Moreover, the revelation by which God makes himself known to man, does not admit of being limited exclusively to the written word. Nature itself is a book written on both sides, both within and without, in every line of which the finger of God is discernible. It is, as it were, a Holy Writ in visible form and bodily shape—a song of praise on the Creator’s omnipotence composed in living imagery. But besides Scripture and nature—those two great witnesses to the greatness and majesty of God—there is in the voice of conscience nothing less than a divine revelation within man. This is the first awakening call to the two other louder and fuller proclamations of revealed truth. And, lastly, in universal history we have set before us a real and manifold application and progressive development of revelation. Here the luminous threads of a divine and higher guidance glimmer through the remarkable events of history. For, not only in the career of whole ages and nations, but also in the lives of individuals, the ruling and benignant hand of Providence is every where visible.

Fourfold, consequently, is the source of revelation, from which man derives his knowledge of the Deity, learns his will, and understands his operation and power—conscience, nature, Holy Writ, and universal history. The teaching of the latter is often of that earnest and awful kind, to which we may, in a large sense, apply the adage, “Who will not learn must feel.” How often does it show us some mighty edifice of fortune, which, having no firm basis in the deep soil of truth and the divine order, owed its rapid growth and false splendor to some evil influence, falling suddenly in ruins, as if stricken by the invisible breath of a superior power. On such occasions the public feeling recognizes the hand which sets a limit to every temerity in the history of the world—to every extravagance of a false confidence—and appoints it its ultimate term. And the olden notion (which, with men of the day, had become little more than an antiquated legend) of God’s retributive justice, resumes its place among the actuating sentiments of life, with new and intense significance. The sublime truth, however, is only too soon forgotten, and the temporary alarm subsides but too quickly into the habitual calm of a false security—that old and hereditary feeling of human nature.

The volume of Holy Writ, as it is transmitted to us, and was first commenced about three-and-thirty centuries ago, does not exclude the possibility of an earlier sacred tradition in the twenty-four centuries which preceded it. So far, indeed, is the supposition of such an original revelation from being inconsistent with Scripture, that, on the contrary, it contains explicit allusions to the fact, that such a manifold enlightenment was imparted to the first man, as well as to that patriarch who, after the destruction of the primeval world of giants, was the second progenitor of mankind. But as this divine knowledge, derived immediately from the primary source of all illumination, flowed down in free and unconfined channels to succeeding generations, and to the different nations which branched off from the parent stock, the original sacred traditions were soon disfigured and overloaded with fictions and fables. In these, however, a rich abundance of remarkable vestiges and precious germs of divine truth were mixed up with Bacchanalian rites and immoral mysteries. And thus, amid a multitude of sensuous and stimulating images, the pure and simple truth was buried, as in a second chaos, under a mass of contradictory symbols. Hence arose that Babylonish confusion of languages, emblems, and legends, which is universally to be met with among ancient, and even the most primitive nations. In the great work, therefore, of purification, and of a restoration of true religion (which we may call a second revelation, or, at least, as a second stage thereof), a rigid exclusion of this heathenish admixture of fable and immorality was the first and most essential requisite. But those older revelations, imparted to the first man and the second progenitor of mankind, are expressly laid down as the groundwork of that evangel of the creation, which forms the introduction to the whole volume of Scripture, and furnishes us thereby with a key to understand the history and religion of the primitive world—or, to speak absolutely, the true Genesis of the existing world, its history and its science. This double principle, expressly recognizing, on the one hand, an original revelation and divine illumination of the first progenitors of the human race, of which the olden and less corrupted monuments of heathenism still retain many a trace; and, on the other, strictly rejecting the additions of a corrupt and degenerated heathenism, with all its tissue of fables and false, godless mysteries, must be kept steadily in view in examining the earliest portions of the sacred Scriptures. For the neglect, or imperfect consideration of it, has already led, and is ever likely to give rise to many complicated doubts and perverted views, which imperil not only the simple understanding of the whole body of revealed Scripture, but even the right conception of revelation.

Now, if we may venture to consider the fourfold revelation of God in conscience, in nature, in Holy Writ, and the world’s history, as so many living springs or fertilizing streams of a higher truth, we must suppose the existence of a good soil to receive the water of life and the good seed of divine knowledge. For without an organ of susceptibility for good to receive the divine gift from above, no amount of revelation would benefit man. Now, the soul, so susceptible of good on all sides, both from within and from without, is even this organ for the reception of revelation. And this function of the soul, together with its creation of language as the outer form of human knowledge, constitutes its contribution to science, and especially to internal science. And even with the understanding, as the sense which discerns the meaning and purport of revelation, the soul is co-operative—since nothing divine can be understood merely in the idea, and of and by itself alone, but in every case a feeling for it must have preceded, or, at least, contributed toward its complete understanding. The soul, consequently, which is thus susceptible of the divine, is ever informing itself about, or co-operating in the acquisition of a knowledge of the Godlike. And this, the soul’s love and pursuit of divine truth, when, unfolding itself in thought, it comes forth in an investiture of words, is even philosophy—not, indeed, the dead sophistic of the schools, but one which, as it is a philosophy of life, can be nothing less than living. And the soul, thus ardently yearning for the divine, and both receiving and faithfully maintaining the revealed Word, is the common center toward which all the four springs of life and streams of truth converge. In free meditation it reconciles and combines them.

On this account the oldest and most natural form of philosophy was that of dialogue, which did not, however, exclude the occasional introduction of a simple narrative, or the continuous explanation of higher and abstruser questions. Philosophy, accordingly, might not inappropriately be defined as a dialogue of the soul in its free meditation on divine things. And this was the very form it actually possessed among the earliest and noblest of the philosophers of antiquity—first of all really and orally, as with Pythagoras and Socrates, and lastly in its written exposition, of which style Plato was the great and consummate master. But it was only to the noblest and best of all ranks, though without distinction of age or sex, that these the greatest men of antiquity communicated their treasures of philosophical wisdom. In this course Pythagoras first set the example, which, on the whole, was followed also by Socrates and Plato. For, in general, the latter confined their philosophical teaching to a select circle, and imparted it, as it were, under the seal of friendship, to such only as in the social intercourse of life they admitted to close and familiar intimacy. Occasional exceptions were, perhaps, furnished by their disputes with the sophists, in the course of which they were constrained to adopt, not only the weapons, but also the method of their adversaries—a license of which Plato, perhaps, has too often availed himself, even if he has not sometimes abused it. For about this time the sophists introduced a practice as erroneous as their doctrine was false. Publishing their philosophemes to the whole people, they treated it and quarreled about it in the market-place as a common party matter. Such a procedure was in every sense pernicious, and one which must have brought even truth itself into contempt. Lastly, Aristotle comprised in his manuals the collective results of all earlier philosophical speculation, and intrusted his treasury of mature knowledge and well-sifted and newly-arranged thoughts to the keeping of a school. Now, we should be far from justified were we to make this a reproach against this master of subtlety and profoundest of thinkers; for at this time all true intellectual life had, together with public spirit, become extinct among the Greeks, amid the disorders of democracy, or under the pressure of the armed supremacy of Macedonia. Still it must ever remain a matter of profound regret. For philosophy, as standing in the center between the guiding spirit of the divine education of man and the external force of civil right and material power, ought to be true mundane soul [Weltseele] which animates and directs the development of ages and of the whole human race. Deeply, therefore, is it to be deplored whenever science, and especially philosophy, are withdrawn from this wide sphere of universal operation, and from human life itself, to remain banished and cooped up in the narrow limits of a school.

