Cosmos

The kingdom of God to come on earth. — Man is a micro- cosm because the cosmos is a grand man. — The heart of men is much in advance of their head. — Regeneration impossible save through a redemption of Nature. — In Christ God is re- vealed as a glorified Natural man : hence Christianity por- tends a Divine innocence for man in the sphere of his natural life. — Our religious life is a standing opprobrium to the Divine name. — The life which Christ inaugurates in human nature is not post-mortem existence. — God is perfect Man 324 CHAPTER XIV. The thorough redemption of Nature in Christ. — Christ is not a spirit but a Divine natural man. — Swedenborg scouts the notion of any arbitrary power in God, there being no infant who has not more. — Angel and devil both involved in Man.' — Influence of the Christian truth in the natural sphere of the mind. — In Divine order the First is last, and the Last first. — Hell is glorified in conventional, Heaven in true, Man- hood 241 CHAPTER XV.

The mother fallacy which breeds all these petty fallacies in the popular understanding, con- sists in attempting to conceive of an infinite power acting finitely, or under the limitations of space and time. Natural religion conceives that there was originally a space where, and a time when, creation was not. It conceives ac- cordingly that these two great idle wildernesses of time and space were inhabited by a mute inactive Deity alone ; and that this extraordinary degrades its Spiritual Contents. 69 Deity, tired at last of slumbering in eternal sloth, sent forth a great creative shout, or succession of shouts, which made the existing cosmos sud- denly appear as if it had always been.

prejudices. You both alike maintain in truth, whatever you may do in fact, that nature is the hmit, not the starting-point, of creation ; that it is the controlhng end, not the servile means or pliant method, of the creative power: the consequence being that you, ]\[r. Mansel, from your point of view, have no occasion for a god who is not the jealous and implacable rival of nature ; nor you, Mr. INlill, from your point of view, any occasion for one who is not its unlimited servant, its idle and abject tool." The regeneration, then, which Swedenborg's spiritual dis- closures bring to faith and to science quite equally consists in a totally new conception of the creative power, whereby, on the one hand, nature, or the cosmos, is turned from an objective into a subjective work of God, which alone it is ; and man, on the other hand, is turned from a subjective work of God, which he is not, into an objective work, which alone he truly is.

It thus appears that Mr. Mansel and Mr. Mill cannot help differing egregiously from Swedenborg in the estimate they make of Christ's nativity, inasmuch as they both alike look upon nature as an absolutely fixed existence, as an essentially finite quantity, wholly incapable of any adjustment or approx- imation to the infinite ; while Swedenborg regards it as an essen- tially indeterminate quantity, or indefinite existence, being in itself neither infinite nor finite, but the exact neutrality or indif- ference of the two, and standing therefore in equal and unforced proximity to either interest. Both Mr. Mansel and Mr. Mill conceive nature herself — the cosmos — whatever they may make of her shifting specific forms, to be her own end, to exist upon her own absolute basis, as exhibiting no normal subser- viency to a distinctly superior style of life.

Protoplasm means intellectual chaos ; means the resolution of the existing cosmos into absolute form lessness or disorder. That is to say : you cannot arrive at protoplasm experimentally or livingly, ex cept by disowning our present cosmical form and order, except by eliminating all that you organically are, with all that is contingent upon your organiza tion, namely : all your experience of life and con sciousness, every fact of appetite and emotion, of reason and imagination, of passion and action, every thing, in short, that constitutes you a living person and so stamps you of the slightest moment to phi losophy. Protoplasm, in truth, as an intellectual symbol, means the extinguishing of the soul or life or being of things, and the permission of mere bodily existence to them, without any source either for them to exist, or go forth, from, but what is essentially in ferior to themselves. For no one will pretend that TO THE INTELLECT. 245

