The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

VIII.

It is important, as never before, for those who see the truth and recognize the right to declare the same with all authority. It is said that the Emperor Henry IV. stood shivering two whole days and nights in the snows of the courtyard of Canossa Castle, suing piteously for permission to throw himself, in agonized submission, at the feet of Hildebrand. That he was shunned by his subjects more absolutely because of the ban that was upon him than he would have been had he been afflicted with the smallpox. This incident illustrates for us the authority wielded by the Church of the Middle Ages. The Church was then felt to be in touch with tremendous power. Its fulminations carried terror to the hearts of kings and subjects. What the Church declared should be done, or should be left undone, the people felt could only be disregarded at the peril of all hope for time and eternity. It not only declared the duties men were under the necessity of observing in order to save their souls, but the kind of thoughts men were under the necessity of thinking concerning the shape of the earth, the movements of the stars, and the structure of the human body, in order to save themselves from the odium of heresy. The Church reigned without a rival in all the civilized world. She was not expected to give any reason for her actions or her utterances. When she determined what the order of the solar system was, the brains of men were compelled, without question, to acquiesce. Even to doubt was to deny the faith. The Church dictated the policy of the stars without being at the trouble of studying the stars; and no other sidereal opinions were tolerated but such as she formulated and published.

But the minds of scholars and students, in different parts of Europe, began to reach other conclusions concerning the nature and order of things than such as had been ecclesiastically settled for them. Copernicus saw that the heavenly bodies did not move in accordance with the teachings of the Church. And when the Venetian scholars looked through the telescope of Galileo at Padua, and saw Jupiter and his satellites, a central sun and revolving planets, the authority of the Church on the subject of astronomy was gone. In this way the Church has been forced to give up one position after another. The people, seeing she had no foundation for the opinions she held concerning nature, began to question the value of her opinions concerning God, and heaven and hell, and right and wrong.

Now the Church must regain her note of authority. She must do this by seeing what the laws are which grow out of the facts of condition. The laws of the family are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute the family. These will be seen to coincide with the old laws uttered from Sinai. The laws of society are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute society. These, it will be seen, are summed up as was said of old in the formula, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” When men get through framing laws for the regulation of human conduct, from a study of the facts of human nature, they will find to their amazement that they have reinstated the Ten Commandments, and that Sinai is not a burnt out volcano. They will find that the Ten Commandments are still the foundations of social health, and harmony, and progress. God wrote them for Moses on tables of stone because he had already written them in the nature of man. The laws of gravity can no more be read out of the world of space than the Eternal Decalogue can be read out of the world of human life. So the man of law should speak with the same authority as the man of science, without apology and without misgivings.

BEAUTY.

“If the endeavor to analyze the world is a trifle, it is because the world is such. The sum of things can have no second intention, nor can it be characterized by any trait that is not included in itself. Some things are sweet, but what is our sense which perceives them; some things are good, but what is our conscience which judges them; some things are true, but what is our intellect which argues them; some things are deep, but what is our reason which fathoms them? Everyone who thinks deeply, must have reflected that, if the purposes and results of man’s practice are vanity, so also must be those of his speculation. Goethe said, that there was no refuge from virtues that were not our own, but in loving them; and Ecclesiastes, that there was none from the vanity of life, but in fearing and obeying God. So, also, from the vanity of speculation there is no refuge but in acquiescing in its relative nature, and accepting truth for what it is.”

CHAPTER V.
THE PROVISION FOR THE ÆSTHETIC NATURE OF MAN.

The glory of the mind is the possession of two eyes, the eye of sense and the eye of reason. Through the one, it looks out upon the world of matter and fact. Through the other, it beholds the world of idea and relation. The world of matter and fact, seen through the eye of sense, is lifted and transfigured and multiplied a thousandfold when contemplated through the eye of reason. When the literal world is transferred to the ideal world, it takes on hues and dimensions in accordance with the universal and illimitable nature of man. The world which the sense sees, and the world which the reason sees, are both real, and through the mind commerce is kept up between them. Along this mental highway facts make a pilgrimage to the holy land of reason; there they are changed into ideas. Stars are turned into astronomy, atoms into chemistry, rocks into geology, plants into botany, colors into beauty and sounds into harmony.

Over the same royal road, ideas pass to the world of sense. There they are changed again into facts. Ideas of beauty, distilled in the alembic of the imagination from the seven prismatic colors, are turned into painting, and Raphael’s “Transfiguration” blesses the world. Ideas of harmony, formed by the power of the imagination from the notes of the musical scale, are turned into song, and Handel’s “Messiah” agitates the thoughts and feelings of men with the melody of the skies. Ideas of form, deduced from the contemplation of the shapes of things, are turned into sculpture, and Michael Angelo’s “Moses” augments the world’s fund of conviction and courage. By changing facts into ideas, the mind gives us science. By changing ideas back to facts, it gives us art. Without science, life would be without bread; without art, it would be without ideals.

Science ministers to the body, art to the spirit. Men who go from things to ideas are practical; those who go from ideas back to things are the seers. Practical men conserve, but never venture. Seers throw the light of their genius into the dark beyond, disclosing new worlds for men. They are the leaders, they are in the vanguard of human progress.

By the possession of two eyes, the eye of sense and the eye of reason, man is placed into relation with two worlds.

The world he sees by the eye of sense is meager, limited, poverty-stricken. There are only a few houses in it, a little clump of trees, a little patch of meadow, a horizon hounded by the curl of his cabin smoke. The world he sees by the eye of reason stretches far down into the twilight of the past, embracing all ages, all stages of progress, all empires and republics, all literature and peoples.

Through the eye of sense, he sees a world of hard limitation and fact. Through the eye of reason, a universe of ideas, visions, relations. Through the eye of sense, he sees a candle, with its flickering and passing flame. Through the eye of reason, he sees a kingdom of light, with truth and beauty, and love billowing away to infinity.

Through the eye of sense he sees a little mountain spring rise from the ground, to lose itself in the deepening shadows of the trees. Through the eye of reason he sees a river, clear as crystal, flowing forever from under the throne of God. A few violets and buttercups, covering with their blue and their beauty a little strip of meadow, he sees through the eye of sense. The hills of day, numberless and immeasurable, covered with flowers, whose leaves never wither and whose beauty never fades, he sees through the eye of reason.

It is the conceit of those whose habit of mind is to look through the eye of sense alone, that they see more in the actual tangible world than those who are accustomed to look through the eye of reason as well as through the eye of sense. There never was a greater mistake. Those who see most in the world of mountain and sea and sky, are those who look most through the eye of reason into the world of idea, principle, and relation. Adams in England, and Leverrier in France, discovered Neptune, not by sweeping the heavens with their telescopes, but by careful ciphering in their studies. “Mr. Turner,” said a friend to him one day, “I never see in nature the glows and colors you put into your pictures.” “Ah! don’t you wish you could, though,” was the painter’s reply. In an apple’s fall Newton sees the law of gravitation. Goethe sees in the sections of a deer’s skull the spinal column modified. Emerson sings:

“Let me go where’er I will,

I hear a sky-born music still.

’Tis not in the stars alone,

Nor in the cups of budding flowers,

Nor in the red-breast’s yellow tone,

Nor in the bow that smiles in showers;

But in the mud and scum of things,

There always, always something sings.”

Humboldt habitually dwelt in the realm of principles and ideas. He spent only five years in America, and it took twelve quartos, and sixteen folios, and half a dozen helpers, and many years to put on record what he saw.

“The poem hangs on the berry bush,

When comes the poet’s eye,

And the street is one long masquerade

When Shakspere passes by.”