LECTURE IV.

OF THE SOUL IN RELATION TO NATURE.

“WE know in part,” exclaimed, with burning zeal, the honest man of God in Holy Scripture, “We know in part, and we prophesy in part.” How true the first member of this sentence is even in the case of that knowledge of God which alone deserves the name of knowledge, or repays the trouble of its acquisition, the previous Lecture must in many ways have served to convince us. The second member, which will chiefly occupy our attention in the present discussion, is in an eminent degree applicable to physical science. For what, in fact, is all our knowledge of nature, considered as a whole and in its inmost essence, but a mere speculation, conjecture, and guess upon guess? What is it but an endless series of tentative experiments, by which we are continually hoping to succeed in unveiling the secret of life, to seize the wonderful Proteus, and to hold him fast in the chains of science? Or is it not, perhaps, one ever-renewed attempt to decipher more completely than hitherto the sybilline inscriptions on the piled-up rows and layers of tombs, which as nature grows older convert its great body into one vast catacomb, and so perchance to find therein the key to unlock and bring to light the far greater—nay, the greatest of all riddles—the riddle of death? Now there are undoubtedly, even in nature itself, occasional indications of, scattered hints and remote allusions to, a final crisis, when even in nature and in this sensible and elementary world, life shall be entirely separated from death, and when death itself shall be no more. Gravely to be pondered and in nowise to be neglected are these hints, although without the aid of a higher illumination they must forever remain unintelligible to man. Thus considered, however, the universe itself appears replete with dumb echoes and terrestrial resounds of divine revelation. It is not, therefore, without reason and significance, if in this beautiful hymn the ancient prophetess of nature lends her concurrent testimony to the promises of the holy seer of a last day of creation, which nature shall celebrate as the great day of her renovation and toward which she yearns with an indescribable longing which is nowhere so inimitably depicted, so strongly and so vividly expressed, as in Holy Writ itself. Holy Scripture could not and can not contain a system of science, whether as a philosophy of reason or a science of nature. Nay, in this form of a manual and methodical compendium of divine knowledge, it could not inspire us with confidence either as revelation or as science. Condescending altogether to the wants of man, both in form and language, it consists of a collection of occasional and wholly practical compositions derived immediately from, and expressly designed for, life—in a certain sense it consists of nothing but the registers and social statutes either of the prophetic people or of the apostolical community. Accordingly, its contents are of a mixed nature: historical, legal, instructive, hortatory, consolatory, and prophetical, together with a rich abundance of minute and special allusions, while it enters every where into, and with watchful love adapts itself to, individual wants and local peculiarities. And the form of these writings, at once so singular in its kind—and in such marvelous wise, but yet so eminently human—is so far from being inconsistent with the divine character, that the very condescension of the Deity constitutes a new and additional but most characteristic proof of genuine revelation. Only the first foundation-stone and the key and corner-stone form an exception. Embracing within their spacious limits the beginning of nature and the end of the world, they form, as it were, the corner-rings and the bearing-staves of the ark of the covenant of revelation. And while on the one side as well as on the other, in the opening no less than in the closing book, which contain almost as many mysteries as words, the seven-branched candlestick of secret signification is set up, still all else that is inclosed within the holy ark receives therefrom sufficient light for its perfect elucidation. In all other respects the style is that of a plain narrative couched in very appropriate and simple words; and if the masters of criticism in classical antiquity have quoted a few passages from the beginning of Genesis as the most exalted instances of the sublime, still it was in the very simplicity and extreme plainness of the language that they recognized this character of sublimity. From these two ends, moreover—from this first root as well as from the last crown of the book, there proceeds many threads and veins, which, running through the tissue, bind it together more closely into a living unity, on which account, although consisting of so many and such divers books, it is justly considered as one, being called simply the “Book” (Bible). Consequently it would, as already said, be foolish to look for a system of science in the divine book for men. Nevertheless we do meet here and there with single words about nature and her secrets—hints occasionally dropped and seemingly accidental expressions—which, giving a clear and full information as to much that is hidden therein, furnish science consequently with so many keys for unlocking nature. These, indeed, are not scattered throughout in equal measure, but here, perhaps, more thinly, and there again more thickly. In all these passages, and especially those of the Old Testament, which not only depict the external beauties and visible glory of nature, but also touch upon its hidden powers and inmost secrets of life, we may observe a kind of intentional, I might, perhaps, say, cautious reserve and heedful circumspection, amounting at times almost to an indisposition to speak out fully and clearly, lest the abuse or probable misconception of what should be said might give encouragement to the heathenish and wide-spread deification of nature.

In the New Testament (if we may venture to speak of these things in the same natural and human fashion that Scripture itself employs) the Holy Spirit uses language far more precise and clear. On the whole, the relation in which Holy Writ and divine revelation stand to nature itself, and the science thereof, is a peculiar one. It is eminently tender and wonderful, but not, indeed, intelligible at the first glance, or broadly definable according to any rigorous and established notion. It is one, however, capable of being made clearer by means of a simile borrowed from Scripture itself. Those guileless men whom the Redeemer chose as His instruments for carrying out His great work of the redemption of the world, were endued with miraculous powers, which it was and ever will be apparent, were not of their own strength, but of His. Now, of the first of these apostles it is narrated that a healing power, and, as it were, an invisible stream of life proceeded from him, without his being conscious of, or, at least, without his regarding it, which healed the sick who were brought out and placed within the range of his shadow as he passed by.[20] In the same manner the fiery wain of divine revelation, as it passes on its way, scatters, in single words and images, many a bright spark. The radiant shadow of the word of God, as it falls, is sufficient to kindle and throw a new light over the whole domain of nature, by means of which the true science thereof may be firmly established, its inmost secrets explored and brought into coherence and agreement with all else.

