The philosophy of life, and philosophy of language, in a course of lectures

by Friedrich von Schlegel

The apprehension of a living object in thought, so as to seize and fix it in its mobile vitality and its fluctuating and fleeting states, is an act of the imagination, which, however, is naturally of a peculiar kind, and entirely distinct from artistic or poetical fancy. It is, in this respect, worthy of remark, that all the most characteristic and felicitous terms which are employed to designate the great discoveries in modern times of the profounder secrets of nature are, for the greater part, boldly figurative, and often even symbolical. Here, therefore, also, we have a manifestation of that affinity which subsists between nature and the faculty of fancy, by which alone its ever-stirring vitality is scientifically apprehended.

I formerly observed that, in the outer senses, as faculties of the soul subordinate to the fancy, a higher intellectual endowment, as a special gift of nature, is occasionally found to exist, namely, the sense of art, or the eye for beautiful forms, and the ear for musical sounds. But even the lower sense, the more purely organic feeling, is often evolved to higher degrees of susceptibility, which, however, do not fall within the sphere of the feeling for art, but form, as it were, a peculiar and special sense of nature. To this class belong those indescribable feelings of sympathy and inward attraction—the many vivid presentiments of a strange foreboding—traces of which may be observed among many other animals besides man, just as, in the case of musical tones and emotions, a light note of remote affinity seems to bring the soul of man in unison with a correspondent nature soul in the higher members of the brute creation. Numberless are the instances of such forebodings (among which we must reckon also the significant vision or dream) recorded of all times, countries, and spheres of life. No doubt, from their strange nature, and from the manifold difficulties with which man’s mode of observing and narrating these phenomena perplexes the consideration of them, it is any thing but easy, in any individual case, to arrive at a pure result, and to pass a final and decisive sentence. Still, on the whole, the fact can not well be denied, as, indeed, it is not even attempted, by any unprejudiced and profound observer of nature in the present day. But now, if such an immediate feeling of invisible light and life does freely develop and clearly manifest itself as an indubitable faculty and a perfectly distinct state of the consciousness, then assuredly we have herein a new organ of perception and a new natural sense. Though not, indeed, more infallible than any other of the senses, it may, nevertheless, be the source of very remarkable phenomena, which, perhaps, above all others require investigation, in order that their distinctive character may be precisely and accurately determined. It is, however, necessary to remember that the latter is not to be determined by any side-blow of caprice, any more than the electric phenomena of nature and the atmosphere, when they are actually lowering there, are to be got rid of by any such expedient.

It is only just and right, and not inconsistent with true human knowledge, if physical science should commence with the study of man. Still, if we would contemplate man from the side of nature, it seems the safer course to endeavor, first of all, to obtain a clear and leading idea of the whole of his constitution in this respect, rather than to lose ourselves in the contemplation of the special phenomena of a particular sphere. Now, with regard to the whole of man’s organization, the organic body as the third constituent of human existence, I will merely remark that, just as the triple principle of body, soul, and spirit is repeated in the special and narrower spheres of the senses, the instincts, and the passions, and even in the different forms in which a disordered intellect usually manifests itself, so also it admits of a further application to the organic body in general. That most wonderful organization, the marvelous structure of bones and muscles, the outward organic frame, is, as it were, the body in a narrower sense, the pre-eminently material constituent of living bodies. The soul of man—here consequently the organic soul—is in the blood and in the five or six organs whose functions are first of all to elaborate the blood and afterward to provide for its circulation—or perhaps by maintaining a perpetual interchange of the breath and the external air, to keep the vital flame constantly burning on the hearth of life within. A third element—and, indeed, the principal one of the three, though only noticeable in its effects on the brain—exists within the higher senses and functions—in short, in the whole nervous tissue. But it lies not in the nervous filaments themselves: anatomy can not detect it, for it is not visible to the eye. On this account some have called it the æther of the nerves to indicate its incorporeal nature—incorporeal, i.e., relatively to, and in comparison with, the other two constituents of man—the blood-soul, and the external frame—as being the spirit of life in the organic body. Strictly and sharply enough does Holy Writ distinguish this spiritual body (as it calls it) of man from the body of the soul, or the organic blood-soul, considering the former, as it were, the seed of the resurrection, even because at the moment of death this ethereal body-of-light leaves its terrestrial veil to be in due time reunited to it after a more glorious fashion. And death itself is even nothing else than its total departure and painful emancipation from the organic body, on which the features, one might almost say, the physiognomy of corruption stamps itself, immediately that the immortal Psyche, the invisible seed of light and eternity, has put off the tabernacle of this body.

