MIND.
The Ancients had a happy conception of mind in their Pantheon of its Powers. They fabled these as gods celestial, mundane, infernal, according to their several prerogatives and uses. It appears their ideal metaphysic has not as yet been surpassed or superseded altogether, as the classic mythology still holds its high place in modern thought and the schools as a discipline and culture. And for the reason that thought is an Olympian, and man a native of the cloudlands, whatever his metaphysical pretensions. It is only as we sit aloft that we oversee the world below and comprehend aright its drift and revolutions. Ixion falling out of the mist, which he illicitly embraced, is the visionary mistaking images for ideas, and thus paying the cost in his downfall. Plumage, wings or none, imagination or understanding, the fledged idea or the footed fact, the fleet reason or slow—these distribute mankind into thinkers or observers. Only genius combines the double gifts in harmonious proportions and interplay, possessing the mind entire, and is a denizen of both hemispheres. The idealist is the true realist, grasping the substance and not its shadow. The man of sense is the visionary or illusionist, fancying things as permanencies, and thoughts as fleeting phantoms. A Ptolemaist in theory, and earth-bound, he fears to venture above his terra firma into the real firmament whereinto mind is fashioned to spring, and command the wide prospect around.
"Things divine are not attained by mortals who understand body merely, But only those who are lightly armed arrive at the summit."
Thought is the Mercury; and things are caught on the wing, and by the flying spectator only. Nature is thought in solution. Like a river whose current is flowing steadily, drop displacing drop, particle following particle of the passing stream, nothing abides but the spectacle. So the flowing world is fashioned in the idealist's vision, and is the reality which to slower wits seems fixed in space and apart from thought, subsisting in itself. But thought works in the changing and becoming, not in the changed and become; all things sliding by imperceptible gradations into their contraries, the cosmos rising out of the chaos by its agency. Nothing abides; all is image and expression out of our thought.
So Speech represents the flowing essence as sensitive, transitive; the word signifying what we make it at the moment of using, but needing life's rounded experiences to unfold its manifold senses and shades of meaning.[[H]] Definitions, however precise, fail to translate the sense. They confine in defining; good for the occasion, but leaps in the dark; at best, guesses at the meanings we seek; parapets built in the air, the lighter the safer; mere ladders of sound, whose rounds crumble as we tread. We write as we speak. The silence bars away the sense, closing shape and significance from us. Here is the mind facing its image the world, and wishing to see the reflection at a glance, a trope. No. The world is but the symbol of mind, and speech a mythology woven of both. Each thing suggests the thought imperfectly, and thought is translatable only by thought. Our standards are ideas, those things of the mind and originals of words.
Thought's winged hand, Marshals in trope and tone The ideal band. Genius alone Holds fast in eye The fleeing God— Brings Beauty nigh— Senses descry Footsteps he trod, Figures he drew, Shapes old and new, The fair, the true, In soul and sod.
Nature is thought immersed in matter, and seen differently as viewed from the one or the other. To the laborer it is a thing of mere uses; to the scholar a symbol and a muse. The same landscape is not the same as seen by poet and plowman. It stands for material benefit to the one, immaterial to the other. The artist's point of view is one of uses seen as means of beauty, that being the complement of uses. His faculties handle his organs; the hands, like somnambulists, playing their under parts to ideas; these, again, serving uses still higher. The poet, awakened from the sleep of things, beholds beauty in essence and form, being thus admitted to the secret of causes, the laws of pure Being.
The like of Persons. Every one's glass reflects his bias. If the thinker views men as troglodytes—like Plato's groundlings, unconscious of the sun shining overhead; men of the senses, and mere makeweights—they in turn pronounce him the dreamer, sitting aloof from human concerns, an unproductive citizen and waste power in the world. Still, thought makes the world and sustains it; atom and idea alike being its constituents. Nor can thought, from its nature, at once become popular. It is the property and delight of the few fitted by genius and culture for discriminating truth from adhering falsehood, and of setting it forth in its simplicity and truth to the understandings of the less favored. Apart by pursuit from the mass of mankind, or at most taking a separate and subordinate part in affairs that engage their sole attention, the thinker seems useless to all save those who can apprehend and avail themselves of his immediate labors; and the less is he known and appreciated as his studies are of lasting importance to his race. Yet time is just, and brings all men to the side of thought as they become familiar with its practical benefits, else the victory were not gained for philosophy, and wisdom justified in him of her chosen children.
