The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

VIII.

The intelligence, as the organ of truth, must be large enough to find truth and contain truth. No sane man would undertake to dig down a mountain with a toothpick. Mr. Spencer devoted page after page to the discussion of cause, time, space, force, and ultimate reality, while holding a theory of knowledge that made the very thought of these inconceivable. The very things that he labeled as knowable contained a substrate the mind could never get at. Knowable things, then, could not be known as they were; hence if they were known at all, must be known as they were not, which made the mind’s knowledge error. All who accept Mr. Spencer’s theory of knowledge are shut up to absolute ignorance or absolute error. If we are to know the truth of reality, of mind, of external existence, we must have knowing faculties up to the style of the truth we are to know. If we are to know light, we must have eyes capable of taking in the light, of analyzing it, and turning it into vision. The disposition to limit our power to know, by telling us, on the strength of Mansel and Hamilton and Kant, that all our knowledge is relative, is innocent enough when stripped of its seeming wisdom. It is true that we can know no more than our knowing faculties permit us.

We cannot know more than we can know. We are not absolute and omniscient as to our capacity to know. All we can see is what we can see with our eyes. We cannot see with our fingers or with the back of our heads. All we can hear is what we can hear with our ears. We have no other organs with which to hear. All sounds that vibrate at the rate of sixteen times to the second up to thirty-eight thousand times to the second, we can hear. Whatsoever sounds vibrate at a lower rate than sixteen times to the second or at a higher rate than thirty-eight thousand times to the second, we cannot hear, because such sounds are not related to the ear. But the eye, being adjusted to and related to much finer wave lengths than the ear, can see waves that vibrate up as high as seven hundred and twenty-seven trillion times to the second. The eye cannot see waves shorter than seven hundred and twenty-seven trillion vibrations to the second, because such waves are not adjusted to the eye. The waves the ear cannot hear are not sound waves. The waves the eye cannot see are not light waves. There are no sound waves in the universe the ear cannot hear, provided they are near enough to come into contact with it. There are no light waves in the universe that the eye cannot turn into vision, if they strike the retina. Are we going to fall out with the eye, and discredit the beauty it does see, because it is not as large as the rim of immensity, and cannot see everything disclosed by the light of suns and stars at once? Are we to hold the ear in contempt after it takes in the harmonies of Beethoven and Mozart, because it cannot hear all the music the stars are making as they move through the heavens?

Whatever is real and true the mind can know, because the mind is correlated to the real and the true. It cannot know what is unreal and untrue. It cannot know that two and two make five, because that is unreal and untrue. It cannot know that a crooked line is the shortest distance between two points, because that is unknowable. It cannot know that it is more rational to tell a lie than to tell the truth, because that is unknowable and untrue. There is much that is unknowable, but whatever is, we may be sure is irrational and unreal. Whatever is true in being, cause, time, space, mind, matter, force, motion may be known. The finite mind cannot know it at once, and can never, throughout all infinite time, directly take it into the intelligence; but it is knowable, because the underlying, fundamental, prior thing in the universe is mind, the mind of the absolute and eternal One. All things are set in order and reason. The external universe is the expression of mind, and is therefore intelligible. The human intelligence is the expression of the same mind, and is therefore capable of grasping and turning into thought the intelligible order without.

According to the theory of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, and Spencer, any knowledge whatsoever is impossible. If the knowing subject and the knowable object, the two factors of knowledge, can only come together in a mechanical way, as basket and potatoes, kettle and water, paper and letters, then the very conditions of knowledge are denied, and we are shut up to blank, square ignorance.

Things come together to form knowledge, as things come together to form a tree, and not as house, calico, pins, lace, shoes, and blankets come together to form a store. An acorn is a living something. It is not a tree, but within itself are the germs of a tree. When grown, it may be said to have forms, as root, trunk, and branches. These were potentially and ideally contained in the acorn. But their realization and active expression involved a process, in which the ideal forms, tendencies, and forces contained in germ in the acorn met and united with the elements of the outside world. Suppose we consider the acorn the subject, and the particles in soil and rain and atmosphere capable of making a tree as the object. What happens when an oak with all its beauty stands out upon the hillside? This subject and object have come together in unity, in an organism. Suppose Locke should have undertaken the work of understanding how a tree came to be, instead of how knowledge came to be. We will say he began by analyzing a full grown tree. After thorough examination of its contents, he finds that all the parts of the tree, carbon, water, etc., are found outside of it in the external world.

