Substance and Shadow

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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.

Life or consciousness unites what sense and reason disunite. — Sir William Hamilton's curious theory of the causal judg- ment. — He finds the cause of a thing in the thing's own en- trails. — Thus he thinks saltpetre is not merely constituted but caused by K O and N 06. — Cause evoked only to explain some breach of natural order. — We never ask the cause of Things, but only of their mutations. — Sir W. Hamilton stul- tifies intelligence by confounding Finiteness with Phenomenal- ity. — They are as distinct as sense and reason. — Cause is adduced to explain ^cts of phenomenal not of fixed existence. — It is not a sensible but a rational inquest. — Cause is a sci- entific rudiment of the philosophic idea of creation. — The force of the caus,al judgment is in its educating or disciplining the intellect 299 CHAPTER XIX.

his optics, to the contemplation of death instead : only unfor- tunately he misnamed that death life; and so, by his great au- thority over men of thought, not of life, stirred up any amount of dreary sepulchral literature. — His pretension to be the Co- pernicus of Philosophy. — His German and Scotch disciples* • 32a CHAPTER XX. The fundamental misconception of the Critical Philosophy. — Kant's dread of Philosophy, lest it plainly avouch creation. — Common sense affirms creation. — Pseudo Philosophy denies it. — Kant's fatal philosophic delinquency, in exteriorating ob- ject to subject. — The extraordinary performances of Fichte, ■ Schelling, and Hegel thereupon. — The testimony of sense one thing ; that of consciousness another. — Kant confounds them. — He thought finite and relative to be one and the same con- c/— ception. — Sense divorces what consciousness marries. — Kant

22 ^he JntroduSlion. us — He may give them totally new and unex- pected issues in harmony with His own univer- sality of love and providence. In other words, let God reveal Himself to my intelligence as a natural man, as a sympathetic partaker of my own corrupt nature, not with any view as my natural reason alleges to condemn and denounce It, but only to purify and exalt it to the measure of His own infinitude, and I shall necessarily love Him, love Him with such a reality and in- tensity of love as reconciles me even to my past natural animosity, and fills mie moreover with His own unspeakable tenderness towards the possible natural animosity of all mankind.

the Dependence of Morality. 45 that our conduct should be visibly self-moved, or date from ourselves exclusively, to the denial of all outward constraint. But then the surface aspect of thills is precisely what the philoso* pher disregards, being above all things careful to seize their substantial or spiritual import, which alone is conformable to absolute truth. At all events it is just this surface aspect of the case which Swedenborg proves to be eminently fallacious, in showing us that the apparent self- hood or freedom we have from nature, is nothing but an appearance, vouchsafed to us in the inr terest of a higher or spiritual evolution, and contingent upon a certain strict equilibrium which the Divine Providence maintains in our nature between the opposing poles of good and evil. Let me briefly illustrate the practical differ- ence on this point between Swedenborg and the popular theologians, by a familiar example.

The profoundest of our sensuous judgments, and the basis of the religious instinct in us, is, that our natural force is final : that far from be- ing strictly incidental to a grander subsequent evolution of the Divine power in us, it is, on the contrary, its own end: thus that the pleasure and the pain, the health and the disease, the strength and the weakness, the growth and the decay, upon whose equilibrium our natural conscious- ness is contingent, are in themselves absolute goods and evils: to be received, the former with thankfulness, as a mark of the Divine favor; the latter with sorrow, as a mark of the Divine dis- pleasure.

But this alternative is wholly lacking in the catastrophe imagined by orthodoxy. Orthodoxy alleges that God makes all things out of noth- ing, out of absolutely no material whatever ; so that if they turn out ill, the responsibility of their aberration in no way attaches to them- selves: for by the hypothesis they have no selfhood or character but what God imposes upon them, being summoned into instant con- sciousness by the creative fiat : and so attaches wholly to their maker. The orthodox concep- tion is that the creature is formed out of abso- lutely nothings and hence is utterly destitute of subjective force or selfhood apart from his ob- jective being: so that any evil which may ap- pear in him attributes itself instantly to the creator, confesses itself exclusively due either to His original want of genius to conceive, or His original want of skill to execute, a perfect work: in short, to some defect in the creative love or wisdom, or both.

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.