This internal, invisible body-of-light [Lichtkorper] is also the organ and the center of all the higher and spiritual powers of the human organization. For it is easily conceivable that a partial projection of this life of light which is latent in the sound organic body should produce such phenomena, while its complete projection, or rather total separation, would have death for its result, or rather would itself be death. A truly scientific view of nature can easily enter into or allow the legitimacy of this idea. The true rule, however, and standard for the right decision of phenomena of this kind can only be found in a higher region, even because they themselves lie on the extreme limits of nature and life, and in part also pass beyond them.

We therefore prefer to follow the more slow but sure course of development pursued by physical science itself, as commenced nearly twenty-five centuries ago by the Greeks. On the whole it began even there with the cognition of man—of his diseases and their cure. The naturalists, indeed, of the present day are in general disposed to laugh at the ideas of nature which were advanced by the first philosophers of Greece, and to despise the hypotheses of water, or air, or fire, as being the essence of all things, which, nevertheless, as the first beginnings of a clearer contemplation and of a higher view of nature, greatly recommend themselves by their extreme simplicity. But however modern observers of nature may be ready to hand these systems over to fancy as so many purely poetical cosmogonies, yet, on the other hand, the present masters of medicine, with greater gratitude and fuller acknowledgment of his merits, reverence Hippocrates as the founder of their art. For, indeed, as such, and not properly as a science, or at any rate as an art far more than as a science, was medicine regarded by its founder and the great masters who came after him. They looked upon it as the art of the diagnosis and treatment of disease, in which the unerring tact of a practiced and happy judgment is of primary importance, and where the rapid and searching glance of genius into the secret laboratories of life or into the hidden sources of disease is, and ever will be, the principal and most essential point. The mere historical acquaintance with the different forms of diseases and their remedies, with botany, and the anatomy of the human body, with the number and structure of its organs, forms merely the materials, the external sphere of medical practice; while the essential qualification is even this penetrating glance which searches out the inmost secrets of the bodily temperament. But now those who have been most richly gifted with this peculiar gift have ever been the last to believe themselves possessed of a perfect science. And yet, inasmuch as that physical knowledge which, by attaining to a complete understanding of life, shall be able to comprehend and explain the mystery of death would alone deserve the name of the science of nature; inasmuch also as the searching glance of the true physician arrives the nearest to such a point, penetrating, as it does, deep into the manifold fluctuation and struggle between the two, and into the secrets of their conflict, this, therefore, is perhaps to be considered as the first germ of life for a future science of nature, which, however as yet undeveloped, has for more than twenty centuries been slumbering on, hidden, as it were, in embryo, in the womb of medical art and lore. The physical, geographical, and astronomical observations of this whole period of gestation, form, it is true, a rich treasury of valuable materials, but they do not give us that profound knowledge, of which alone the physician’s penetrating glance into life and its constitution furnishes the first commencement and essay, however weak.

With respect to natural science in general, and the possibility of our attaining to it, the case stands thus:—If nature be a living force—if the life which reigns within it be in a certain though still very remote degree akin to the life of man and the human soul—then is a knowledge of nature easily conceivable, and right well possible (for nothing but the like, or at least the similar and cognate, can be known by the like) even though this cognition may still be extremely defective, and at best can never be more than partial. But if nature be a dead, stony mass, as many seem to suppose, then would it be wholly inconceivable how this foreign mass of petrifaction could penetrate into our inmost Ego; then at least would there seem to be good grounds for the idealistic doubt whether ultimately this external world be any thing but a mere phantom, having no existence save in our own thoughts—the outward reflection of ourselves—the pure creation of our own Me.

