The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

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.