No man of Comte's intellectual make has the slightest title to prejudice the question in hand, because he has no apprehension of the spiritual uses of Philosophy, which alone supply the clew to its solution. The grand use of Philosophy is to promote the spiritual understanding in man» by disengaging the infinite in human conception from the grasp of the finite, or what is the same thing, revealing the latent harmony which pre- vails between being and seeming, between sub- stance and form, between spirit and flesh. Evi- dently then the very first requisite to a competent judgment of Philosophy is, that one believe in/ the Infinite at least as much as he believes in the finite, or be quite as unwilling to see religioil merge in science as to see science absorbed by religion. None of these men fulfil this condi- tion. They all admit the Finite, but they scout the Infinite out of sight as a rational cognition. They perfectly believe in science, but they have . a total disbelief in religion save as an early ne- 1 cessity of the scientific intellect, or at best a/ courteous dofling of the hat to Deity. They are consequently all alike incompetent to esti- mate the grandly reconciling genius and func- tion of Philosophy, just as incompetent as a one- legged man would be to run a race, or a one- eyed man to appreciate the stereoscope. It is

cause with constitution. It is only the philoso- pher who is speculatively aux abois that ever finds himself drifting at this helpless and melancholy rate. In practice one never dreams of asking a cause for things^ for fixed existence, but only for the observed vicissitudes to which they are liable. Things we suppose to be created not caused. Phenomena^ that is, the mutations to which things are subject inwardly and out- wardly, we claim to be caused not created. Things have an absolute existence to sense, and never suggest the conception which is implie4 in all causation, that they exist for the sake of something else than themselves. The origin of things, or of finite existence, is a question of pure Philosophy, not of science, all whose attention goes to ascertaining the purely logical relations of unity and variety which characterize finite existence to our apprehension, and noting the purely phenomenal modifications to which its forms are incidentally and accidentally exposed The vulgar designation of the creator as a cause (the First cause) is owing exclusively to this inveterate habit among philosophers, of reducing questions of pure Philosophy (such for example, as the origin of existence) to ques* tions of science, to the extent of envisaging creation itself at last as a mere event in space and time. The question of creation which is a question not about any event in space and time, but about the origin of space and time them- selves, is a purely philosophic question, wholly insoluble by any scientific acumen, and disdain* >

Clearly then Kant was as treacherous to sdi- ence as he was to Philosophy, as disloyal to reason as he was to Revelation, in making the objective sphere of human life fall outside of man's subjectivity or below it, rather than with- in or above it He systematically identified the realm of the not-me with nature instead of God: or if he allowed it any pertinency to the latter designation, it could only be by divesting God meanwhile of every spiritual attribute, and pos- tulating Him as a purely natural existence sep- arated from man by the totality of space and time, or the integrality of nature. It is as in- structive as it is melancholy to observe how the whole current of subsequent philosophic, or rather logical, speculation in Germany reflected the unhappy scientific bias Kant had thus im- pressed upon it, by hastening to precipitate itself into the fatal embraces of Pantheism. For of course if, not negligently but on principle, you exteriorate object to subject, being to seem- ing, substance to form, you necessarily exalt the minor element of thought to the unchallenged primacy of its major element, and consequently end by identifying man with- Deity. Fichte accordingly in accepting without examination the ICantian analysis of knowledge, found him-

man of science attributes certain facts of na- ture to what he calls the influence of gravi- tation, he has or should have no intention to intimate that there is any such thing in na- ture, any such substance or entity, as gravi- tation. The word marks a mere mental gen- eralization on our part of certain widely diffused and various facts of experience, the generalization itself being only an instinctive effort of the common or associate mind of the race to indue itself, by the instrumental- ity of the individual mind, with that perfect scientific form or order which shall constitute its own eventual and permanent self-conscious- ness. All these generalizations of our natu- ral experience are only so many approxima- tions, on the part of the common mind of the race, to the recognition of its own univer- sality and unity. Nature is but the spiritual man turned inside out, or the contents of his otherwise unknown and unimaginable spiritual personality revealed to his senses. It is not a substance, but the shadow of a substance whose reality is altogether spiritual. Yet when you see the energy with which our so-called philosophers pursue cause to its last fastness, and seek to waylay heat and take light cap- tive in the web of their cunning devices, or bleat forth idle prayers to know what after all is electricity and what magnetism, you must inevitably infer that the living and unitary sub- stance they seek under all these shifting forms, the absolute personality they demand under ail