The question of innate ideas has been often mooted in philosophy. As, however, the essential functions and different acts of thought, together with its several notions, are, properly speaking, nothing but the natural division of man’s cogitative faculty, it is not on their account necessary to suppose such a preliminary intercalation of general ideas into the human mind. And as little necessary is it, in order to explain the universal belief in the existence of a Deity, to suppose that there is in the minds of all men an implanted idea of God; for this would lead to the purely arbitrary hypothesis, of that which is so difficult to conceive—the pre-existence of the spirit or soul of man. And as no created beings can have an idea of God, but those to whom He vouchsafes to communicate it, and to accord a knowledge of His existence, so can He bestow this privilege the very instant He pleases, without the intervention of any innate idea expressly for that end. And yet I am disposed, and not, I think, without reason, to assume that man, as at present constituted, does possess one, though only one, species of inborn ideas, viz., an innate idea of death. This, as a false root of life, and a true mental contagion, produces a dead cogitation, and is the origin of all dead and dead-born notions. For this idea of death, whether hereditary or inoculated in the soul, is, as its peculiar but fundamental error, transferred by the mind of man to every object with which it comes in contact. And thus, in man’s dead cogitation, the surrounding world and all nature appears to him a similar lifeless and inert mass, so long as sitting beneath this shadow of spiritual death, his mind [geist] has not sufficient strength to work its way out of its dark prison-house into the light. For not at all without higher aid, and even with it only slowly and tardily, does man discover that all that is really and naturally dead is within himself, or learn to recognize it for what it truly is, a something eminently null and naught. Another species of this false and dead conception of nature presents itself under the form of multiplicity. In this view nature is represented as forming something like a vast sandhill, where, apart from the pile they thus form together and their aggregation in it, the several grains are supposed to have no connection with each other; while, however, they are so diligently counted, as if every thing depended on their right enumeration. But through the sieve of such an atomistic, which would break up the universe into a number of separate and absolute individualities, the sand will ever run, however often and painfully man may strive to reckon or to measure the infinity of these grains of nature. Mathematical calculation and measuring hold the same place in physical science that is held in every living language by conjugating and declining, and other grammatical rules, which, in truth, are but a species of mathematical formulæ. In learning a foreign and especially a dead language, these are indispensable and necessary aids, which greatly promote and facilitate its acquisition; so also mathematics furnish indispensable helps and a most valuable organon for the cognition of nature. But with them alone man will never learn to understand even a word, not to talk of a whole proposition, out of nature’s strangely-sounding and most difficult hieroglyphics.

Somewhat different is it, when man seeks to understand the true living geometry in nature herself, i.e., attempts to discover the place which the circle and eclipse (passing from these up to the spheres in their sidereal orbits), or which the triangle, the square, the hexagon, and so forth, assume in the scale of its creations—or when, in a similar spirit, he investigates and ascertains the really dominant rule in the arithmetic of life; those numbers which the physician observes in the periodic developments of life, and which, in the fluctuating states of an abating and heightening malady, enable him, under certain conditions, to predict the moment of its crisis. Of a still higher kind is that spiritual, we might almost call it divine chronology, which, in universal history, marks out definite epochs of the mental development of the human race, and traces therein the influence of certain grades of life, or ages of the world, and the alternating phases of disease in whole communities, and those decisive moments and great critical emergencies in which God Himself appears as the healing Physician and Restorer of life. It was, in all probability, in reference to such an arithmetic, or in some similar sense, that Pythagoras taught that numbers are, or contain the essence of things. For such an arithmetic of life and geometry of nature do afford a positive cognition and a real knowledge. As commonly understood, however, mathematics are nothing more than a formal science—in other words, they are simply a scientific organon, rather than a science. But now, if nature be not regarded as dead, but living, who can doubt that it—or, as we are now speaking of man’s nearest neighbor—that the earth is akin to man? Was he not formed out of the dust of the earth, and is he not therefore the son, nay, in truth, the first-born of the earth?—does he not receive from it food and nourishment? and when the irrevocable summons goes forth from above, does he not give back again to its bosom the earthly tabernacle of his flesh? Do not chemists tell us that the principal constituent of the purest wheat-corn has a great affinity to the substance of man’s blood? and does not the blood, moreover, derive one of its ingredients from iron—the principal among the metals of the earth? And are not gold and other metallic substances either wholesome medicines or deadly poisons? And is there not also an inexhaustible store of both in the wonderful varieties of herbs and plants? Do not invigorating and healing springs burst from numberless rocks and fissures of the earth? Is not—to speak only of the heavenly bodies nearest to and immediately connected with our globe—is not the sun’s heat so specifically different from every other kind of warmth, the quickener of all that lives and moves, and for man under a milder clime, as it were, a soft renovating bath? And is not the other and lesser light—earth’s mighty satellite and companion, the moon—the cause of all those changes in the weather and atmosphere, which, from the earliest times, have been acknowledged to be most serviceable and highly beneficial to agriculture? Is not the great pulse of the ocean, in its ebb and flow, measured by it, as well as many periods, of the development of life? And is it not, when its operation is too powerful or violently exciting, the cause of a peculiar disease among men? As, therefore, the musical unisons in the melodious songs of birds, both find and wake a concordant echo in the heart of man, so, too, in a larger scale, the blood-soul of man, with its living pulsation and organic sensibility, is most nearly akin to and sympathizes with the earth and the whole earthly frame. And is not, in all probability, this sympathetic influence between the earth and man reciprocal? Must not, for instance, the respiration of nine hundred millions of human beings have affected the atmosphere? Has not the very air degenerated with the human race, and like it become corrupt and deteriorated? Are not certain pestilential diseases propagated by the air alone, being carried in fixed telluric directions, without material contact or pollution? And if, in answer to the inference which we would draw from these facts, any one should sit down to calculate the number of cubic miles in the atmospheric belt, and argue that the breath and evaporation from ever so many myriads of human beings would be insufficient to have any effect thereon, we might easily retort upon him the equally vast reckoning of the millions of seconds which make up a hundred and more generations, and by which these respirations must be counted. But, however this may be, it does appear that the air must, in primitive times, have been far more pure and balsamic, and more vital and more nutritive, than at present. For before the Flood men required neither flesh nor wine to recruit their strength, and yet, in duration of life and bodily vigor, and above all in energy of will and powers of mind, they far surpassed the sons of a later age; and it was even by the misuse of these great gifts and endowments that they brought down the divine vengeance on their sinful generation. And, lastly, if the earth were wholly without life, how could it, at the creation of the animals of this planetary world, have yielded obedience to the behest of the Creator, as it went forth on the sixth day, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind?” Highly important, moreover, as regards the true estimate of the whole realm of nature as contemplated by the Divine mind, and deeply significant, is the wide interval which, in the Mosaic history of the creation, separates the bringing forth of the beasts by the earth at the command of the Almighty, from the making of man, whereof it is written, “Let us make man in our own image.”

