The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

We have dwelt at length on the self-consciousness and self-determination of God, as these unite in him as an absolute personality, for the reason that the immortality of the human spirit finds its condition and its security here. If God is a person, and self-conscious, self-determining, and self-active, man is immortal, for in him the elements which constitute the essential nature of God appear. Man is a person and a spirit, made in the likeness and image of God. He is, therefore, as imperishable and indestructible as God is. He has thought and is therefore self-conscious; he has a will, and is therefore self-determining; he has power, and is therefore self-active; he maintains his identity through change, and is therefore a person. But the finite person finds his life through the infinite Person. He finds his knowledge by partaking of truth, the realized thought of God; he finds his freedom by the observance of law, the expressed will of God; he finds his peace by partaking of the life that was in Christ, the manifested love of God. As the fundamental and prior thing in the being of God is thought, so the fundamental and prior thing in the being of man is thought. His progress in the practical matters of life will be in proportion to his thought. His political status will be in proportion to his thought; his religious attainment will be in proportion to his thought. Schleiermacher said “Feeling is the source of religion—a feeling of dependence.” But one cannot have a feeling of dependence without having the thought of dependence. One cannot feel that he depends unless he thinks of himself as dependent. Matthew Arnold said that religion was morality touched by emotion. But there cannot be morality without the thought of some rule by which conduct ought to be guided. Even the African savage, who worships a snake, thinks there is something in the snake entitled to his adoration. Thought is the clearest self-explication of the human spirit. In thought it comes to itself and knows itself. Take thought out of the spirit of man, and you take out its essential nature. Its immortality, even were it possible, would then not be worth contending for. One had as well be blotted out, as to lose the only element of his spirit by which he is able to recognize himself as such. Looking upon thought as the center and kernel of the human spirit, we see that to deny the immortality of the human spirit is to assume that thought is destructible; and this is a flat contradiction, for destruction has no meaning, except in relation to thought. It is of the very nature of thought to be eternal. No thought ever dies, or can die. All the determinations of God’s thought are eternal. The mind of God has within it all determinations of thought; those past, those present, and those to come. Some of these determinations of the divine thought have taken the form of objects in the inorganic world, some have taken the form of objects in the vegetable kingdom, and some have taken the form of objects in the animal kingdom. The determinations of thought, of which inorganic things, trees, and animals were the expressions, are all eternal.

It is of the nature of the things in which the determinations of thought took form to change and pass away. But the ideal patterns, of which they were only the temporary forms, are held in the mind of God forever. The house which expresses the architect’s ideal may be blown away, or burned up, but the ideal in the thought of the architect cannot be blown away or burned up. Now in man the determination of God’s thought is not expressed in a thing, but in a thought. Man, as God’s child, inherits, or comes through creation into the possession of thought, of mind, so that he is able to set up thinking—in his own behalf, and by the self-determining, self-conscious, and self-active power of his own mind. God as thought is his own object and his own subject, and man as thought is his own object and his own subject. God has set him up to housekeeping in the republic of thought.

In the changes which take place in material objects, there is preservation of the species, but the loss of the individual. The object is an element and not a self. When it changes, it is by something external to itself, and in changing, realizes its nature. It is indifferent to change, as there is no central self that retains its essential identity in the midst of all change. The tree belongs to a higher order of existence than a rock. It is the expression of unconscious life. The animal belongs to a still higher plane than the tree. Besides appropriating food from its environment, as does the tree, it takes in the images of things, and lives a low order of sentient life. But in order that animals may take in the images of things through the senses, the things must be present before them. When the thing is gone, the image fades. The objects which stand around man in his environment pass into his consciousness through the senses. But when the environment changes and the objects are taken away, the impressions made by the objects remain. In this way man re-creates the universe for his own thought. The gurgling of brooks, the murmur of the sea, the sighing of the winds, the cooing of doves, he hears just as the animal does. But away from brooks, and seas, and winds, and doves, Beethoven throws into one of his symphonies all the notes that were ever on sea or land. He has within him the same kind of mind that expressed itself in all the notes of music, and he not only hears these notes, but he re-combines and reorganizes them in his great compositions.

