If it be essential to the meaning of philosophy that it should issue from life, it is equally essential that it should return to life. But this connection of philosophy with life does not mean its reduction to the terms of life as conceived in the market-place. Philosophy cannot emanate from life, and quicken life, without elevating and ennobling it, and will therefore always be incommensurable with life narrowly conceived. Hence the philosopher must always be as little understood by men of the street as was Thales by the Thracian handmaiden. He has an innocence and a wisdom peculiar to his perspective.
"When he is reviled, he has nothing personal to say in answer to the civilities of his adversaries, for he knows no scandals of anyone, and they do not interest him; and therefore he is laughed at for his sheepishness; and when others are being praised and glorified, he cannot help laughing very sincerely in the simplicity of his heart; and this again makes him look like a fool. When he hears a tyrant or king eulogized, he fancies that he is listening to the praises of some keeper of cattle—a swineherd, or shepherd, or cowherd, who is being praised for the quantity of milk which he squeezes from them; and he remarks that the creature whom they tend, and out of whom they squeeze the wealth, is of a less tractable and more insidious nature. Then, again, he observes that the great man is of necessity as ill-mannered and uneducated as any shepherd, for he has no leisure, and he is surrounded by a wall, which is his mountain-pen. Hearing of enormous landed proprietors of ten thousand acres and more, our philosopher deems this to be a trifle, because he has been accustomed to think of the whole earth; and when they sing the praises of family, and say that some one is a gentleman because he has had seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he thinks that their sentiments only betray the dulness and narrowness of vision of those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had thousands and thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, many times over."[427:17]
It is not to be expected that the opinion of the "narrow, keen, little, legal mind" should appreciate the philosophy which has acquired the "music of speech," and hymns "the true life which is lived by immortals or men blessed of heaven." Complacency cannot understand reverence, nor secularism, religion.
The Secularism of the Present Age.
§ [219]. If we may believe the report of a contemporary philosopher, the present age is made insensible to the meaning of life through preoccupation with its very achievements:
"The world of finite interests and objects has rounded itself, as it were, into a separate whole, within which the mind of man can fortify itself, and live securus adversus deos, in independence of the infinite. In the sphere of thought, there has been forming itself an ever-increasing body of science, which, tracing out the relation of finite things to finite things, never finds it necessary to seek for a beginning or an end to its infinite series of phenomena, and which meets the claims of theology with the saying of the astronomer, 'I do not need that hypothesis.' In the sphere of action, again, the complexity of modern life presents a thousand isolated interests, crossing each other in ways too subtle to trace out—interests commercial, social, and political—in pursuing one or other of which the individual may find ample occupation for his existence, without ever feeling the need of any return upon himself, or seeing any reason to ask himself whether this endless striving has any meaning or object beyond itself."[428:18]
The Value of Contemplation for Life.
§ [220]. There is no dignity in living except it be in the solemn presence of the universe; and only contemplation can summon such a presence. Moreover, the sessions must be not infrequent, for memory is short and visions fade. Truth does not require, however, to be followed out of the world. There is a speculative detachment from life which is less courageous, even if more noble, than worldliness. Such is Dante's exalted but mediæval intellectualism.
"And it may be said that (as true friendship between men consists in each wholly loving the other) the true philosopher loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts to wander to other things."
Even though, as Aristotle thought, pure contemplation be alone proper to the gods in their perfection and blessedness, for the sublunary world this is less worthy than that balance and unity of faculty which distinguished the humanity of the Greek.