I have already more than once called your attention to the method which all the philosophers of reason, without exception, pursue. In different ways, according to the special objects they have in view, they all alike presumed to set certain absolute and impassable limits to human reason (which, however, by some slight turn or other, they soon dextrously contrive to transgress) in order to bring within their system of absolute science—which is at best but a dead semblance—all that it will hold, and even what it can not contain. Quite different, however, is it with the truth, and with that living science which we take for the basis of our speculations. For from it it appears that the soul of man, however liable it may be to manifold error, is, nevertheless, capable of receiving the divine communications. Since, then, man can possess as many of these higher branches of knowledge, and can learn as much of divine things as it is given to him to know, and since, at the same time, it is God himself who is the primary source from which all man’s knowledge flows, and his guide to truth—who shall determine the measure and fix the limits—who shall dare to say how much of knowledge and of science God will vouchsafe to man?—who shall venture to prescribe the limits beyond which His illumination can not pass? This, it is evident, is illimitable. It may go on to an extent which, at the beginning, man would not have believed to be possible. In a word, though of himself, and by his own unassisted reason, man is incapable of knowing any thing, yet through God, if it be his will, he may attain to the knowledge of all things. And yet it is true, though in a very different sense from that intended by these philosophers of reason, that man’s knowledge is in reality limited. No absolute limit, indeed, is set to it. Yet because it is a mixed knowledge, composed of outward tradition and inward experience, and is founded on the perceptions of the external and internal senses, therefore is it made up of individual instances, extremely slow in its growth, and in no respect perfect and complete, and scarcely ever free from faults and deficiencies. Consequently, when considered in its totality, and as pretending to be a whole, it is invariably imperfect. But this character of imperfection belongs, in fact, to all real science, as derived from the experience of the senses. Seldom, indeed, is the first impression free from the admixture of error; numberless repeated observations, comparisons, essays, experiments, and corrections, which must often be carried on through many centuries, not to say many tens of centuries, are necessary before a pure and stable result can be attained to. In this way all truly human knowledge is imperfect, and “in part;” and although, on the contrary, the false conceited wisdom may parade itself from the very first as fully ripe and complete, yet in a very brief space indeed will its imperfection and rottenness appear.

And, indeed, the character of imperfection shows itself, as in all other human things, so also in the science of nature. From its birth among the earliest naturalists of Greece to its boasted maturity among ourselves, it counts an age of two millenniums and a half of unbroken cultivation. But now if, looking beyond the explanation of single isolated facts, we consider rather our knowledge of nature in its universal system and internal constitution, can we say that physical science has, during the time, made more than, perhaps, two steps and a half of progress? And this slow and toilsome advance which, in a certain sense, never arrives at more than “knowing in part,” is the law of every department of human science. Consequently it may be justly said of the development of man’s science, that with God a thousand years are as a day, and one day as a thousand years.[21] All knowledge drawn from the senses and experience is bound by this condition. It may, no doubt, apply immediately and principally to external experience, which is dependent on the lower and ordinary senses, whether we reckon them according to the number of their separate organs as five, or as three in compliance with a more scientific classification. But it also holds equally good of those which we pointed out and described in the last Lecture as being the four superior scientific senses, the organs of a knowledge founded on a higher and internal experience, the sense, viz., of reason, the sense of understanding, the sense for nature or fancy, and the proper sense for God, which lies in the inmost free will of man. Not merely as the faculty of suggestion [Ahndungsvermogen], is fancy to be regarded as the higher and internal sense for nature, or because it is from this side that the affinity of man, and of man’s soul with nature, is most distinctly revealed, but it also exhibits itself as such in the scientific apprehension of natural phenomena. That dynamical play of the inner life, that law of a living force which constitutes the essence of every phenomenon of nature, is a something so fleeting and evanescent that it can only be seized and fixed by the fancy alone, since, as is now pretty generally allowed by all profound observers of nature, in the abstract notion life eludes the grasp, and nothing remains but a dead formula.

I formerly observed that, in the outer senses, as faculties of the soul subordinate to the fancy, a higher intellectual endowment, as a special gift of nature, is occasionally found to exist, namely, the sense of art, or the eye for beautiful forms, and the ear for musical sounds. But even the lower sense, the more purely organic feeling, is often evolved to higher degrees of susceptibility, which, however, do not fall within the sphere of the feeling for art, but form, as it were, a peculiar and special sense of nature. To this class belong those indescribable feelings of sympathy and inward attraction—the many vivid presentiments of a strange foreboding—traces of which may be observed among many other animals besides man, just as, in the case of musical tones and emotions, a light note of remote affinity seems to bring the soul of man in unison with a correspondent nature soul in the higher members of the brute creation. Numberless are the instances of such forebodings (among which we must reckon also the significant vision or dream) recorded of all times, countries, and spheres of life. No doubt, from their strange nature, and from the manifold difficulties with which man’s mode of observing and narrating these phenomena perplexes the consideration of them, it is any thing but easy, in any individual case, to arrive at a pure result, and to pass a final and decisive sentence. Still, on the whole, the fact can not well be denied, as, indeed, it is not even attempted, by any unprejudiced and profound observer of nature in the present day. But now, if such an immediate feeling of invisible light and life does freely develop and clearly manifest itself as an indubitable faculty and a perfectly distinct state of the consciousness, then assuredly we have herein a new organ of perception and a new natural sense. Though not, indeed, more infallible than any other of the senses, it may, nevertheless, be the source of very remarkable phenomena, which, perhaps, above all others require investigation, in order that their distinctive character may be precisely and accurately determined. It is, however, necessary to remember that the latter is not to be determined by any side-blow of caprice, any more than the electric phenomena of nature and the atmosphere, when they are actually lowering there, are to be got rid of by any such expedient.

It is only just and right, and not inconsistent with true human knowledge, if physical science should commence with the study of man. Still, if we would contemplate man from the side of nature, it seems the safer course to endeavor, first of all, to obtain a clear and leading idea of the whole of his constitution in this respect, rather than to lose ourselves in the contemplation of the special phenomena of a particular sphere. Now, with regard to the whole of man’s organization, the organic body as the third constituent of human existence, I will merely remark that, just as the triple principle of body, soul, and spirit is repeated in the special and narrower spheres of the senses, the instincts, and the passions, and even in the different forms in which a disordered intellect usually manifests itself, so also it admits of a further application to the organic body in general. That most wonderful organization, the marvelous structure of bones and muscles, the outward organic frame, is, as it were, the body in a narrower sense, the pre-eminently material constituent of living bodies. The soul of man—here consequently the organic soul—is in the blood and in the five or six organs whose functions are first of all to elaborate the blood and afterward to provide for its circulation—or perhaps by maintaining a perpetual interchange of the breath and the external air, to keep the vital flame constantly burning on the hearth of life within. A third element—and, indeed, the principal one of the three, though only noticeable in its effects on the brain—exists within the higher senses and functions—in short, in the whole nervous tissue. But it lies not in the nervous filaments themselves: anatomy can not detect it, for it is not visible to the eye. On this account some have called it the æther of the nerves to indicate its incorporeal nature—incorporeal, i.e., relatively to, and in comparison with, the other two constituents of man—the blood-soul, and the external frame—as being the spirit of life in the organic body. Strictly and sharply enough does Holy Writ distinguish this spiritual body (as it calls it) of man from the body of the soul, or the organic blood-soul, considering the former, as it were, the seed of the resurrection, even because at the moment of death this ethereal body-of-light leaves its terrestrial veil to be in due time reunited to it after a more glorious fashion. And death itself is even nothing else than its total departure and painful emancipation from the organic body, on which the features, one might almost say, the physiognomy of corruption stamps itself, immediately that the immortal Psyche, the invisible seed of light and eternity, has put off the tabernacle of this body.