Ideas alone supplement nature and complement mind. Our senses neither satisfy our sensibility nor intellect. The mind's objects are mind itself; imagination the mind's eye, memory the ear, ideas of the one imaging the other, and the mind thus rounding its history. And hence the pleasurable perspective experienced in surveying our personality from obverse sides in the landscape of existence—culture, in its inclusive sense, making the tour of our gifts, and acquainting us with ourselves and the world we live in. All men gain a residence in the senses and the family of natural things; few come into possession of their better inheritance and home in the mind—the Palace of Power and Personality. Sons of earth rather by preference, and chiefly emulous for their little while of its occupancy, its honors, emoluments, they here pitch their tents, here plant fast their hopes, and roll through life they know not whither.
Instinct is the fountain of Personal power, and mother of the Gifts. With instinct there may be an embryo, but sense must be superinduced to constitute an animal—memory, moral sentiment, reason, imagination, personality, to constitute the man. The mind is the man, not the outward shape: all is in the Will. The animal may mount to fancy in the grade of gifts; but reason, imagination, conscience, choice—the mediating, creative, ruling powers—the personality—belong to man alone. But not to all men, save in essence and possibility. Man properly traverses the hierarchy of Powers—spiritual, intellectual, moral, natural, animal—their full possession and interplay enabling him to hold free colloquy with all, giving the whole mind voice in the dialogue. Thus:
| Asking for | |||
| The Who? | Will | responds, | ThePerson. |
| The Ought? | Conscience | " | The Right. |
| The How? | Imagination | " | The Idea. |
| The Why? | Reason | " | The Truth. |
| The Thus? | Fancy | " | The Image. |
| The Where? | Understanding | " | The Fact. |
| The When? | Memory | " | The Event. |
| The Which? | Sense | " | The Thing. |
| The What? | Instinct | " | The Life. |
In accordance with this gradation of gifts, man and animals may be classified as to their measures of intelligence respectively; instinct being taken as the initial gift and prompter of the rest in their order of genesis, growth and adaptability: man alone, when fully unfolded in harmony, being capable of ranging throughout the entire scale.[[I]]
Thus:
| Class | |
| I. | Instinct, Sense, Memory,Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience,Personality. |
| II. | Instinct, Sense,Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination, Conscience. |
| III. | Instinct, Sense,Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason, Imagination. |
| IV. | Instinct, Sense,Memory, Understanding, Fancy, Reason. |
| V. | Instinct, Sense,Memory, Understanding, Fancy. |
| VI. | Instinct, Sense,Memory, Understanding. |
| VII. | Instinct, Sense,Memory. |
| VIII. | Instinct,Sense. |
| Man is | ||
| Spiritual as he | experiences | Personality, Thought |
| Moral | " | Choice, Conscience. |
| Intellectual | " | Imagination, Reason. |
| Natural | " | Fancy, Understanding. |
| Brute | " | Memory, Sense. |
| Demonic | " | Appetite, Passion. |
Nature does not contain the Personal man. He is the mind with the brute omitted, or, conversely, the animal transfigured and divinized by the Spirit. It is a slow process; long for the individual, longeval for the race. Centuries, millenniads elapse, mind meanwhile travailing with man, the birth arrested for the most part, or premature, the translation from germ to genius being supernatural, thought hardly delivered from spine and occiput into face and forehead, the mind uplifted and crowned in personality.
Pure mind alone is face, Brute matter surface all; As souls immersed in space, Ideal rise, or idol fall.
The lapsed Personality, or deuce human and divine, has played the prime part in metaphysical theology of times past, as it does still. But rarely has thought freed itself from the notion of duplicity, triplicity, and grounded its faith in the Idea of the One Personal Spirit, as a pure theism, and planted therein a faith and cultus. If we claim this for the Hebrew thought, as it rose to an intuition in the mind of its inspired thinker, it passed away with him; since Christendom throughout mythologizes, rather than thinks about his attributes; is divided, subdivided into sects, schools of doctrine; each immersed so deeply in its special individualism as to be unable to rise to the comprehension of the Personal One. Nor, considering the demands mind makes upon the senses,—these inclining always to idolatry,—is it surprising that this spiritual theism, seeking its symbols in pure thought, without image graven or conceived, should find any considerable number of followers. Yet a faith less supersensuous and ideal, any school of thought, code of doctrine, creed founded on substance, force, law, tradition, authority, miracle, is a covert superstition, ending logically in atheism, necessity, nihilism, disowning alike personality, free agency. Nature is sufficient for the creature, but person alone for man, without whose immanency and inspirations, man were heartless and worshipless. The Person wanting all is wanting. For where God is disembosomed, spectres rule the chaos within and without.[[J]]
"Make us a god," said man: Power first the voice obeyed, And soon a monstrous form Its worshippers dismayed; Uncouth and huge, by nations rude adored, With savage rites and sacrifice abhorred.
"Make us a god," said man: Art next the voice obeyed, Lovely, serene, and grand, Uprose the Athenian maid: The perfect statue, Greece with wreathed brows, Adores in festal rites and lyric vows.
