a body of individuals, who may present themselves to us in either of two ways. They may, in the first instance, appear with sufficient intervening distances to be each distinctly individualized, like a nebula resolved by a powerful telescope; or, secondly, they may be agglomerated, as in the unresolved nebula, and so be massed or matted into one. In the former case, we have the analogue of the idea of individuality, which we may now associate with that aspect of being which we call mind, the disengaged and separate point, atom, or star, pivoting upon its own centre,—self-centre being the peculiar characteristic of mind; in the latter case, we have the analogue of the idea of matter, which even in its etymology means that which is mat-ted or mass-ed. The nebula is the first appearance of matter, which, as it becomes more and more solidified or massed, obliterates more and more the individuality of the distinct atoms which compose it; that is to say, obliterates or obscures the manifestation of the mind-principle which underlies it, and which we may now say is essentially identical with it, differing only in consequence of a difference of conditions.*
Scientists are rapidly resolving the ultimate atoms, in the constituency of matter, into mere points of force. I believe Judge Stallo astutely combats both ideas, that of indivisible atoms and that of points of force, calling them necessary fictions of the mind merely. So Prof. Brackett calls in question the existence of the great ocean of luminiferous ether; bat the prevalent hypotheses on those subjects are such approximations to the truth as we must for the present avail ourselves of, whatever changes of form they may be destined to undergo.
In a word, then, we may assume the ultimate material atom, itself centred by the finer geometric point of force, as the type of the primitive constitution of things; and we may (proximately) identify this compound atom with the monad of Leibnitz. Let us also demand for it the character of plurality, or the co-existence of many such monads. The mere method of that co-existence will then cause the difference between that manifestation which we call Mind, and that other manifestation which we call Matter.
Let us assume that the inner geometric point of each monad is the type of the individual mind inhabiting a body; that the material atom is the type of the body so inhabited; and that the inner geometric point, what is virtually the point of force, is, at the same time, a radiating centre, whose rays permeate the outer atomic corporeal structure, as the nerves of the human body, taking their origin in the brain, permeate the body; and that, like the nerves, these rays relate the monad to the other monads within its social environment. In this supposition we have, in the primitive monad, and its compound structure, a perfect prefigurement; nay, more, the actual incipiency, in logical evolution, of the individual human being for the single monad; and of human society for the aggregation of monads in question.
The statement is still not sufficiently strong to cover the truth of the case. All the analogies concur, and in their concurrence demonstrate, that this precise type of structure, an outer and grosser body, with an inner and spiritual core, radiating and permeating the other, and relating it to the environment, is the incipient type of being universally, and in particulars; incipient we must say, guardedly, for during the infinite variations in the careers of development, the dance of differentiation throws things often into opposite relations, demanding the closest scrutiny in tracing occurrences and their causes.
Hickok (Rational Psychology, p. 22) thus epitomizes Leibnitz’s theory of primitive monads: “Leibnitz sublimated all being into indivisible atoms, and as thus indistinguishable by any outer. They must be distinguished, each from each, by an inner peculiarity, and which, analogous to mind, is a faculty of representing. Every atom with its inner representation-force was thus a monad; and when representing in unconsciousness is matter; when partially conscious is animal; when in full self-consciousness is human soul; and the absolute monad arranges all the representations through a ‘preestablished harmony.’” This statement, mutatis mutandis, is the universological conception in question. Leibnitz recognizes a within and a without for each monad, and a system of relations between the within and the without, passing outward and beyond into the environment. The within is mind, or mind-like; the without is body, or body-like; and the connective sphere is radiance-like (rationoid), or nerve-like, in structure and function. I render this conception more definite by identifying the withoutness of the monad with the physical atom, as its body; and this, by analogy, with the human body; and so with the body of a sun or planet, and in fine, of any constituted object whatsoever; the withinness of the monad with the abstract geometrical point centring the physical atom, being conceptually finer than it, and being also the centre of those subtle spiritual forces which ray out through the body and into the vacancy of the environment.