We therefore prefer to follow the more slow but sure course of development pursued by physical science itself, as commenced nearly twenty-five centuries ago by the Greeks. On the whole it began even there with the cognition of man—of his diseases and their cure. The naturalists, indeed, of the present day are in general disposed to laugh at the ideas of nature which were advanced by the first philosophers of Greece, and to despise the hypotheses of water, or air, or fire, as being the essence of all things, which, nevertheless, as the first beginnings of a clearer contemplation and of a higher view of nature, greatly recommend themselves by their extreme simplicity. But however modern observers of nature may be ready to hand these systems over to fancy as so many purely poetical cosmogonies, yet, on the other hand, the present masters of medicine, with greater gratitude and fuller acknowledgment of his merits, reverence Hippocrates as the founder of their art. For, indeed, as such, and not properly as a science, or at any rate as an art far more than as a science, was medicine regarded by its founder and the great masters who came after him. They looked upon it as the art of the diagnosis and treatment of disease, in which the unerring tact of a practiced and happy judgment is of primary importance, and where the rapid and searching glance of genius into the secret laboratories of life or into the hidden sources of disease is, and ever will be, the principal and most essential point. The mere historical acquaintance with the different forms of diseases and their remedies, with botany, and the anatomy of the human body, with the number and structure of its organs, forms merely the materials, the external sphere of medical practice; while the essential qualification is even this penetrating glance which searches out the inmost secrets of the bodily temperament. But now those who have been most richly gifted with this peculiar gift have ever been the last to believe themselves possessed of a perfect science. And yet, inasmuch as that physical knowledge which, by attaining to a complete understanding of life, shall be able to comprehend and explain the mystery of death would alone deserve the name of the science of nature; inasmuch also as the searching glance of the true physician arrives the nearest to such a point, penetrating, as it does, deep into the manifold fluctuation and struggle between the two, and into the secrets of their conflict, this, therefore, is perhaps to be considered as the first germ of life for a future science of nature, which, however as yet undeveloped, has for more than twenty centuries been slumbering on, hidden, as it were, in embryo, in the womb of medical art and lore. The physical, geographical, and astronomical observations of this whole period of gestation, form, it is true, a rich treasury of valuable materials, but they do not give us that profound knowledge, of which alone the physician’s penetrating glance into life and its constitution furnishes the first commencement and essay, however weak.

The question of innate ideas has been often mooted in philosophy. As, however, the essential functions and different acts of thought, together with its several notions, are, properly speaking, nothing but the natural division of man’s cogitative faculty, it is not on their account necessary to suppose such a preliminary intercalation of general ideas into the human mind. And as little necessary is it, in order to explain the universal belief in the existence of a Deity, to suppose that there is in the minds of all men an implanted idea of God; for this would lead to the purely arbitrary hypothesis, of that which is so difficult to conceive—the pre-existence of the spirit or soul of man. And as no created beings can have an idea of God, but those to whom He vouchsafes to communicate it, and to accord a knowledge of His existence, so can He bestow this privilege the very instant He pleases, without the intervention of any innate idea expressly for that end. And yet I am disposed, and not, I think, without reason, to assume that man, as at present constituted, does possess one, though only one, species of inborn ideas, viz., an innate idea of death. This, as a false root of life, and a true mental contagion, produces a dead cogitation, and is the origin of all dead and dead-born notions. For this idea of death, whether hereditary or inoculated in the soul, is, as its peculiar but fundamental error, transferred by the mind of man to every object with which it comes in contact. And thus, in man’s dead cogitation, the surrounding world and all nature appears to him a similar lifeless and inert mass, so long as sitting beneath this shadow of spiritual death, his mind [geist] has not sufficient strength to work its way out of its dark prison-house into the light. For not at all without higher aid, and even with it only slowly and tardily, does man discover that all that is really and naturally dead is within himself, or learn to recognize it for what it truly is, a something eminently null and naught. Another species of this false and dead conception of nature presents itself under the form of multiplicity. In this view nature is represented as forming something like a vast sandhill, where, apart from the pile they thus form together and their aggregation in it, the several grains are supposed to have no connection with each other; while, however, they are so diligently counted, as if every thing depended on their right enumeration. But through the sieve of such an atomistic, which would break up the universe into a number of separate and absolute individualities, the sand will ever run, however often and painfully man may strive to reckon or to measure the infinity of these grains of nature. Mathematical calculation and measuring hold the same place in physical science that is held in every living language by conjugating and declining, and other grammatical rules, which, in truth, are but a species of mathematical formulæ. In learning a foreign and especially a dead language, these are indispensable and necessary aids, which greatly promote and facilitate its acquisition; so also mathematics furnish indispensable helps and a most valuable organon for the cognition of nature. But with them alone man will never learn to understand even a word, not to talk of a whole proposition, out of nature’s strangely-sounding and most difficult hieroglyphics.

Somewhat different is it, when man seeks to understand the true living geometry in nature herself, i.e., attempts to discover the place which the circle and eclipse (passing from these up to the spheres in their sidereal orbits), or which the triangle, the square, the hexagon, and so forth, assume in the scale of its creations—or when, in a similar spirit, he investigates and ascertains the really dominant rule in the arithmetic of life; those numbers which the physician observes in the periodic developments of life, and which, in the fluctuating states of an abating and heightening malady, enable him, under certain conditions, to predict the moment of its crisis. Of a still higher kind is that spiritual, we might almost call it divine chronology, which, in universal history, marks out definite epochs of the mental development of the human race, and traces therein the influence of certain grades of life, or ages of the world, and the alternating phases of disease in whole communities, and those decisive moments and great critical emergencies in which God Himself appears as the healing Physician and Restorer of life. It was, in all probability, in reference to such an arithmetic, or in some similar sense, that Pythagoras taught that numbers are, or contain the essence of things. For such an arithmetic of life and geometry of nature do afford a positive cognition and a real knowledge. As commonly understood, however, mathematics are nothing more than a formal science—in other words, they are simply a scientific organon, rather than a science. But now, if nature be not regarded as dead, but living, who can doubt that it—or, as we are now speaking of man’s nearest neighbor—that the earth is akin to man? Was he not formed out of the dust of the earth, and is he not therefore the son, nay, in truth, the first-born of the earth?—does he not receive from it food and nourishment? and when the irrevocable summons goes forth from above, does he not give back again to its bosom the earthly tabernacle of his flesh? Do not chemists tell us that the principal constituent of the purest wheat-corn has a great affinity to the substance of man’s blood? and does not the blood, moreover, derive one of its ingredients from iron—the principal among the metals of the earth? And are not gold and other metallic substances either wholesome medicines or deadly poisons? And is there not also an inexhaustible store of both in the wonderful varieties of herbs and plants? Do not invigorating and healing springs burst from numberless rocks and fissures of the earth? Is not—to speak only of the heavenly bodies nearest to and immediately connected with our globe—is not the sun’s heat so specifically different from every other kind of warmth, the quickener of all that lives and moves, and for man under a milder clime, as it were, a soft renovating bath? And is not the other and lesser light—earth’s mighty satellite and companion, the moon—the cause of all those changes in the weather and atmosphere, which, from the earliest times, have been acknowledged to be most serviceable and highly beneficial to agriculture? Is not the great pulse of the ocean, in its ebb and flow, measured by it, as well as many periods, of the development of life? And is it not, when its operation is too powerful or violently exciting, the cause of a peculiar disease among men? As, therefore, the musical unisons in the melodious songs of birds, both find and wake a concordant echo in the heart of man, so, too, in a larger scale, the blood-soul of man, with its living pulsation and organic sensibility, is most nearly akin to and sympathizes with the earth and the whole earthly frame. And is not, in all probability, this sympathetic influence between the earth and man reciprocal? Must not, for instance, the respiration of nine hundred millions of human beings have affected the atmosphere? Has not the very air degenerated with the human race, and like it become corrupt and deteriorated? Are not certain pestilential diseases propagated by the air alone, being carried in fixed telluric directions, without material contact or pollution? And if, in answer to the inference which we would draw from these facts, any one should sit down to calculate the number of cubic miles in the atmospheric belt, and argue that the breath and evaporation from ever so many myriads of human beings would be insufficient to have any effect thereon, we might easily retort upon him the equally vast reckoning of the millions of seconds which make up a hundred and more generations, and by which these respirations must be counted. But, however this may be, it does appear that the air must, in primitive times, have been far more pure and balsamic, and more vital and more nutritive, than at present. For before the Flood men required neither flesh nor wine to recruit their strength, and yet, in duration of life and bodily vigor, and above all in energy of will and powers of mind, they far surpassed the sons of a later age; and it was even by the misuse of these great gifts and endowments that they brought down the divine vengeance on their sinful generation. And, lastly, if the earth were wholly without life, how could it, at the creation of the animals of this planetary world, have yielded obedience to the behest of the Creator, as it went forth on the sixth day, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind?” Highly important, moreover, as regards the true estimate of the whole realm of nature as contemplated by the Divine mind, and deeply significant, is the wide interval which, in the Mosaic history of the creation, separates the bringing forth of the beasts by the earth at the command of the Almighty, from the making of man, whereof it is written, “Let us make man in our own image.”

