In Book II. chapter vii. of Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric, there is a section headed, "Why is it that nonsense so often escapes being detected, both by the writer and reader?" It explains with great perspicuity the uses and abuses of our faculty of abstraction, which is not a spiritual, but merely an intellectual faculty. I would commend this essay (and indeed, for several reasons, the whole book) to a student of intellectual philosophy. A great deal may be learned upon this subject, also, from an Essay on Language, printed a second time with some other papers, by Phillips & Sampson, Boston, in 1857, and probably still to be found in old bookstores, if it be not reprinted by its author, R. L. Hazard.
On the subject of my second paper of Glimpses the same author has written two books, one published by D. Appleton, in New York, in 1864, The Freedom of the Mind in Willing; or, Every Being that wills, a Creative First Cause; and in 1869, Lee & Shepard, Boston, published, as supplement, Two Letters on Causation and Freedom in Willing, addressed to John Stuart Mill, with an Appendix on the Existence of Matter, and our Notions of Infinite Space.[13]
INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM TO WILL.
If the spontaneous will of man, and its heart with its latent love, hope, and sense of beauty and justice, are without date,
"An eye among the blind,
That deaf and silent reads the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind,"
yet there is no doubt that the human understanding, as well as the body, begins in time, and gradually identifies the individual for communication with other individuals of its kind. The beginning of the human understanding is in the impressions of an environing universe, against which the sensibility reacts, and by this activity develops the organs of sense, which are the connection of those two great contrasts, the soul and the outward universe. For perceptions of sense are the instrumentality by which the will vivifies the heart, so disposing the particulars of the surrounding universe as to give the definite form of thoughts to consciousness. The human being has no absolute knowledge like the lower animals, who are passive instrumentality of God to certain finite ends below the plane of spirituality. Created for the infinite ends of intelligence, and free communion with one another and God, men need to become conscious of the whole process of their own being, and do so by a gradual conversation with God, who is forever saying, by the universe, which is his speech, I am. And here education begins its offices, by helping man to reply Thou art, which he does by his legitimate art. But no one man can utter the thou art of humanity adequately. It takes all humanity forever and ever to do so; and it does not do so but just so far as the men who compose it are in mutual understanding and communion with each other. Therefore each child must be taken by the hand by those already conscious, and led to realize his own consciousness by learning that of his fellows.
In the action and reaction of the individual with his special environment, he comes to distinguish himself from that which gives him pleasure and pain, and he will be attracted to the former, and repelled from the latter; and thus come to discriminate outward things from each other. The observation and discrimination of the particulars of nature is thinking. Sensuous impressions are the raw material of thoughts, but discrimination and classification of things according to their similarities, is the operation of thought.
Education has an office in both the accumulation of sensuous impressions and the operation of thinking. The mother and nurse of each child must so order the objects about him, that his organs shall be properly impressed, and not overtaxed, because only so can they grow to be a good instrumentality for receiving even more delicate impressions. A tender sympathy for the unconscious little one, who is gradually coming to identify himself, and love,—such as only a mother can have in the greatest perfection,—are the special qualifications of the educator at this stage. Such a knowledge of nature's laws and order, as may enable the educator to lead the child's activity according to law and order, can alone help the child to reproduce, on his finite plane, an image of God's creative action. The educator who should succeed the nurse is the kindergartner, who, without lacking the sympathetic affection of the nurse, must add a knowledge of nature both material and spiritual, so that she may bring these opposites into their right connection with each other.
She will therefore lead the child to produce something that shall serve as a ground for the operation of thinking. Instead of letting the blind will spend its energy in wild and aimless motion, she will present a desirable aim to attain, which will produce an effect that shall satisfy the heart, and produce an object that shall engage the attention, and stimulate to a reproduction of it, until it is thoroughly known, not only in its natural properties, but in the law of its being, which was the child's own method of producing the thing.
The genesis of the understanding, then, is, first, sensuous impression, which, reproducing itself intentionally, becomes, secondly, perception; and, thirdly, an adapting of means to ends, and thereby rising into judgment and knowledge. To get understanding precedes getting knowledge, which is the special work of the understanding when it is developed.