As new, in point of statement, and more important in some senses, there are also, besides all this, inherent and necessary geometrical relationships, existing as between all the monads, and especially as between their geometrical centres, represented, conceptually, by an infinite net-work of straight lines passing from centre to centre, and constituting an infinity of geometrical figures in space (and, by extending the idea, in time also). Each of these figures is different from every other, in all the details of its geometrical constitution, while all are equal in the infinity of their complexity, according to the particular monad which is taken as centre of the particular schema of such relationships. This immense complex of inherent relationships is, therefore, the tressel-board of the destinies of all the individual monads,—all destinies being infinitely alike, and yet infinitely different. It is to this schema of fated relationships of the monads, and not to anything within the particular monads, that we must look for that element of difference or diversity which Leibnitz refers to the withinness of the monads. They are no more differenced from each other internally, as geometrical points, than they are externally, as physical atoms,—rather less so, if a difference in this respect is conceivable. The great ocean of individual minds is as confluent and indiscriminated, at bottom, as the physical atomic parenchyma. The differentiative factor, by preeminence, is the angulation, and so the ratio-nal element found in the connective lines which conclude the monads—the web of destiny which fixes their individual peculiarities of character and career. So, in the next place, and this is still more important, it must be questioned whether the absolute monad, by which is meant the God-entity centring (relationally) and embracing all the other monads, is really and truly that which “arranges all the representations, through a “preestablished harmony,” as Leibnitz puts the case; or whether the preestablished harmony is something which is not arranged by any mind or will, whatsoever; a something which arranges itself; or rather which exists inherently and necessarily in the nature of things — its analogue being the network of geometrical lines which characterize and prescribe the destiny of each individual monad,—the central and absolute monad, as well as all the rest. This, at all events, is the rational as constrasted with the dogmatic conception of the constitution of the universe; and each represents a side of the larger and complex truth. We are again in the presence of the contrast and conflict between logicism and arbitrism in the evolution of thought; or between the secular-philosophical, and the theological idea. Is it true, in other word, that the will of God has fundamentally constituted things as they are in the universe, as theology has taught, in which case they are the result of an arbitrary edict;—the monarchic idea; or is there a Nature of Things, and an inherent necessity in that nature of things by virtue of which they have been so constituted, through laws of being, as controlling over God as over nature and man? This latter is the democratic and occidental conception, as contrasted with the dictatorial and oriental one. Lucretius, Pope, and Emerson have accustomed us to the idea of allying philosophic thought with a poetic form. I have been prompted to attempt to throw this profoundest of metaphysical speculations into poetical expression, and with the following result:—
MIGHT AND RIGHT.
When a king proclaims a law
Men think only to obey;
When the law proclaims a king,
All men accept his sway.Which is the first, then, king or law?
The sway of law, or personal awe?
The Constitution of the State,
Or will of sovereign potentate?This is the problem of State-lore;
‘Tls, too, the theologlc core:
Is God to reign, alone of might!
Or reigns he under law and right?Whence, then, God’s rank and sovereign lot?
Would wrong be right if God were not?
Is God then first; or law before,
And God executor; no more?The State-craft of our happy land
Proclaims the taw supreme;
Our Asiatic creed command—
Exalts!—adverse philosopheme !
The Greek philosopho-theology coincides with and may be placed at the head of occidentalism, in this behalf, in that it put Fate back of Jove, and so subjected gods and men alike to the inherent necessity lodged in the nature of things. Christian theology, changing all this, puts God back of all, and thus unwittingly renders him responsible for evil as well as good. The interposition of the devil as the father of evil does not help the case, as the devil is not, by this system, an independent and co-equal being, as he was in the old Persian theology, but is himself a subject and subordinate of God, who is therefore still responsible for all that he is and does. He is simply an agent of God in the carrying out of his designs, and no number of intermediate agencies relieves in any degree the responsibility of the principles in any transaction. It is a good maxim of the law,—quod facit per alium, facit per se.
We can, therefore, in no manner relieve God of the responsibility of evil; in no manner “justify the ways of God to man,” otherwise than by restoring or interpolating the old Greek idea of inherency in a nature of things which no arbitrary will, divine or human, can infringe or wholly overbear. It is the merest subterfuge to say: That evil Is a means to the attainment of a higher good: for an unlimited omnipotence could as well command and so secure that higher good, without as with the intervention of evil; and hence the presence of evil is purely gratuitous. We must limit either the power or the goodness of God; and it is an over-zealous piety, which by affirming both in an absolute sense involves the divine being in a hopeless dilemma, and makes him an object of hatred rather than of love.
But are we thus brought under the dominion of a perfectly inflexible and absolutely dominant fatalism? I shall show in another article that we are not; that the ultimate philosophy opens a way of escape from that result; and that the fate-side of things, while it must be admitted as one of the factors, is only to be admitted as an equal factor with the will-side of things in the constitution of the universe; and, that, therefore, theology on the one hand, and secular philosophy on the other hand, are reconcilable in the grasp of a larger and complex unity.
* The position of Spinoza makes substance, and that of Schelling the pure reason, and that of Hegel the absolute as logical process—specific differences of the same generic idea—to be the within or inmost of being; mind and matter being, conjointly, the without. All of their views will, at some time, require to be reviewed. At present It will suffice for the reader to remember that our mode of viewing the subject makes mind to be the within and matter the without; and their conjoining identity (whether as substance, reason, or logical process) figures as their betweenity, or middle term, (it is this middle-term-character which makes it seem to be the within,—and which, from another point, entitles it to be so regarded.)
[ XIII–XXIV ]
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