Physical science having thus sluggishly advanced through a definite period and number of centuries—having lived through almost two millenniums in little better than an embryo state—made at last the few steps of progress that it has yet taken. By a more rapid march of time, it hastened to suit itself to the riper age of man, and to come forth itself, as it were, mature, although, in many respects, this is even yet very far from being the case. The principal of these advances of physical science is the invention of the compass. For, in the first place, the phenomenon of magnetism presents a remarkable manifestation of the universal life of the world, which eludes all mathematical calculations of magnitude, while the little piece of this wonderful iron balances by its living agency the whole globe itself. And, in the second place, the results to which it has led have been no less important and marvelous. The magnetic index pointed the way to the discovery of the New World, and to a more perfect acquaintance with the figure of the earth, and thus, through an enlarged observation of geographical and astronomical facts, opened out a grander and more extensive view of the whole planetary system. Of the new world in the other hemisphere, a trace unquestionably is to be found in antiquity in the legend of the island of Atlantis. The general description of this island, as equal in extent to both Asia and Africa together, agrees remarkably with the size of America. But the fable contains the additional circumstance, that, having existed in the Western Ocean in very ancient times, it was subsequently swallowed up by the waves. From this circumstance I am led to infer, that the legend did not, as is generally supposed, owe its origin to Phœnician navigators, who, even if it be true that they did succeed in sailing round Africa, most assuredly never ventured so far westward. Like so much besides that is equally great and grand, and, indeed, far grander, the main fact of the legend seems to be derived from an original tradition from the primeval times, when, unquestionably, man was far better acquainted with his whole habitation of this earth than in the days of the infant and imperfect science of Greece, or even of the more advanced and enlightened antiquity. A vague traditionary notion of its existence lived on from generation to generation. But afterward, when even the Phœnician sailors, however far they penetrated into the wide ocean, were unable to give any precise information about, or adduce any proof of, the fact, the hypothesis was advanced, and finally added to the tradition, that the island had been swallowed up by the sea.

Modern astronomy, at its first rise, was extremely revolting to man’s feelings, which had become, as it were, habituated to the olden theory of the world’s shape. The system of Ptolemy, indeed, with its narrow egotistic conceit of making man the center of the sidereal universe, was as unsatisfactory as it was absurd, and little was lost when it was exploded. But, on the other hand, it was startling, and still has a staggering effect on our minds, to be told, that, when measured by the mathematical standard of the vast distances and periodic times of the planetary system, the earth, for which the Almighty has done such incalculably great things, and on which He has bestowed such high and precious gifts, is, as it were, but a little and insignificant splinter in the vast regions of infinite space. A true and profound science of nature, however, does not allow of the validity of mathematical magnitude as an exclusive standard of the value of things. Whether in a greater or less sphere of existence, it sees and discovers in far other properties the true center of life. If, even in our globe, the living magnetic pole does not coincide with the true mathematical north pole, but lies a considerable distance on one side of it, may it not, without prejudice to modern astronomy, be also the case with the whole planetary system? The first conceptions of nature are rarely, if ever, free from mistakes, and oftentimes, together with great truths, contain also great errors. And while the first fresh impression, the living intuition, ever recommends itself to the general feeling of mankind, and takes deep root therein, the notions, on the other hand, which new discoveries of nature introduce, not unfrequently do violence to the prevalent views as to the shape and form of the old world. Often, indeed, the former run directly counter to what we might call the old family feelings of mankind, which, transmitted through generations from father to son, have become, as it were, a custom of life, a holy habit. Afterward, however, as the new scientific discovery is more perfectly developed, it gradually conciliates the old hereditary and customary feeling of nature. The two at last fall into friendly relations with each other.

Now, in the article of the stars, the cherished creed of nature, professed by all ancient peoples, insisted, perhaps, on no one dogma so earnestly as that there are seven planets. That this deeply-rooted and habitual feeling of men was not uninfluenced by the general consideration of the number seven, is only natural to suppose. For not only does it comprise the three dimensions of time, together with the four cardinal points of space, but it is also found entering, under a variety of combinations, into the life, the thought, and history of men. And in the new astronomy, though the sun and moon have been ejected from the number of the planets, yet the earth has entered into the list, and the deficient member of the system having been discovered, we have again seven planets, as in the olden belief. For it is, to say the least, highly improbable that any new planetary body will ever be discovered beyond Uranus,[22] and as for the small bodies which are situate between Mars and Jupiter, it is pretty generally acknowledged that they are not properly to be counted as planets, from which they are even distinguished by their very names by some astronomers.

And as little ground is there to take exception or offense at modern astronomy, even on that side of it where difficulties were originally most felt and mooted. For Holy Writ was neither written exclusively nor designed pre-eminently for astronomers. In these matters, therefore, as in all others, it speaks the ordinary language which men employ among themselves in the business of daily life.

