The empirical philosophy, which reduces knowledge to sensations and morality to laws imposed by prudence, and man himself to the same plane of life occupied by the lower animals, invades the domain of æsthetics, and makes of beauty a mere matter of individual feeling, local convention, and arbitrary fashion. This philosophy of the dirt denies to mind any inherent, creative activity, in the region of knowledge, morals, or art. Now, it is doubtless true, that food and power and beauty of color and tone are addressed to the lower animals; sufficiently, at least, for them to get the means of subsistence, and some low sort of pleasure from them. They do this, however, not by reason, but by instinct. The bee is determined by its nature to build his cell in accordance with mathematical principles, and to store it with honey from the leaves and the flowers. The bee does this as naturally as water runs down-hill. There is no calculation in it, and the bee does not recognize itself in the process of this work.
The bird may be determined in the selection of its mate by brilliant plumage, or joyous song, but this it does just as a rock turned loose from the top of a house falls to the ground. The evidence of a combining, mental activity in man, to which things in the outside world are addressed, in a peculiar and distinct sense, is found in the fact that man not only receives the things that come to him, but sends them from him in the forms of his own thought.
The bee appropriates the honeydew that covers the surface of the leaves, stores it in his cell, and eats it in the winter; but who ever knew bees to plant out trees in order that there might be leaves from which to secure honeydew? Man finds the bananas that grow in the tropics, and the berries that grow in the temperate zones, and eats them; but he sees how bananas and berries grow, and so clears fields and hedges, to insure a more abundant crop.
The monkey hears the thunder and sees the lightning as well as the man, but man investigates the nature of lightning; he sees the principle underlying its weird movements, the things for which it has affinity. So he contrives various methods for utilizing it. The mind within him being the same in kind as the mind which sends the lightning, he sees how lightning is sent, and sends it. He not only sees thunder-storms, but how they are made. So the professor creates them in glass jars for the benefit of his class.
Nature presents herself to man under uniform methods of action. Everywhere is regularity and orderliness. He reproduces this order in political and social life. The laws without him kindle into expression the moral magazine of volition within him.
Nature presents herself to man as unity. This implies mind. Unity is impossible without mind. The mind underneath the unity, without him, speaks to the mind within him. Then by his own mind he recreates the universe in literature.
He hears the cawing of rooks, the cooing of doves, the purling of brooks, and the roar of tempests. These, with all other sounds in nature, are caught and combined in the marvelous creation of Mozart and Beethoven.
Much is said by the learned men who are ever seeking to minify man’s place in nature, about the reason and memory, and intelligence, and even conscience of the lower animals. It is almost enough to make one wish he were a dog or a horse when he reads how much sense and how much conscience dogs and horses have. Not much weight, however, will ever be given to these long treatises on the intelligence of the lower animals, until some bee shall give us a book on mathematics, or until some horse shall tell through one of our agricultural journals the best time to sow clover; or some dog shall give us the philosophy of the chase. We see the capacity of the human mind in Shakspere’s plays. So one picture painted by a cat, one poem written by a mule, one philosophical dissertation composed by an owl, or one cocoanut plantation planted by the monkeys, would establish beyond question that the high claims made for the mental capabilities of these humble members of the animal creation are justified.
Man grows wheat by the use of the mind within him, which sees how the mind without him has made the growth of wheat possible. Man utilizes power, by the use of the mind within him, which recognizes how power is produced and controlled by the mind without him. Man sees truth, because the mind within him is like the mind without him, which expresses itself in truth. Man sees law, because the mind within him is like the mind without him which ordained law. So man sees beauty, because the mind within him is like the mind without him, which expresses itself in beauty. Food, and truth, and law, and beauty, cannot be reproduced by man, except by the laws of mind acting in him as the laws of mind do without him.