He finds that the tree is composed of various atoms, all of which may be found in the soil and in the atmosphere. He concludes, then, that these atoms from soil and atmosphere, began to move up to and down to the acorn. The acorn, passive meanwhile, lets them fall on it. So, of their own free will and accord, the atoms kept piling themselves upon the acorn, until in the process of a hundred years there was a tree. Now a brick column might be carried up after this fashion, but not a tree. The prior and fundamental thing in an oak tree is the acorn. It contains an active, organizing life principle. Falling into the soil, this folded life power begins to stir. It lays hold upon the elements about it, digests them, assimilates them, and turns them into an oak. The mind is to the raw material of knowledge, what the acorn is to the raw material of oak. Through the senses the raw material is conveyed into the mind. It is then appropriated, assimilated, digested, and turned into knowledge. The active, organizing, combining power that turns the raw material presented by the senses into knowledge, does not come from the outside world. It is constitutional, fundamental, original. Just as the organic forces of the plant take up the elements from the outside environment upon which it subsists, so the synthesizing, living power of the mind takes the matter of sensation and turns it into the whole called knowledge. Knowledge is a unifying process. It combines the manifold into one. It reduces multiplicity to unity. All that is real and all that is true in the heavens above or in the earth below, in mind or in matter, in time or in space, in man or in external world, are capable of being reduced to unity in knowledge.

Knowledge is the subjective unity in the finite mind that corresponds to the objective unity that lies within the infinite mind. Nothing less than a universal synthesis satisfies the finite mind, because it is a copy of the infinite mind. The finite self-consciousness is a copy of the infinite self-consciousness. The infinite mind knows all things at once; the finite mind comes to knowledge through a gradual process. It can never, through all eternity, know all the infinite mind knows, but it can eternally advance in knowledge, and comfort itself at every stage of the process with the thought that nothing in the mind of the infinite and absolute one is foreign to it, or in contradiction with its capacity to know. In thinking, the finite mind is at home in its father’s realm, and because this realm stretches out illimitably every way should not oppress us or discourage us. For this the finite mind can know, that throughout the limitless domain of God there is order and truth and reality.

Thus standing face to face with truth, and being endowed with intellectual capacities capable of recognizing it, grasping it, in its unity and in its particulars, it is proper to inquire the object and the purpose of it. It is the revelation which the infinite mind has made to the finite. It is the language of God, in which he has embodied his thought. It is the word of the universal spirit. Man is a spirit, and he is to grow and come to the full realization of himself by partaking of the word of God. Truth has been revealed for no other purpose than to make men. Sir William Hamilton represents truth as game, and the method of getting truth to a chase. He says the exercise of our powers involved in the process of getting truth is better than the game we seek. Lessings says, “If the Almighty, holding in one hand truth, and in the other search after truth, presented them to me and asked me which I would choose, with all humility, but without hesitation, I should say, give me search after truth.”

Mallbranche says: “If I held truth captive, like a bird in my hand, I would let it go again, that I might chase and capture it.” Müller says: “Truth is the property of God alone. Search after truth belongs to man.” Such sentiments indicate that the men who uttered them had no correct idea of the real nature of truth, or of man’s intellectual nature, the necessary food of which is truth. It is true that the search after truth gives exercise and pleasure to the intellectual faculties, as search after bread gives exercise and health to the physical powers. But an eternal search for bread is not sufficient to keep man’s body robust and strong. The very condition upon which he will be able to keep up the search for it is, that he regularly and steadily partake of it. A tree, had it intelligence and emotion, would, doubtless, enjoy wrestling with the storms, and throwing its roots into the earth and its branches into the heavens, making levies upon earth and sky for its own nourishment; but if it did not constantly turn the elements it found into its trunk and branches, it would not be able to wrestle long with the storms, or forage long upon the earth and sky.

To claim that the intellectual faculties are always to search for truth, and that the search is better than the truth, is tacitly to assume that truth is not for them; or, if for them, and should ever be found, would be as useless as a poor, tired, half-dead fox overtaken by the hunters in the chase. Searching for truth is doing; partaking of truth is being. The search gives agility and skill; the partaking of truth gives wealth of character. To hunt game with no other object than that which comes from the sport of the chase is degrading. To shoot birds only for the purpose of seeing them fall is mean and wicked. So, to search for truth with no other purpose than that which comes from the exercise of the search, is unworthy the intellect that was given, not only to find truth, but to grow rich and God-like by partaking of the truth.

