IX.
The emphasis is to be kept on the social rather than the individual side of human nature; not that personality may be lost, but that it may be gained.
The social mass that constricts and squeezes the single life until the virility of self-assertion and the right of private initiative are destroyed, is no improvement on Bedouin isolation. The latter brutalizes life, while the former eviscerates it. The eye does not lose its capacity for sight, and its place of peculiar responsibility by being brought into reciprocal relations along with other organs in the same body. It would have no meaning and no power of vision apart from relations with other organs. The ear is not discounted, nor are its wonderful functions belittled amid the manifold members which work together in the same human frame. Its position of honor is secured to it by the organic relations it sustains to the other members. The foot, the hand, and the tongue find themselves and their uses as they unite together in one living whole. The lone Bedouin, with no laws and no relations, seems to have all liberty, but in reality he has none. He is as completely without meaning as would be the finger separated from the hand. The man of whom nature is a prophecy is not the being in the woods whose home is a cave and whose food is wild meat; but it is the man in society, whose home all woods and metals and stones have helped to build, and whose food all soils and skies and seas have helped to produce.
The emphasis is to be kept on the social side of human nature, because it is through that side of himself that man is to pass into the world-wide work and the glorious destiny for which he is fitted. Through that side of himself he moves out into order, and strength, and freedom. All men whose names are cherished in history, passed into place, influence, and honor through the social side of human nature.
In passing through the social side of himself, the life man finds is a million times larger and richer than the life he loses. That men might find the life that belonged to them, the only life worth living, the tendency from the first has been toward the solidarity of the race. The relations growing out of such solidarity are constitutive of the being of each man. The important properties of an acid cannot be known, when it is considered out of relation with an alkali. What a thing is for another, that it is in itself. So what a man is through relations with others, that he is in himself. But what he is in himself cannot be known until he comes into relations with others.
Solidarity is not to swamp single lives, but single lives are to come to all that is peculiar and high in themselves through solidarity. The universe is to preserve relations with each private spirit. By the organization of men into one social whole, provision is made for each man to participate in the life of humanity. It is intended that all the oceans of life shall reach, through their waves, the shores of each man’s being, and leave deposits of all their wealth in each man’s spirit. When we speak of the horse, the eagle, the whale, it is understood that we are using generic terms, and are intended to refer to no particular horse or eagle or whale. Yet in each horse the species is reproduced, and in each eagle the species is epitomized, and in each whale the whole whale type is summarized. This is done in the case of the lower animals, without their thought or volition. No universal relations are necessary among whales, for each whale to have within itself all the peculiarities and furnishments possessed by all whales. The species are to be realized in each man, too; but this is to be accomplished through social relations among all men. All the men in the world must touch each man, to call forth the capacities which lie folded within his life. Humanity, as parcelled out in nations, generations, epochs, must lift itself into the being of each man; as the ocean, parcelled out in Atlantics, Pacifics, Indians, Arctics, Antarctics, lifts itself into each wave.
Power, parcelled out in gravitation, heat, and electricity surrounding the globe; advertised in every apple’s fall, declared in every flash from the clouds, and present in every sunbeam; stands ready to make universal brotherhood, not simply an ideal, running through the dreams of poets and prophets, but an actual fact. The recognition of power, as the provision made for the social nature of man, is enabling us to realize the dreams of prophets and poets.
TRUTH.
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought. One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deciphering the word fraternity.
“All light is at some point condensed into a flame; likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. The man dead, the epoch is concluded: God turns over the leaf. Dante dead, a period is placed at the end of the thirteenth century: John Huss may come. Shakspere dead, a period is placed at the end of the sixteenth century. After this part, who contains and epitomizes all philosophy, may come the philosophers—Pascal, Descartes, Molière, Le Sage, Montesquieu, Diderot, Beaumarchais.”
CHAPTER III.
THE PROVISION FOR THE INTELLECTUAL NATURE OF MAN.
Truth and reality stand for the same thing. Reality is truth out of the mind, and truth is reality in the mind. Reality is objective truth, and truth is subjective reality. But all reality is in relation to mind; objective reality to the divine mind, and subjective reality to the human mind. Objective reality is the realized thought of God; subjective reality is the realized thought of man. The correspondence of thoughts to things is called scientific truth. Objective reality is truth, because it corresponds to the thought of God. Knowledge in the human mind is truth when it corresponds to objective reality or the expressed thought of God. When words and conduct correspond to knowledge, we have truth in the domain of morals.