"Make us a god," said man: Religion followed art, And answered, "Look within; Find God in thine own heart— His noblest image there, and holiest shrine, Silent revere—and be thyself divine."
Heaven hell's pit copes: Nor fathoms any sin's abyss, or clambers out, Save by the steps his choice hath delved.
The gods descend in the likeness of men, and ascending transfigure the man into their Personal likeness. Descending below himself he debases and disfigures this image; as by choice he leaps upwards, so by choice he lapses downwards. Yet, while free to choose, he sinks himself never beneath himself absolutely, his beneath subsisting by his election only. His choices free or fetter, elevate or debase, deify or demonize his humanity. Superior to all forces is the Spirit within, doing or defying his determinations, ever holding him fast to the consequences. Obeying its dictates or disobeying, frees or binds. It has golden chains for the good, for others iron. Love is its soft, yet mighty curb; freedom its easy yoke; fate its fetter.
Nor man in evil willingly doth rest, Nor God in good unwillingly is blest.
There is no appeal from the decisions of this High Court of Duty in the breast. The Ought is the Must and the Inevitable. One may misinterpret the voice, may deliberate, disobey the commandment, but cannot escape the consequences of his election. The deed decides. Nor is the Conscience appeased till sooner or later our deserts are pronounced—The welcome "well done," or the dread "depart."
"'Tis vain to flee till gentle mercy show Her better eye. The further off we go The swing of justice deals the mightier blow."
Only the repenting consciousness of freedom abused restores the lost holiness, redeems from the guilty lapse—the sin that in separating us from the One, revealed the fearful Doubleness within, opening the yawning pit down which we stumbled, to become the prey of the undying worm.
"Meek love alone doth wash our ills away."
And with love enough, knowledge were useless. It comes in defect of love. Exhaustless in its sources, love supersedes knowledge, being the proper intellect of spirit and spring of intuition—God being very God, because his love absorbs all knowledge and contains his Godhead. Knowing without loving is decease from love, and lapse from pure intellect into sense. Knowledge is not enough. The more knowledge, the deeper the depths left unsounded, the more exacting our faith in the certainty of knowing. Our faith feels after its objects, if haply by groping in the darkness of our ignorance we may fathom its depths, and find ourselves in Him who is ever seeking us. "Although no man knoweth the spirit of a man save The Spirit within him, yet is there something in him that not even man's spirit knoweth."
"WHO placed thee here, did something then infuse Which now can tell thee news."
| CATEGORIES OF SPEECH, | ||
| being: | ||
| Flowing, | Fixed, | |
| Subjective. | Objective. | |
| i. | iii. | ii. |
| Actions, | Participles, | Things, |
| Verbs. | Nouns. | |
| iv. | ||
| Qualities, | ||
| Adverbs, Adjectives. | ||
| v. | ||
| Relations, | ||
| Prepositions, Conjunctions,Pronouns. |
[I] "One would think nothing were easier for us than to know our own mind, discern what was our main scope and drift, and what we proposed to ourselves as our end in the several occurrences of our lives. But our thoughts have such an obscure, implicit language, that it is the hardest thing in the world to make them speak out distinctly; and for this reason the right method is to give them voice and accent. And this, in our default, is what the philosophers endeavor to do to our hand, when, holding out a kind of vocal looking-glass, they draw sound out of our breast, and instruct us to personate ourselves in the plainest manner."—Lord Shaftesbury.
[J] "The first principle of all things is Living Goodness, armed with Wisdom and all-powerful Love. But if a man's soul be once sunk by evil fate or desert, from the sense of this high and heavenly truth into the cold conceit that the original of all lies either in shuffling chance or in the stark root of unknowing nature and brute necessity, all the subtle cords of reason, without the timely recovery of that divine torch within the hidden spirit of his heart, will never be able to draw him out of that abhorred pit of atheism and infidelity. So much better is innocency and piety than subtle argument, and sincere devotion than curious dispute. But contemplations concerning the dry essence of the Godhead have for the most part been most confusing and unsatisfactory. Far better is it to drink of the blood of the grape than to bite the root of the grape, to smell the rose than to chew the stalk. And blessed be God, the meanest of men are capable of the former, very few successful in the latter; and the less, because the reports of those that have busied themselves that way have not only seemed strange to most men, but even repugnant to one another. But we should in charity refer this to the nature of the pigeon's neck than to mistake and contradiction. One and the same object in nature affords many different aspects. And God is infinitely various and simple; like a circle, indifferent whether you suppose it of one uniform line, or an infinite number of angles. Wherefore it is more safe to admit all possible perfections of God than rashly to deny what appears not to us from our particular posture."—Henry More.