IV.

The spirit of man is simple. It is an ultimate and indivisible unity. Death divides, breaks up, and disintegrates. The nature of the human spirit is such, however, that it cannot be divided, broken up, or disintegrated. We see it maintain its identity through the storms and mutations of eighty years. All things change about it. The very body that constitutes its temporary abiding place is torn down and rebuilt many times in the course of a long life. It advances in knowledge and experience; grows larger and richer in hope and love, but all its accumulations of thought and increasing wealth of life are stored in the same self-conscious, self-determining, personal spirit. In the evening of life the old man sits in the midst of his grandchildren and recounts the scenes of his boyhood days. All the waves of time contained within the sweep of three score years and ten have left their labels of drift and storm on the shores of his life. But they have not worn, or wasted, or altered his spirit.

A rock wears away, or is crumbled to dust, when it is a rock no longer. A tree is cut down and split into cord wood and burned in the engine, and it is a tree no longer. In the furnace it is turned back into its original elements. In the fire it is altered or othered. The other of a tree is oxygen, hydrogen, etc. The bird in the thicket is shot by the heartless sportsman. It falls to the ground and its little heart ceases to beat. Soon its body is changed back into earth and air. The other of a bird is not a bird, but the particles which were organized under the process of natural law to form its body. The images which fell on its vision in the grove, faded away when the objects which caused them were removed. The sounds which came to its ears from here and there in the forest passed from its sense when the air that caused them ceased to vibrate. In the bird there was no inner self, abiding, self-conscious, determining, and active, that was capable of grasping and holding and recreating the visions and the notes which came to it. It may have had a sort of sentient consciousness, but it was not much above the consciousness of the sea, which holds the images of the stars in its dark blue waves, as long as they stand above it.

By comparing man with the classes of individuals below him, we may see the respects in which he rises infinitely above them. And we may see, too, by this comparison, that immortality is not something to which man is to come beyond death, but something that he has already in the very constitution of the personal spirit. The same may be said of man’s body, that is said of the bodies of trees and birds, its other is the original elements which compose it. The life in a tree cannot other itself, because it is not conscious. The life in a bird cannot other itself because its consciousness is not self-consciousness. But in man’s body there resides a spirit that can other itself. Man, as a personal spirit, can project himself out of himself, and reason with himself and commune with himself. The self he projects out of himself is another self, but not a different self. The other of man’s spirit, then, is not something else, but it is the same spirit. Man is subject and object, active and passive, determiner and determined. Man, as subject, may externalize himself, and thus make of himself his own object, and by this self-separation enrich himself and advance within himself. Beethoven, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought in the symphonies, and thus regaled and thrilled his own spirit. By putting his own thought into the form of sound waves, it came back to him in the rain, and storm, and thunder, and sigh, and murmur of music. As a thinking subject Raphael objectified his own thought in the transfiguration, and thus had it come back to him in a vision as immortal as the spirit that created it. Michael Angelo objectified his own thought in the Last Judgment, and by this self-separation of his spirit, advertised its indestructibility. Homer, as a thinking subject, objectified his thought into the Iliad. This great epic poem has already lived, even on this side of the grave, where the order is change and decay, nearly three thousand years. Are we to conclude that a personal spirit that could deposit itself in numbers never to die, was itself subject to dissolution? This would be to have an effect greater than the cause. The sunbeam may deposit itself in a tree, and thus secure to itself life in embodied form for hundreds of years. But in order that this may be, the sun must send his beams to warm and nourish the tree all the days of its life. The Iliad has lived, however, nearly three thousand years, without the daily ministrations of Homer’s spirit. For a bubble on the sea of life to lift itself into imperishable form and then fall back to mingle with the waves and the waters, is to contradict the principle of the correlation of forces, which declares that action and reaction must always be equal. The expression a spirit makes of itself cannot be more enduring than the spirit itself.

“The ship may sink and I may drink

A hasty death in the bitter sea;

But all that I leave in the ocean grave