In saying that objective reality is the realized thought of God, we denote its unity. This is not to destroy the particulars of which it is composed, or to swamp their individuality in an inarticulate mass, but simply to indicate their oneness.
When the observer looks out into the universe, which includes and shuts him round, he is impressed by the infinite varieties and diversities which everywhere meet his gaze. No two things are alike. No two leaves, no two drops of water, no two snowflakes, no two apples, no two faces. Every particular thing seems to be persistently determined to differ, in some respect at least, from everything else. The history of true knowledge begins, however, with the observation of resemblance and similarity—just beneath the surface of difference and variety. The lightning that appears on the bosom of the cloud, like the writing of some awful fiend, is seen to be the same with the gentle sparks emitted when a tag of silken ribbon is drawn briskly between the fingers. The power that pulls the ball to the ground is seen to be the same as that which keeps the sun in his place.
The plant lifts itself up as but a sum of organized varieties; but every part, corolla, petal, and stamen, is known to be only modified leaf. Keeping to their silent and lonely rounds since the dawn of time, are the stars in the heavens, differing in color, orbit, and size, but we now know that to understand the elements of which they are composed, we have only to lift our foot and see what the constituent parts of the earth beneath it are. Were objective reality one amorphous mass, it would not be intelligible. It is one and many, particular and universal, singular and manifold, concrete and discrete. All things cohere in a centrality that includes and commands them.
So true is it that unity underlies all difference, that no single variety can be understood, only as it is considered in relation with the whole of which it forms a part.
No one could ever get a correct notion of a particular star by directing his entire attention to the study of that star. To understand it, he must study it through the system of which it forms a member, and in connection with all laws and forces related to it. Oxygen separate and distinct from other elements has no meaning. It gets its definition and significance from the things to which it is related. What it is for rocks and water and trees and globes, that it is in itself. But it must be seen in connection with these before we can know what it is in itself. What an acid is for an alkali and for other things, that it is in itself. Alone, out of relation, we could know absolutely nothing of it. Society is the organism that reveals to each person the nature of his own life. Out of contact and touch with other human beings, no one would ever know anything concerning himself.
Objective reality embraces manifold variety, but it is the unity that presides over it that makes it intelligible. Difference provokes questions and unity answers them.
In calling objective reality truth, we tacitly assume the laws and relations constitutive of it. We could not speak of the truth of the globe, had there been no method in its formation, no order in its development, no system in its parts, and no relations between its constituent elements. To speak of the truth of it, is to imply the thought of it, the intelligibility of it. Were it not the expression of mind, man’s reason could find no truth in it. Scholars have been able, after long and painstaking study, to understand the meaning of Egyptian and Assyrian hieroglyphics, but they never could have found thought in them, had they contained no thought. The original elements which make up the matter of the globe, have come into such relations with one another as that they make up the soil, rocks, water, trees, and animals we see. Thought, then, is the result of the internal relations of the particles which compose it. These internal relations, too, constitute its intelligibility. The globe that wheels on its axis is objective. This may be taken into the mind, and by its synthesizing, organizing activity converted into a subjective globe. The difference between the objective and the subjective globe will be, that one will be thought and the other will be thing. But the same internal relations found in the objective globe will be preserved in the subjective, and the transcript of the globe that is held in thought will be truth in exact proportion as it corresponds to the material globe that rolls out of the mind. That an objective globe, which is a thing, may become a subjective globe, which is a thought and not a thing, implies that there is something in common between thoughts and things; that is, the mind, by its constitution, is capable of apprehending and taking into itself the constitution and relations of things. This is its capacity for truth, and shows that truth is not foreign to it, but one with itself.
The sides and angles of a right angle triangle have certain relations to one another. The square described on the hypotenuse of such an angle is equal to the squares described on the other two sides. This may be demonstrated on a piece of blank paper, or the mind may conceive a right angle triangle, and prove the proposition without making any marks at all. The constitutional relations which were in the nature of a right angle triangle are the same, whether it be drawn on paper or conceived by the imagination. The relations of the triangle make it intelligible, because they constitute its truth.