Now we know that in the pulse of the organic body its regular beating is occasionally interrupted by a hurried circulation or a momentary stoppage. Is it not in the same way possible that the pulsatory revolutions of the great planetary world do not observe, like a piece of dead clock-work, a mechanical uniformity, but are liable to many deviations and irregularities? If, then, a similar stoppage to that which sometimes occurs in the pulse of man, be here also supposable, as produced by a superior power and external influence, then in the case of such an extraordinary interruption, it is a matter of indifference whether it be said of this wonderful moment that the sun stood still, or (as seems to be the fact) that the earth was held in check and rested in its orbit. And, in like manner, for the changing phenomena of the astronomical day, the common expressions are equally true with the scientific, and equally significant. The sun’s rise, the morning dawn, is, for all men, a figure, or, rather, a fact of pregnant meaning, while the setting sun fills all hearts with a melancholy feeling of separation. Equally true, however, is it, and in a symbolical sense it conveys perhaps a still more serious meaning, when we say, in scientific language, “The earth must go down before the sun can rise;” or, “When the earth goes up, then is it night, and darkness diffuses itself over all.” Or if, perhaps, in the new and quickening spring, instead of the old phraseology, “The sun has returned, has come near to us again,” we were to say, “The earth, or at least our side of it, is again brought nearer to the sun,” would it not be as beautiful and significant a description? And happy, indeed, are those periods of the world wherein, to speak in a figurative but moral sense, that earth-soul which rules in the changes of time—the so-called public opinion, has declined toward, and approached more nearly to, its sun.

It is a remarkable, not to say wonderful, fact, that in ancient times the Pythagoreans held the same system of the universe which modern astronomy teaches, though, perhaps, they were not acquainted with the mathematic calculations of its distances. But still more surprising is it, that while they were thus perfectly acquainted with the number of the planets, and even arranged them in the same order that they are placed by modern astronomers, they admitted into their system two stars which we have not. One of these, as the sun of the gods [Geister-sonne],[23] they placed high above the visible sun. The latter, which they named the “counter-earth,” (αντἱχθν) was placed directly opposite to the real earth. It would seem, therefore, that they regarded these two bodies as the invisible centers of the whole sidereal universe, and, as it were, the choir-leaders or choragi of the apparently orderless and scattered host of heaven. Are these two stars now extinct? or is their light too pure and ethereal to penetrate our dense and thickened atmosphere; or, like so much besides, was it little else than a still surviving tradition from the primitive world? This, however, must ever remain conjectural. As for the fact itself, that the Pythagoreans did so teach, and understood by these names, not merely figurative symbols, but real stars, has been placed beyond doubt by modern investigations into the Pythagorean doctrines. At any rate, their knowledge of these stars must have been acquired by some other means than the telescope of modern astronomy, with which, in fact, they were not acquainted, and nothing but some new observation or phenomenon in the sidereal heavens can ever throw light on this matter. And who shall say that even our present astronomical science shall not advance still further, and that it has not closed too soon, and been in all too great a haste to sum up its doubtless most elaborate and complicated calculations?

Thus did the mind of man advance the first step toward the maturity of physical science, by attaining to a more comprehensive survey of the mundane system, and a more accurate knowledge of his own habitation, of this earthly planet. The next step in this sluggish progress was made by the chemical discoveries of modern times, and especially of the French chemists. In a merely negative point of view, these have been important, as establishing the fact that the old elements, water, for instance, and air, which had long been regarded as simple, are themselves decomposable into other constituents and aeriform parts. And, indeed, that such great powers of nature as these are, and must ever remain so long as the present constitution of the world shall last, could only subsist in the reciprocal dynamical relation of several conflicting forces, a profounder glance at nature would of itself have conjectured and presupposed. But in a positive sense, this second step has carried us very far toward the understanding of the hieroglyphics of nature. Those primary elements of things discovered and numbered by that chemical analysis which has subjected to its experiments almost every form and species of matter, constitute, as it were, the permanent material letters and consonants of the natural world around us. On the other hand, the vowels of human language are represented by the fundamental facts of the magnetism of the earth, together with the phenomena of electricity, the decomposition of light, and the chemical chain of the galvanic pile, in which the inner life of the terrestrial force, and of the eternally-moving atmosphere, as well as the soul whose pulse beats therein, finds an utterance, like a voice out of the lowest deep. And thus, by means of an alphabet of nature, which, however, is still most imperfect, we may hope to make a beginning, at least, and to decipher one or two entire words. But modern chemistry has made a more important advance toward a right understanding of nature as a whole. By analyzing and decomposing all solid bodies, as well as water itself, into different forms of a gaseous element, it has thereby destroyed forever that appearance of rigidity and petrifaction which the corporeal mass of visible and external nature presents to our observation. Every where we now meet with living elemental forces, hidden and shut up beneath this rigid exterior. The proportion of aqueous particles in the air is so great, that, if suddenly condensed, they would suffice for more than one flood. And a similar deluge of light would ensue, if all the luminous sparks which are latent in the darkness were simultaneously set free; and the whole globe itself would end in flame, were all the fiery elements that are at present dispersed throughout the world to be at once disengaged and kindled. The investigation of the salutary bonds which hold together these elementary forces in due equilibrium, controlling one by the other, and confining each within its prescribed limits, does not fall within the scope of our present inquiries, as neither does the question, whether these bonds be not of a higher kind than naturalists commonly suppose? More immediately connected with, as also more important for our general subject, is the result which chemical analysis has so indubitably established, that in the natural world every object consists of living forces, and that properly nothing is rigid and dead, but all replete with hidden life. This colossal mountain range of petrified mummies which forms nature on the whole—this pyramid of graves, piled one over the other, is therefore, it is true, a historical monument of the past—of all the bygone ages of the world in the advancing development of death; but nevertheless, there is therein a latent vitality. Beneath the vast tombstone of the visible world there slumbers a soul, not wholly alien, but more than half akin to our own. This planetary and sensible world, and the earth-soul imprisoned therein, is only apparently dead. Nature does but sleep, and will, perhaps, ere long awake again. Sleep generally is, if not the essence, yet, at least, an essential signature and characteristic of nature. Every natural object partakes of it more or less. Not the animals only, but the very plants sleep; while in the vicissitudes of the seasons, and of their influences on the productive surface of the earth, and, in truth, on the whole planet, a perpetual alternation is perceptible between an awakening of life and a state of slumbering repose. Whatever, consequently, partakes, and requires the refreshment of sleep, belongs, even on that account, to nature. Painters, indeed, have given us pictures of sleeping angels or genii; but the pure spirits sleep not, and stand, in truth, in no need of such rest, and their activity is not subject to this necessity of alternate repose.