Physical science having thus sluggishly advanced through a definite period and number of centuries—having lived through almost two millenniums in little better than an embryo state—made at last the few steps of progress that it has yet taken. By a more rapid march of time, it hastened to suit itself to the riper age of man, and to come forth itself, as it were, mature, although, in many respects, this is even yet very far from being the case. The principal of these advances of physical science is the invention of the compass. For, in the first place, the phenomenon of magnetism presents a remarkable manifestation of the universal life of the world, which eludes all mathematical calculations of magnitude, while the little piece of this wonderful iron balances by its living agency the whole globe itself. And, in the second place, the results to which it has led have been no less important and marvelous. The magnetic index pointed the way to the discovery of the New World, and to a more perfect acquaintance with the figure of the earth, and thus, through an enlarged observation of geographical and astronomical facts, opened out a grander and more extensive view of the whole planetary system. Of the new world in the other hemisphere, a trace unquestionably is to be found in antiquity in the legend of the island of Atlantis. The general description of this island, as equal in extent to both Asia and Africa together, agrees remarkably with the size of America. But the fable contains the additional circumstance, that, having existed in the Western Ocean in very ancient times, it was subsequently swallowed up by the waves. From this circumstance I am led to infer, that the legend did not, as is generally supposed, owe its origin to Phœnician navigators, who, even if it be true that they did succeed in sailing round Africa, most assuredly never ventured so far westward. Like so much besides that is equally great and grand, and, indeed, far grander, the main fact of the legend seems to be derived from an original tradition from the primeval times, when, unquestionably, man was far better acquainted with his whole habitation of this earth than in the days of the infant and imperfect science of Greece, or even of the more advanced and enlightened antiquity. A vague traditionary notion of its existence lived on from generation to generation. But afterward, when even the Phœnician sailors, however far they penetrated into the wide ocean, were unable to give any precise information about, or adduce any proof of, the fact, the hypothesis was advanced, and finally added to the tradition, that the island had been swallowed up by the sea.

Modern astronomy, at its first rise, was extremely revolting to man’s feelings, which had become, as it were, habituated to the olden theory of the world’s shape. The system of Ptolemy, indeed, with its narrow egotistic conceit of making man the center of the sidereal universe, was as unsatisfactory as it was absurd, and little was lost when it was exploded. But, on the other hand, it was startling, and still has a staggering effect on our minds, to be told, that, when measured by the mathematical standard of the vast distances and periodic times of the planetary system, the earth, for which the Almighty has done such incalculably great things, and on which He has bestowed such high and precious gifts, is, as it were, but a little and insignificant splinter in the vast regions of infinite space. A true and profound science of nature, however, does not allow of the validity of mathematical magnitude as an exclusive standard of the value of things. Whether in a greater or less sphere of existence, it sees and discovers in far other properties the true center of life. If, even in our globe, the living magnetic pole does not coincide with the true mathematical north pole, but lies a considerable distance on one side of it, may it not, without prejudice to modern astronomy, be also the case with the whole planetary system? The first conceptions of nature are rarely, if ever, free from mistakes, and oftentimes, together with great truths, contain also great errors. And while the first fresh impression, the living intuition, ever recommends itself to the general feeling of mankind, and takes deep root therein, the notions, on the other hand, which new discoveries of nature introduce, not unfrequently do violence to the prevalent views as to the shape and form of the old world. Often, indeed, the former run directly counter to what we might call the old family feelings of mankind, which, transmitted through generations from father to son, have become, as it were, a custom of life, a holy habit. Afterward, however, as the new scientific discovery is more perfectly developed, it gradually conciliates the old hereditary and customary feeling of nature. The two at last fall into friendly relations with each other.