Man’s need for bread, we saw, led to the establishment of commerce, and commerce did far more than secure to man food and clothing and shelter. It brought men together and discovered themselves to themselves. Power lent itself to the uses of man’s social nature, awakened and developed by commerce, and made it possible for men to come into relations with one another, not simply in states and nations, but on all the earth. The need for bread helped to the formation of society, the nature of power and the applications to which it lent itself widened the social domain into a universal brotherhood, to which man, as a spirit, was correlated. But many saw bread only in its relations to hunger, and power only in its relations to wealth and worldly dominion. So, many see in truth no purpose except the practical and material ends to which it can be put. In the esteem of the utilitarians, it was well enough that learned men consecrated their genius and their industry to the study of the subtle subject of heat. It was well that they discovered the real nature of heat, and saw that it was not caloric, but a mode of motion. Because this opened the way for our railroads and steamboats and quick methods of transportation, which have contributed so much to the world’s wealth. It was well that the impracticable and theoretical men, who had nothing better to do, spent ages studying the nature of electricity, and finally discovered that there were certain metals for which it had affinity, and that it had speed equal to thought itself. For these studies have enabled the practical and substantial men to order their corn and meat by telegraph, and the practical housewives to order their roast beef by telephone. It is well that people who had no practical turn of mind spent years in considering the structure of the human frame, and the plants and minerals capable of ministering to it, for in this way the doctors have got ideas by which they are enabled to keep us practical men alive, so that we can trade longer, and build more factories and eat more victuals.

Now it is true that the knowledge the intelligence comes to by insight into the relations and nature and truth of things, can be turned to practical account. But the truth the mind finds by study was not primarily intended to open the way for steam cars and telegraphs and the production of wealth. These things are incidental. Truth is the provision God has made for the intellect. The knowledge of the stars has helped man to sail the sea and to take his bearings on any part of its surface. But the practical account to which this knowledge has been turned is not to be compared, in value, to the effect it was intended to have on the human mind, strengthening it, ennobling it, and harmonizing it with the divine mind.

RIGHTEOUSNESS.

“While smitten with the fatal wanness of approaching doom, the flamboyant pleiad of the men of violence descends the steep slope to the gulf of devouring time: lo! at the other extremity of space, when the last cloud has but now faded in the deep sky of the future, azure forevermore, rises resplendent the sacred galaxy of the true stars—Orpheus, Hermes, Job, Homer, Æschylus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hippocrates, Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Euclid, Pythagoras, Lucretius, Plautus, Juvenal, Tacitus, Saint Paul, John of Patmos, Tertullian, Pelagius, Dante, Gutenberg, Joan of Arc, Christopher Columbus, Luther, Michael Angelo, Copernicus, Galileo, Rabelais, Calderon, Cervantes, Shakspere, Rembrandt, Kepler, Milton, Molière, Newton, Descartes, Kant, Piranesi, Beccari, Diderot, Beethoven, Fulton, Montgolfier, Washington: and the marvelous constellations, brighter from moment to moment, radiant as a tiara of celestial diamonds, shine in the clear horizon, and, as it rises, blends, with the boundless dawn of Jesus Christ.”

CHAPTER IV.
THE PROVISION FOR THE MORAL NATURE OF MAN.

Two elements are essential to the process of thinking, the intellect and the truth. One is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Two elements are also essential to the process of volition, the will and the right. The one within, the other without. The one subjective, the other objective. Before sight is possible, there must be an eye and there must be light. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before hearing, there must be an ear and there must be sound. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective. Before breathing there must be lungs and there must be atmosphere. The one is within, the other is without. The one is subjective, the other is objective.

No definition of man is large enough to accommodate the facts of his nature, that does not embrace what he is without as well as what he is within, what he is objectively as well as what he is subjectively. It must not only embrace the intellect, but the truth which it thinks; not only the will, but the right which corresponds to it; not only the eye, but the light which gives it meaning; not only the ear, but the sound which matches it; not only the lungs, but the atmosphere to which they are correlated. Human nature is dually constituted, so that the larger half of itself is outside of itself.

Illustrations of the same duality of constitution may be found on a limited scale in the organic and in the inorganic worlds. The greater half of the oak is not in the life germ of the acorn, but in the elements of the soil and the sky which environ it. The larger part of the fish is in the ocean which surrounds it. Most of the fuel which makes the heat in the grate is not in the carbon of the coal, but in the oxygen of the air which fills the room.