The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

When we begin to talk about human life, we find all that has made civilization is not physical. In the death of human beings, the energies of thought, and affection, and volition are not represented in the transformations which take place with reference to their bodies. Yet all the energies man has put forth that give any evidence of his record on the earth are such as come from thought, and affection, and volition. As these energies are not transformed at death, as are the forces of the body, they must continue. For to suppose they ceased at death would be to break the law of the correlation and the conservation of forces. If they are not transformed at death, along with the forces of the body, they must reside in another than the material world, and must not, therefore, be subject to its changes.

V.

The personal spirit, by its very nature, and tendencies, and possibilities, seems to be addressed to another than the tangible, local, and physical realm in which it finds itself while residing in the body. An irrepressible and wide-reaching something in the spirit of each man seems to impel him to triumph over space, and time, and change. In the accumulation of property, he would own the whole world. A very small portion of land would be adequate to his physical needs. But he would add acre to acre, till his private domain compassed the surface of the whole earth. Alexander, weeping because there was not another world he could get to conquer, advertises the immensity and illimitability of the human spirit. By the aid of instruments by which man has augmented and lengthened his power of vision, he has come upon stars rolling in the immensity of space to the circle of the thirteenth magnitude. He has not been content to look upon the stars in the vast depths of space, but he has photographed them, so as to behold their faces in his study. Back beyond the dim dawn of time, commensurate with the appearance of human life on earth, he has gone, to return with the chemical, physical, and stratigraphical history of the globe. By the aid of steam, he has made himself a cosmopolite, and through the application of electricity, he has made himself ubiquitous. Must we not posit a spirit correlated to the universal to account for this disposition to compass all things, to know all things, and to be everywhere? The tendency of the human spirit to compass and possess universality is seen, too, by its capacity to create language, in which it embodies all things and through which it expresses its thought of all things. If there had to be separate words for all individual things any but the most limited knowledge would be impossible, and such knowledge alone there would be if man was shut up to atomic sensations for the data of knowledge. But the mind, by its creative, combining power, and its active spontaneous insight, forms words which represent not only individual things, but classes and species of things. Man devises the word oak, and lets it stand for all the oaks in the world. He creates the word humanity, and puts into it the whole human race. He coins the word vegetable, and uses it to define the whole kingdom of plants. Thus he not only goes over the world and sees it directly, but he produces language manifold and complicated, and elastic enough to accommodate and contain the world, with all that is in it. This makes it possible for him to go round the world and see all its wonders, without leaving the place of his birth.

He not only builds for himself the universe in language, so that he can contemplate its moons, and measure its suns, and sail its oceans, and climb its mountains in the silent precincts of his study, but he avails himself of sound and light, also, to give expression to universal ideas. He takes a few notes, and so combines and mixes them as to be able to touch all the chords of the universal human heart in one song. Michael Angelo put all the theology of all the books into the Last Judgment.

Throughout the length and breadth of nature, there is economy of faculty and resource until we come to man. The fish has not a gill nor a fin too many, and there is not in the water where he lives any surplus or margin upon which he does not make levies for his life.

The wings and tail and bones of the bird are all necessary to his poise and circle in the sky. The same economy is found in the atmosphere through which the bird flies. It is none too heavy and none too light. But when we come to man, we find that margin and surplus is the rule. He has a surplus of faculty and a surplus of resource, a surplus of endowment and a surplus of environment. He finds it necessary to make levies on hardly any of himself to get along in this world, at least as far as his natural wants are concerned. What would be the use for a carpenter to have all the tools necessary to build St. Peter’s at Rome, if his only work was to put up a tent for a week’s camping excursion in the woods? Why have an engine with a million horse power to run a flutter mill?

With the animal there is changing endowment and changing environment. Limitations are clear and distinct within and without. But with man there is infinite environment. Within he has a self-determining spirit, subject and object, bound together in a simple and indissoluble unity. Surrounding this spirit, infinite in structure and capacity, is infinite truth, infinite law, and infinite love. Even Herbert Spencer said “Perfect correspondence would be perfect life. Were there no changes in the environment but such as the organism had adapted changes to meet, and were it never to fail in the efficiency with which it met them, there would be eternal existence, and eternal knowledge.” In the personal spirit and the elements which surround it, we have the two eternal terms of eternal correspondence. A self-determining spirit is essentially, structurally, and constitutionally imperishable. It others itself only through its own act. And the other of itself is itself. It is its own subject and its own object. When it goes out of itself, it is itself that goes out. It is a complete circle, an absolute and indestructible individuation. It is the final expression of God’s creative power. Through all the revolutions and mutations of time, this was the destined goal. The destruction of a human spirit would register the death of God. It is the direct expression of the spirit of God, and bears his own likeness and image, and has for the guarantee of its permanence the person of the eternal God himself.

VI.

Rev. Edward White of England, Dr. E. Petavel of France, and Dr. Lyman Abbott of America, have denied what Dr. Abbott is pleased to call facultative immortality. Immortality, in their esteem, is an importation from without. It is the claim of Locke, and Hume, and Mill, and Spencer, that knowledge is an importation from the realm of sensation. Their war was upon the knowing faculties. From the domain of philosophy the conflict has passed up to the plane of religion, and we now have the attack made upon the self-determining spirit. In the sensational philosophy, we have seen all things dissolved. It not only makes it impossible to rationally believe in God, but also in mind, and self, and external world. The sensational philosophy got the object of knowledge by a process that destroyed the subject of knowledge, so this irrational theory of Dr. Lyman Abbot would secure the object of life by the destruction of the subject of life. We know that the raw material of knowledge is found in the objective world, but unless the mind has the inherent combining, active power to take this raw material and organize it into an orderly system, then the individual can never know anything. There being in the mind no master of ceremonies, no director and referee, the tramp and vagabond sensations may wander in and wander out at their sweet will. They would come in with their own opinions and go out with their own opinions. There being no head of the house within, the tramps could have it all their own way.