13 Introd. to Hume, §§ 146, 188. It is hard to tell just what this apostolic human being but strenuously feeble writer means by relation. Sometimes it seems to stand for system of related fact. The ubiquity of the ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ (see p. 196) in his pages, his incessant leaning on the confusion between the thing known, the thought that knows it, and the farther things known about that thing and about that thought by later and additional thoughts, make it impossible to clear up his meaning. Compare, however, utterances in the text such others as these: “The waking of Self-consciousness from the sleep of sense is an absolute new beginning, and nothing can come within the ‘crystal sphere’ of intelligence except as it is determined by intelligence. What sense is to sense is nothing for thought. What sense is to thought, it is as determined by thought. There can, therefore, be no ‘reality’ in sensation to which the world of thought can be referred.” (Edward Caird’s Philosophy of Kant, 1st ed. pp. 393-4.) “When,” says Green again, “feeling a pain or pleasure of heat to be connected with the action of approaching the fire, am I not receiving a relation of which one constituent, at any rate, is a simple sensation? The true answer is No.” “Perception, in its simplest form . . . — perception as the first sight or touch of an object in which is seen or touched is recognized — neither is nor contains sensation. ( Contemp. Rev., xxxi. pp. 746, 750.) “Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality.” “Mere feeling, then, as a matter unformed by thought, has no place in the world of facts, in the cosmos of possible experience.” (Proglegomena to Ethics, §§ 46, 50.) — I have expressed myself a little more fully on this subject in mind, x. 27 ff.

The monstrously lopsided equation of the universe and its knower, which we postulate as the ideal of cognition, is perfectly paralleled by the no less lopsided equation of the universe and the doer. We demand in it a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match. Small as we are, minute as is the point by which the Cosmos impinges upon each one of us, each one desires to feel that his reaction at that point is congruous with the demands of the vast whole, that balances the latter, so to speak, and is able to do what it expects of him. But as his abilities to ‘do’ lie wholly in the line of his natural propensities; as he enjoys reaction with such emotions as fortitude, hope, rapture, admiration, earnestness, and the like; and as he very unwillingly reacts with fear, disgust, despair, or doubt, — a philosophy which should legitimate only emotions of the latter sort would be sure to leave the mind a prey to discontent and craving.

When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, “I am sufficient as I am.” This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness, — this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it, — is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational. Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes, being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But this fluency may be obtained in various ways; and first I will take up the theoretic way.

Even if it were true that, for aught we know to the contrary, the substance might develop at any moment a wholly new set of attributes, the mere logical form of referring things to a substance would still (whether rightly or wrongly) remain accompanied by a feeling of rest and future confidence. In spite of the acutest nihilistic criticism, men will therefore always have a liking for any philosophy which explains things per substantiam. A very natural reaction against the theosophizing conceit and hide-bound confidence in the upshot of things, which vulgarly optimistic minds display, has formed one factor of the scepticism of empiricists, who never cease to remind us of the reservoir of possibilities alien to our habitual experience which the cosmos may contain, and which, for any warrant we have to the contrary, may turn it inside out to-morrow. Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr. Spencer, whose Unknowable is not merely the unfathomable but the absolute-irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought, it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the ordinary philistine feels his security. But considered as anything else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more reassuring kind. We may then, I think, with perfect confidence lay down as a first point gained in our inquiry, that a prime factor in the philosophic craving is the desire to have expectancy defined; and that no philosophy will definitively triumph which in an emphatic manner denies the possibility of gratifying this need.

It is the most obvious fallacy in the world, and the only wonder is that all the world should not see through it. It is the result of nothing but an invincible blindness from which we suffer, an insensibility to the inner significance of alien lives, and a conceit that would project our own incapacity into the vast cosmos, and measure the wants of the Absolute by our own puny needs. Our christian ancestors dealt with the problem more easily than we do. We, indeed, lack sympathy; but they had a positive antipathy for these alien human creatures, and they naively supposed the Deity to have the antipathy, too. Being, as they were, ‘heathen,’ our forefathers felt a certain sort of joy in thinking that their Creator made them as so much mere fuel for the fires of hell. Our culture has humanized us beyond that point, but we cannot yet conceive them as our comrades in the fields of heaven. We have, as the phrase goes, no use for them, and it oppresses us to think of their survival.