The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded

by Delia Salter Bacon

But here are the very forces that we want, blindly moving, moving in the dark, left to intuition and instinct, where nature had provided reason, and required science and scientific art. That has not been tried. And that is why this question of the state, dark as it is, portentous, hopeless as its aspects are, if we limit the survey to our present aids and instrumentalities, is already, to the eye of science, kindling with the aurora of unimagined change, advancements to the heights of man's felicity, that shall dim the airy portraiture of poets' visions, that shall outgo here, too, the world's young dreams with its scientific reality.

There has been no help from science in this field hitherto. The proceeding of the world has been instinctive and empirical thus far, in the attainment of the ends which the complex nature of man requires him to seek. Men have been driven, and swayed hither and thither, by these different and apparently contradictory aims, without any science of the forces that actuated them. Those ends these forces will seek,—'it is their nature to,'—whether in man, or in any other form in which they are incorporated. There's no amount of declamation that is ever going to stop them. The power that is in everything that moves, the forces of universal nature are concerned in the acts that we deprecate and cry out upon. It is the original constitution of things, as it was settled in that House of Commons, to whose acts the memory of Man runneth not, that is concerned in these demonstrations; and philosophy requires that whatever else we do, we should avoid, by all means, coming into any collision with those statutes. 'We must so order it,' says Michael of the Mountain, quoting in this case from antiquity—'we must so order it, as by no means to contend with universal nature.' 'To attempt to kick against natural necessity,' he says in his own name, and in his own peculiar and more impressive method of philosophic instruction—'to attempt to kick against natural necessity, is to represent the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to outkick his mule.' We must begin by distinguishing 'what is in our power, and what not,' says the author of the Advancement of Learning, applying that universal rule of practice to our present subject.

Here, then, carefully reduced to their most comprehensive form, traced to the height of universal nature, and brought down to the specific nature in man—here, as they lie on the ground of the common nature in man, for the first time scientifically abstracted—are the powers which science has to begin with in this field. The varieties in the species, and the individual differences so remarkable in this kind, are not in this place under consideration. But here is the common nature in this kind, which must make the basis of any permanent universal social constitution for it. Different races will require that their own constitutional differences shall be respected in their social constitutions; and if they be not, for the worse or for the better, look for change. But this is the universal platform that science is clearing here. This is the WORLD that she is concerning herself with here, in the person of that High Priest of hers, who, also, took that to be his business.

Here are these powers in man, then, to begin with. Here is this universal natural predisposition in him, not to subsist, merely, and maintain his form—which is nature's first law, they tell us—but to 'better himself' in some way. As Hamlet expresses it, 'he lacks advancement'; and advancement he will have, or strive to have, if not 'formal and essential,' then 'local.' He is instinctively impelled to it; and in his ignorant attempt to compass that end which nature has prescribed to him, the 'tempest of human life' arises.

The scientific plan will be, not to quarrel with these universal forces, and undertake to found society on their annihilation. Science will count that structure unsafe which is founded on the supposed annihilation of these forces in anything that moves. The man of science knows, that though by the predominance of powers, or by the equilibrium of them, they may be for a time, 'as it were, annihilated,' they are in every creature; and nature in the instincts, though blind, is cunning, and finds ways and means of overcoming barriers, and evading restrictions, and inclines to indemnify herself when once she finds her way again. Instead of quarrelling with these forces, the scientific plan, having respect to the Creating Wisdom in the constitution of man, overlooking them from that height, will thankfully accept them, and make much of them. These are just the motive powers that science has need of; she could not compose her structure without them, which is only the perfecting of the structure which the great Creating Wisdom had already outlined and pre-ordered—not a machine, but a living organic whole.