The comparison of a sentence in the Mosaic history of the creation, with a passage in the Hindoo cosmogony, somewhat similar in kind, but most different in the application, will serve, perhaps, to place this fact in the clearest light. In the former it is said, “God rested on the seventh day.” Now, in this expression there is nothing to startle us. In explaining it, there is no need to have recourse to a figurative interpretation. It does not allude to God’s inmost nature (which admits not of such alternation of states or need of rest), but simply to His external operations. For in every case where an operation of the Deity takes place, whether in history or nature, an alternation between the first divine impulse, and a subsequent period of repose, is not only conceivable but actually noticeable. For the divine impulse or hand is, as it were, withdrawn, in order that this first impulse of the Creator may fully expand itself, and that the creature adopting it, may carry it out and develop his own energies in accordance therewith. But instead of this correct statement, we have, in the Hindoo cosmogony, that “Brahma sleeps.” While he thus slumbers, the whole creation, with its worlds and mundane developments, is said to collapse into naught. Here, then, a single word hurries us from the sure ground of truth and divine revelation into the shifting domain of mythology. Of Him indeed, who is higher than the angels and created spirits, it is no doubt assumed throughout the New Testament that, while on earth, He slept like other men. Once, too, it is expressly stated, that during a great storm, while His disciples were filled with alarm, He was asleep in the hinder part of the ship; but that when He awoke the winds ceased. But here, also, the case is different. While implying many a great object and instructive lesson besides, this passage, like several others, seems designed to prove that our Lord’s body was no mere phantom; but that He took upon Him a real human form, and was, in truth, a man who stood in need of sleep. And from this we may infer, that sleep is so indispensable a condition of natural existence, that even God Himself, as soon as He condescended to enter its limits by taking upon Him a human body, became subject to nature’s essential law of sleep.

This was in Paradise—but with the loss of it man was deprived, in a great manner, of those higher powers of life and those secrets of nature which he had previously possessed and understood. For even in the body of his earthly tabernacle, which had fallen a prey to death, he had become deteriorated, and his organic constitution, as is expressly intimated, fell considerably lower in the scale of sensible existence, and sunk nearer to the level of the brute creation. On this account the cherubic sentinels, with the flaming sword, were placed at the gate of Paradise, that man might not stretch forth his hand to seize again the rights and privileges which he had formerly enjoyed. For now they would only have led to more mischievous abuse and deeper corruption. But since then, many great days of creation have come and gone. Again has the great relation between God and man been restored, and that also between man and the sensible world with the spirits and forces that rule therein, has changed and become new. And now that the beginning is made, and the foundation laid for the Redemption of the world, no man, no one at least who will loyally join the banner of the Redeemer, is forbidden, but every one has freely offered to him the divine, flaming, two-edged sword of the Spirit—or of the Word, and of the thoughts of the heart united to Him, enlightened by Him, and emanating from Him. This fact of itself furnishes at once the answer to the question concerning the secrets of nature, whether, since they are no longer to be kept close from man, impure and wicked hands may drag them to the light, or whether it be not better that they should be touched by the holy and conscientious alone, and faithfully guarded with a pious reserve and religious delicacy.

And here the very context suggests naturally the consideration of the last of the three steps which, following the course marked out for it by God, the human mind has at last made in very modern times toward a true physical science, and a right understanding of the most inmost secrets of nature. It consists in a closer observation and a commencing recognition of a sacred thread of ensouled life—of an internal soul-like link which holds together the whole frame of nature. The thing and force itself are as old as the world and every sphere of existence—all the leaves of tradition and history are full of its manifestations and effects. But the methodical observation and treatment of these phenomena (in which alone the true scientific character consists) dates its commencement within little more than half a century ago. To speak, therefore, agreeably to the measure of time in the slow development of science, it is of yesterday or the day before; and it is even on this account also that I have been constrained to count this third and last advance toward a higher science of nature, as nothing more than a half-step. For it is only a beginning which as yet has gained no firm footing in the minds of men, and, moreover, besides the right and direct road, it has already opened many by-paths of possible error. This only direct road, that higher standard of correct judgment which at the very commencement we alluded to as the guiding rule in these matters, must be sought by philosophy in that divine sword of the Spirit which pierces even to the marrow of life, dividing soul and spirit, and which also is a discerner of spirits. But, if another standard and a higher tribunal is to be set up, then I must leave it to others who, perhaps, know more about the matter than I do, and are better qualified to decide upon it. This spiritual warfare, at any rate, can not be much longer eluded or avoided. O that men would take therein Holy Writ exclusively for their guide! For it, indeed, regards the whole of life, and every important moment of it, as a conflict with invisible powers; as also it tacitly implies, or expressly intimates that the whole sensible world is to be looked upon as nothing else than an almost transparent, and, at all events, a very perishable veil of the spiritual world. To the leader of the rebel spirits the Bible ascribes so great an influence in creation, that it calls him the prince, nay, even the god of this world—the ruler of its principalities and powers. And in order that this might not be taken in a mere figurative sense, and be understood only of a race of men morally corrupt and depraved, these spiritual potentates are in other places expressly called the elementary powers of nature—powers of the air, which in this dark planetary world of ours is compounded of light and darkness, and ever struggling between life and death. The true key and explanation of the whole may, however, lie in the simple sentence—“Death came into the world by sin.” As, then, by the death of the first man, who was not created for, nor originally designed for death, death has passed upon the whole human race; so by the earlier fall of him, who had been the first and most glorious of created spirits, death passed upon the universe—that eternal death whose fire is unquenchable. Hence it is written: “Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the earth”—as the mere grave of that eternal death—“was without form and void;” but the “spirit of God moved on the face of the waters,” and therein lay the first germ of life for the new creation. We here see the difference between all heathen systems of natural philosophy and a divine knowledge of nature, i.e., one acquired in and by God, and also the key for a right understanding of the latter.

If now the dynamic play of the living forces of nature, which is unquestionably a living entity, and has a life in itself though not indeed of and from itself—if this dynamical alternation between life and death be regarded as a simple fact, and man is content to rest there, without seeking to explain it by a higher principle, then will he have ever the self-same One—an all-producing, all-absorbing, ruminating monster, whether we express it poetically, as in mythology, or in the scientific formularies of physiology. Quite different is it, however, if this great pyramid has been built upon the foundation of eternal death. Then is the whole creature of this earthly planet and sensible world merely a commencing life which, so long as the pyramid is still unfinished and incomplete, is, in parts, perpetually relapsing into death—into actual death, or at least into diseases and fractures of various kinds, which are only so many principia or germs of death. Then is nature itself nothing less than the ladder of resurrection, which, step by step, leads upward, or, rather, is carried from the abyss of eternal death up to the apex of light in the heavenly illumination. For, understanding it in this sense, it is impossible to think of nature without remembering at the same time the divine hand which has built this pyramid, and which, along this ladder, brings life out of death. This view, moreover, accounts for the fact, that a state of slumber is essential to nature, and furnishes an explanation why that perpetually-recurring collapse into sleep, which to us appears so near akin to death, should be nature’s proper character. And just as the consuming fire of death appears in the more highly-organized beings to be somewhat subdued and restrained—mitigated or exalted into the quickening warmth of life—so also sleep is only the more than half-enlightened brother of death. And indeed as such, and the lovely messenger of hope to immortal spirits, was he ever regarded and described by the ancients; but that which for them was little more than a beautiful image of poetry is for us the profoundest of truths.

An exalted view and understanding of nature consists, then, in its being contemplated not merely as a dynamical play of reciprocal forces, but historically in its course of development, as a commencing life, perpetually relapsing into death, ever disposed to sleep, and only painfully raising itself, or, rather, raised and lovingly guided through all the intermediate grades into the light. But beneath the huge tombstone of outward nature there sleeps a soul, not wholly alien, but half akin to ourselves—which is distracted between the troubled and painful reminiscence of eternal death, out of which it issued, and the flowers of light which are scattered here and there on this dark earth, as so many lovely suggesters of a heavenly hope. For this earthly nature, as Holy Writ testifies,[24] is, indeed, subject to nullity, yet, without its will, and without its fault: and consequently in hope of Him who has so subjected it, it looks forward in the expectation that it shall one day be free, and have a part in the general resurrection and consummate revelation of God’s glory, before which both nature and death shall stand amazed—and for this last day of a new creation it sighs anxiously, and yearns with the profoundest longing.

