If we wish to know ourselves many subjects of all kinds must be studied simultaneously; religion and religions; the opinions of the ancients and of our contemporaries; men as they now are and as they were. Renan has well characterised primitive men in attributing to them “a special feeling for nature which enabled them, with wonderful delicacy and accuracy, of which we have no conception, to perceive the qualities which furnished names; and they saw innumerable things at once.”
The Hindoos, who were writers many centuries before our present era, must have inherited from their primitive ancestors this special feeling for nature, or they would not have composed those verses in the 129th hymn: “Everything in the beginning was hidden in gloom—the germ which was covered by the husk was brought forth by the power of heat. On this germ rested love, the spring of the mind, yes, and the poets, in meditating thereon, discovered in their souls the tie between the things created and the things uncreated.—This spark, comes it from the earth, piercing all, penetrating into all, or comes it from heaven?”
These passages have something modern in them; they might have been written now when science seeks to fuse heaven and earth, which was not done formerly.
The cord does not cease to vibrate. The persistence of this phenomenon has different comments made on it. “It is the effect of heredity,” says modern science; “it is a contemporaneous effect of the fall,” says theology. Perhaps the one and the other make of the human race one unique being which continues through the ages.
It is as though time had no existence for humanity. Space also apparently does not count for much with the race. If the singular facts are true which we hear, two persons separated by a great distance have the same thoughts at the same instant; not the universal thought naturally inherent in the human mind, but entirely personal. Has sympathy—which is as essentially human as it is mysterious—a relationship with electricity, which is a distinctly physical phenomenon? On those who reject such a supposition should fail the burden of finding another.
Each of us sees a landscape according to our sight; to the short-sighted (and this is a normal condition) the landscape appears simple; trees here, there houses and streets, men walking; but with strong glasses, as is well known, it is possible to see many more things. Again, the short-sighted can distinguish only the colour, veins and serrated edge of a leaf, but if this were placed under a microscope they would see a surface of green glittering with light, and strewn with gold and diamonds.
If there are two ways of looking at a leaf, there are at least three of looking at life; it can be seen from its pleasant or painful side, this is to feel that we live only; then we can grasp it with regard to the duties it imposes on us. This is a right point of view, but it shows one side only; or we may consider it as science represents it, that is its moral, rational, and religious aspect combined.
The more we observe and the more we reflect on what we observe, so much the more do we exercise our faculty of understanding things; and according as this faculty approaches or withdraws from the normal type, so it will correspond either with the leaf seen by the naked eye or with it as seen under the microscope.
Opposition
There are two kinds of opposition. Very often we come upon a true thought in a book which shocks us because for the moment we do not recognise its truth. We also forget that all truths can be viewed at various angles; or we do not understand a truth because it is expressed in a novel way.