Science takes this 'piece of work' as she finds him, ready, waiting for the hand of art—imperfect, unfinished, but with the proceeding of nature incorporated in him—with the creative, advancing, perfecting motion, incorporated in him as his essence and law;—imperfect, but with nature working within him for the rest, urging him to self-perfection. She takes him as she finds him, a creature of instinct, but with his large, rich, undeveloped, yet already active nature of reason, and conscience, and religion, already struggling for the mastery, counterbalancing his narrower motivity, holding in check, with nobler intuitions, the error of an instinct which errs in man, because eyes were included in nature's definition of him, as it was written beforehand in her book, her universal book of types and orders—eyes, and not instinct only—'that what he cannot smell out, he may spy into.' 'O'er that art, which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.' The want of this pre-ordered art is the want here still. The war of the unenlightened instincts is raging here still. That is where the difficulty lies. That same patience of investigation with which science has pursued and found out nature elsewhere—that same intense, indefatigable concentration of endeavour, which has been rewarded with such 'magnitude of effects' in other fields—that same, in a higher degree, in more powerful combinations, proportioned to the magnitude and common desirableness of the object, is what is wanting here. It is the instincts that are at fault here,—'the blind instincts, that seeing reason' should 'guide.'

That is where all the jar and confusion of this great storm begins, that 'continues still,' and blasts our lives, in spite of all the spells that we mumble over it, and in spite of all the magic that all our magicians can bring to bear on it. 'Meagre success,' at least, is still the word here. No wonder that the storm continues, under such conditions. No wonder that the world is full of the uproar of this arrested work, this violated intent of nature. She will storm on till we hear her. Woe to those who put themselves in opposition to her, who think to violate her intent and prosper! 'The storm continues,' and it will continue, pronounce on it what incantations we may, so long as the elemental forces of all nature are meeting in our lives, and dashing in blind elemental strength against each other, and the brooding spirit of the social life, the composing spirit of the larger whole, cannot reconcile them, because the voices that are filling the air with the discord of their controversy, and out-toning the noise of this battle with theirs, are crying in one key, 'Let there be darkness here'; because the darkness of the ages of instinct and intuition is held back here, cowering, ashamed, but forbidden to flee away; because the night of human ignorance still covers all this battle-ground, and hides the combatants.

Science is the word here. The Man of the Modern Ages has spoken it, 'and now the times give it proof'; the times in which the methods of earlier ages, in the rapid advancement of learning in other fields, are losing their vitalities, and leaving us without those means of social combination, without those social bonds which the rudest ages of instinct and intuition, which the most barbaric peoples have been able to command. The times give it proof, fearful proof, terrific proof, when the noblest institutions of earlier ages are losing their power to conserve the larger whole; when the conserving faith of earlier ages, with its infinities of forces, is fainting in its struggles, and is not supported; and men set at nought its divine realities, because they have not been translated into their speech and language, and think there is no such thing; and under all the exterior splendours of a material civilization advanced by science, society tends to internal decay, and the primal war of atoms.

To meet the exigencies of a crisis like this, it is not enough to call these powers that are actual in the human nature, but which are not yet reconciled and reduced to their true and natural order—it is not enough at this age of the world, at this stage of human advancement in other fields—to call these forces by some general names which include their oppositions, and to require for want of skill that a part of them shall be annihilated; it is not enough to express a strong disapprobation of the result as it is, and to require, in never-so-authoritative manner, that it shall be otherwise. No matter what names we may use to make that requisition in, no matter under what pains and penalties we require it, the result—whatever we may say to the contrary—the result does not follow. That is not the way. Those who try it, and who continue to try it in the face of no matter what failures, may think it is; but there is a voice mightier than theirs, drowning all their speech, telling us in thunder-tones, that it is not; with arguments that brutes might understand, telling us that it is not!

It is, indeed, no small gain in the rude ages of warring instincts and intuitions, when there is as yet no science to define them, and compare them, and pronounce from its calm height its eternal axioms here—when the world is a camp, and hostilities are deified, and mankind is in arms when all the moral terms are still wrapped in the confusion of the first outgoing of the perplexed, unanalysed human motivity—it is no small gain to get the word of the nobler intuitions outspoken, to get the word of the divine law of man's nature, his essential law pronounced—even in rudest ages overawing, commanding with its awful divinity the intenser motivity of the lesser nature—able to summon, in rudest ages, to its ideal heights, those colossal heroic forms, that cast their long shadows over the tracts of time, to tell us what type it is that humanity aspires to. It is no small gain to get these nobler intuitions outspoken in some voice that commands with its authority the world's ear, or illustrated in some exemplar that arrests the world's eye, and draws the human heart unto it.