LECTURE V.

OF THE SOUL OF MAN IN RELATION TO GOD.

A DIVINE science of nature—one, i.e., which is ever looking to and has its root in God, unlike the old heathen physiologies—sees something more in nature than a mere endless play of living forces and the alternations of dynamical action. Contemplating it rather as a whole, and in the connection of its several parts, it traces it from the first foundation on which it was originally raised, up to the final consummation which the Almighty has designed it to attain. Now, to such a mode of studying it, nature appears to be in its beginning, as it were, a bridge thrown across the abyss of eternal death and eternal nothingness. And in perfect agreement with this origin or foundation, it exhibits itself at the outset as a house of corruption, a character which, to a certain degree, it subsequently and long afterward retains. After a while, however, this house of corruption is transformed, by the omnipotence of the good Creator, into a laboratory of new life, and finally is raised into a ladder of resurrection, ascending, or, rather, is made to conduct, step by step, to the highest pitch of earthly glorification, in which nature, too, has a promise that she shall partake. This was the subject of the preceding Lecture, and it naturally enough suggests the further question, whether a similar scale of gradual exaltation exists for the human soul, which, even while it is in many respects akin to mother earth and to nature generally, is, nevertheless, far more excellent, and, by its innate dignity, claims to be regarded as the very head and crown of this earthly creation. The inquiry then, whether the soul of man, gradually rising out of the depths of this perishable existence and the bondage of corruption, up to God, can approach nearer to, and finally be totally identified with Him; or at least, whether it is capable of being united in a perfect and lasting harmony with the superior powers of a higher and a diviner region—this will form the theme of our present disquisition. In discussing it, however, our attention will be directed principally to its psychological aspect—its relation, i.e., to the theory of consciousness. For the moral examination of this subject, even if it be not allowable to assume that it, at all events, is well known, belongs to another department of inquiry.

Now, on this head, the following remark immediately and naturally suggests itself to the reflecting mind. Unless the soul be at unity with itself it can not hope ever to be one with, or to attain to an harmonic relation with that Being, who, as he is the one source and principle of all and on whom all depends, is in himself a pure harmony. But so far is this condition from being fulfilled in the actual state of the human consciousness, that the latter appears rather to consist of pure and endless discord. Fourfold, I said, is man’s consciousness; and I called its four conflicting forces, viz., understanding and will, reason and fancy, its four poles, or chief branches, or even the four quarters of the internal world of thought. How seldom, however, do the understanding and will agree together. Does not each of them prefer to follow an independent course of its own? How seldom do men really and perseveringly will and desire what they clearly see and acknowledge and perfectly understand to be the best! And how often, on the other hand, do we understand little or nothing of that, which yet in the inmost recesses of our hearts, we most desire and wish, and most ardently and determinedly resolve upon! Reason and fancy, too, both in the inner thought and in outward life also, are, on the whole, in hostile conflict with each other. Reason would wish to suppress or at least to dispense altogether with fancy, while fancy, caring, for the most part, but little or nothing for the reason, goes its own way. The will, moreover, unceasingly distracted, is never even at peace with itself, while the reason, standing alone in the endless evolution of its own thought, entangles itself at last in a labyrinth of irreconcilable contradictions. The understanding, again, has so many grades and species, and divides itself among so many spheres and functions, that in this respect we might be justified in saying: This one understanding understands not the other, even though it be equally correct both in itself and in its mode of operation. And thus, too, in the individual: his understanding, the sum, i.e., of all that he understands, consists, for the most part, but of rags and fragments of truth, which often enough do not match very well, and seldom, if ever, admit of being made to blend harmoniously together. And so, too, is it in all that belongs to, and is under the influence of fancy. The subjective views, for instance, and conceits of man—the delusions of his senses, the rapidly changing meteors and unsubstantial phantoms of human passion, are things only too well known, self-evident, and universally acknowledged.

So profound, then, even in a psychological point of view, and apart from the multiplied phases which the moral aspect presents, appears the discord which reigns in our whole mind as at present constituted! Dissension seems to be interwoven into its fundamental fabric. Instead, therefore, of saying the human consciousness is fourfold, with equal, if not with greater correctness, we might and ought to say, it is divided, or, rather, split, into four or more pieces. It is common enough to speak of facts of consciousness. And yet how seldom among philosophers is any thing more meant by this expression than the mere thinking of thoughts, in the eternal repetition of the same empty process in which the thinking Ego thinks itself, and by means of which the Me is, as it were, seized in the very act, and then, as the first beginning, the imaginary Creator and Demiurge of the ideal world, this Me is hung out like a gilded pennon from the top of the whole artificial system.[25] The only fact of the consciousness that really deserves to be so named is its internal dissension. And this discord not only reveals itself in thought between the Me and Not Me, but pervades the whole and all its branches, or parts and forms, its species and spheres, in mind and soul, understanding and will, reason and fancy, which every where manifests itself, and of which the thousandfold material discords of man’s outer life is only the reflection—its natural consequence and further development. From this fact of the manifold and ever-varying dissension of the human consciousness an exposition of philosophy might not inappropriately set out, in order from this point to seek the solution of its peculiar problem, and the right road for the attainment of its end. For the problem of philosophy, as contemplated from this side, would consist in the restoration of that original, natural, and true state of the consciousness in which it was at unity and in harmony with itself. It is a leading error of philosophy that it views the present state of the human consciousness as even its right one, which requires only to be raised to a higher power in order to be cleansed from the taint of commonness of the ordinary way of thinking which clings to it among the ignorant and unphilosophical, and thereupon to be comprised in strangely artificial and seemingly most profound formulæ. But by such an involution to a higher power the error is not got rid of, but rather the evil itself is aggravated, since it is contained in the root itself, and is to be found in the inmost structure of the consciousness. Besides, it can not have been the original constitution of man’s mind to be thus a prey to manifold dissension, and split, as it were, into pieces and quartered. This discord is, undoubtedly, in the true meaning of the word, a fact, the only one which every individual can without hesitation vouch for on the immediate and independent testimony of his own experience. For the cause of this well-authenticated fact we have only to look to that event which revelation has made known, of which each man must perceive the sad traces within his own heart. It began with that eclipse of the soul which preceded and commenced the present state of man, and was occasioned by the intervention of a foreign body between it and the sun which gave it light. But if the soul, the thinking as well as the loving soul, be the center of consciousness, then, in this great and general darkening of the center, the entire sphere, in its whole essence and structure, must have been altered. And, consequently, in its philosophical aspect, and apart from all special moral depravity in the independent actions, evil habits and passions of individuals, the soul is no longer what it was originally, as created and designed by the Almighty.