Intelligence

CHAPTER V. A closer exposition of Swedenborg's doctrine of creation. — The law of the creature's subjective constitution. — Nature the realm neither of being nor of not being, but of existence, and hence the iertium quid of which philosophy has always been in search to reconcile God and m:in. It is not the spiritual creation itself, but the shadow of it projected upon a finite intelligence. — Our intelligence conditioned upon nature. — Swe- dcnborg nuikes nature a theatre oi recelatiun exclusively, and denies it any other worth. 31-37 CONTENTS. Sa CHAPTER VL Swedenborg not properlr chargeable with pantheistic or idealist tendencies ; being separated from them by his doctrine of creation, -which makes nature no being but only a seeming, no substance but only a shadow. 38-40 CHAPTER VII.

The hypothesis we are advocating might, if confirmed, considerably mitigate one of the strongest objections to the credibility of the Darwinian theory. A consciousness which should not only determine its brain to prosperous courses, but also by virtue of that hereditary influence of habit (nowadays so generally believed in by naturalists) should organise from generation to generation a nervous system more and more mechanically incapable of wandering from the lines of interest chosen for it at first, would immensely shorten the time and labour of natural selection. Mr. Darwin regards animated nature as a sort of table on which dice are continually being thrown. No intention presides over the throwing, but lucky numbers from time to time fortuitously turn up and are preserved. If the ideas we have advanced concerning the instability of a complicated cerebrum be true, we should have a sort of extension of this reign of accident into the functional life of [p. 16] every individual animal whose brain had become sufficiently evolved. As his body morphologically was the result of lucky chance, so each of his so- called acts of intelligence would be another; and ages might elapse before out of this enormous lottery-game a brain should emerge both complex and secure. But give to consciousness the power of exerting a constant pressure in the direction of survival, and give to the organism the power of growing to the modes in which consciousness has trained it, and the number of stray shots is immensely reduced, and the time proportionally shortened for Evolution. It is, in fact, hard to see how without an effective superintending ideal the evolution of so unstable an organ as the mammalian cerebrum can have proceeded at all.

Thither Science may retreat and hump her strong back against the mockeries and phantasms that people the waste of Being around. Now the essence of the Common-Sense-theory, I take it, is to negate these negations. It obstinately refuses to believe Consciousness irrelevant or unimportant to the rest. It is there for a purpose, it has a meaning But as all meaning, relevancy and purpose are symbolised to our present intelligence in terms of action and reaction and causal efficacy, Common Sense expresses its belief in the worth of Feeling by refusing to conceive of it out of these relations. When a philosophy comes which, by new facts or conceptions, shall show how particular feelings may be destitute of causal efficacy without the genus Feeling as a whole becoming the sort of ignis fatuus and outcast which it seems to be to-day to so many "scientists" (loathly word!), we may hail Professors Huxley and Clifford as true prophets. Until then, I hold that we are incurring the slighter error by still regarding our conscious selves as actively combating each for his interests in the arena and not as impotently paralytic spectators of the game.

The struggle is inherent in man's creatureship 20 His spiritual creation exacts his previous natural formation 22 To what creative excellency is this exaction owing ? 24 LETTER III. The meaning of Infinite Love 26 It means, freedom from self-love, and hence stamps self-love unreal 28 Inferiority of science to philosophy as an intellectual culture 30 Man unreal in se, and made real only by natural redemption 32 Primacy of the heart in belief 3i LETTER IV. Divine truth has first to create the intelligence it afterwards en lightens 35 Its force purely regenerative 33 Persistent Judaism of the Church 39 "Professional" religion the true Antichrist 40 Ritualism, revivalism, radicalism 42 IV CONTEXTS. LETTER V. Sudden demoralization of the writer 43 Almost complete moral imbecility 46 Charm of English landscape 47 Growing delight in nature, and disgust with oneself 48 A friend's account of Swedeuborg 50 I am much interested 51 I resolve to read him 52 LETTER VI.

out so decrepid a doctrine of the Divine name, and our Unitarian or rationalistic pulpits in their turn reply to it in so scant and penurious a strain, that the common mind has grown altogether tired of the senseless jangle, and prefers to take its very unexacting religion and philosophy at the hands of a poet, and that too a pantheistic one. But you don't belong to the common or scientific crowd of men, shut up like so many gregarious sheep to the pens of sense. You are a person first of all of sincere, original thought, taking nothing on trust from other men, despising the servile limits of sensuous obser vation by which their intellect is bound, and think ing out your own conclusions according to the free range of sympathy and intelligence God has given you. And you accordingly can never permanently consent to sell your Divine birthright of freedom, for the paltry mess of pottage these respectable senti mentalists offer you under the name of " destiny." Besides, so active an intellect as yours ought by this time to know that we can have no positive but only a negative action upon this destined life of our race, because our race interests belong exclusively to God, and He is absolute over them. We have no power to promote our race destiny, but by our spiritual regeneration. Every man who becomes regenerate ly abstaining from the commission of evils, in virtue

It is, in fact, only the outward image or shadow of itself which is cast by the inward or spiritual world upon the mirror of our Tudimentary intelligence. And inasmuch as the shadow or subjective image of itself which any object projects of necessity reproduces the object in inverse form, so nature, being the subjective image or shadow of God's objective and spiritual creation, turns out a sheer inversion of spiritual order; exhibits the creator's fulness veiled by the creature's want, — the creator's perfection obscured, or negatively revealed, by the creature's imperfection. Spiritual or creative order affirms the essential unity of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator. Natural or created order must consequently exhibit the contingent or phenomenal oppugnancy of every creature with every other, and of all with the creator; or else furnish no adequate foothold or flooring to the spiritual world....

" I read from the first with palpitating interest. My heart divined, even before my intelligence was prepared to do justice to the books, the unequalled amount of truth to be found in them. Imagine a fever patient, sufficiently restored of his malady to be able to think of something beside himself, suddenly transported where the free airs of heaven blow upon him, and the sound of running waters refreshes his jaded senses; and you have a feeble image of my delight in reading. Or, better still, imagine a subject of some petty despotism condemned to die, and with (what is more and worse)

But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic, and the reflex acts of self-preservation certainly are so. Yet they resemble intelligent acts in bringing about the same ends at which the animals’ consciousness, on other occasions, deliberately aims. Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology?

We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless. Just so we form our decision upon the deepest of all philosophic problems: Is the Kosmos an expression of intelligence rational in its inward nature, or a brute external fact pure and simple? If we find ourselves, in contemplating it, unable to banish the impression that it is a realm of final purposes, that it exists for the sake of something, we place intelligence at tile heart of it and have a religion. If, on the contrary, in surveying its irremediable flux, we can think of the present only as so much mere mechanical sprouting from the past, occurring with no reference to the future, we are atheists and materialists.

to mental states, but of their resultant consequences as well. * * * * * But actions originally prompted by conscious intelligence may grow so automatic by dint of habit as to be apparently unconsciously performed. Standing, walking, buttoning and unbuttoning, piano-playing, talking,