The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

III.

The distance of a question from ordinary thought does not render it any the less important, even for ordinary thinking. How the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge is the most important problem to-day before the human mind. If writers would only take their bearings from the only rational solution that can be given to it, they would find half the books they are writing on the inspiration of the Scriptures, the existence of God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, agnosticism and materialism, unnecessary.

Agnosticism and materialism pass away with a correct theory of knowing. Labor and painstaking thought are involved in the task of getting a right theory of knowledge, but agnosticism and materialism are in line with ignorance and indolence.

So, while few men ever ask themselves how the knowing intelligence and the knowable object get together to form knowledge, millions of men are affected, even in their practical life, by the answer which is given to the question. Someone has said that not more than six men in any one age ever read Plato or understand him. Yet for the six men Plato comes down through the ages. The six men who understand him translate him into the vernacular of the one hundred men who live on the next plane of thought below them.

The one hundred translate him into the common language of one thousand below them. These, in turn, translate Plato into the ordinary thought of the millions below them. So it happens at length that Plato gets so universally known, that not a laborer in the field but wears his hat after one style, rather than another, because Plato wrote.

Doubtless it would have been considered a very unimportant question two hundred years ago, as to whether heat were an igneous fluid or a mode of motion. Perhaps not more than two or three men wrestled with the question for centuries before it was settled. By the masses of the people they were regarded as wasting their time in vain and idle speculation. By an experiment made by Count Rumford, it was put beyond the possibility of doubt that heat was not an igneous fluid, but a mode of motion. Was this a question that concerned the multitudes, that two or three men spent a hundred years talking about and torturing their brains to understand? There is not a single human being in the civilized world to-day whose interests and welfare have not been touched by the settlement of it. There are millions of peasants in Russia who never heard of Count Rumford, or of an igneous fluid, or of caloric, who have this present year been fed by flour sent them by the western millers and transported on the strength of the conclusion that heat is not an igneous fluid, but a mode of motion. Every steam-car that crosses the continent, and every steamboat that crosses the ocean, moves in the wake of this same conclusion. At first we see some algebraic formulas, an array of curves and figures, that practical people said had nothing to do with everyday life. After a while we see the abstract conclusions reached by aid of the algebraic signs, and settled by the test of experiment, translated into steam engines, and transporting even the peasants of India and Mexico from one end of the country to the other. We see the abstract conclusions of the few thinkers turned into steam to spin the people’s clothes and grind the people’s bread.

In 1632 there was born at Wrington, Somersetshire, England, a boy, who was educated at the University of Oxford. In the esteem of his contemporaries he devoted his time to the consideration of subjects of no practical value. In the course of events he put the results of his study into a book known as “The Essay on the Human Understanding.” Few people read it. But the few who did read it started the ideas of it to circulating. They were translated into French and Latin, and were soon potent influences in the intellectual life of Europe. Were they practical and did they concern the ordinary affairs of men? They created the Encyclopedists of France. These learned men were the authors of the radical opinions which cut the people from the moorings of traditional and age-long thought. The fire and the blood of the Revolution were the legitimate expressions of the speculative essay of John Locke that not one in ten thousand ever read. The persons whose heads were cut off in the Reign of Terror must have thought the ideas exceedingly practical that led to the destruction of social and political institutions, that took form in a movement which respected neither law nor property nor life. The speculative opinions of John Locke not only helped to create the French Revolution, but they led to the idealism of Bishop Berkeley, and this in turn to the skeptical philosophy of David Hume. The modern successors of Hume are John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephen, Frederic Harrison, and Professor Huxley, whose contributions have been given to the popular reviews, and which have been read by all intelligent people. Every man in Europe and America has been influenced both in conduct and character by the speculative “Essay on the Human Understanding.”

Locke’s speculative philosophy passed through Berkeley to Hume, and through Hume reached Kant, the great German thinker, and resulted in the “Critique of Pure Reason.” This led to Fichte and Schelling, and finally to Hegel. This led to Heidelberg and the Tübingen school, to Bauer and Dewette, to extreme idealism and rationalism, translated into books and reviews and newspapers, and read by all the people, affecting their thought and life.

Even people who never read, who never open a book or a newspaper, have been influenced by the subtle piece of speculative reasoning given to the world by the great sensational philosopher of England. The spirit of utilitarianism and secularism prevalent throughout the world at the present time is easily traceable to it.