For this purpose it is necessary, not only that the inner works of the mental activity should be laid open, and the mechanism of necessary ideas revealed, but also that it should be shown by what peculiarity of our nature it is, that what has reality only in our intuition, is reflected to us as something existing outside of us.

As natural science produces idealism out of realism, by mentalizing the laws of Nature into laws of intelligence, or super-inducing the formal upon the material (I.), so transcendental philosophy produces realism out of idealism, by materializing the laws of Nature, or introducing the material into the formal.

GENESIS.
By A. Bronson Alcott.

“God is the constant and immutable Good; the world is Good in a state of becoming, and the human soul is that in and by which the Good in the world is consummated.”—Plato.

I.—VESTIGES.

Behmen, the subtilest thinker on Genesis since Plato, conceives that Nature fell from its original oneness by fault of Lucifer before man rose physically from its ruins; and moreover, that his present existence, being the struggle to recover from Nature’s lapse, is embarrassed with double difficulties by deflection from rectitude on his part. We think it needs no Lucifer other than mankind collectively conspiring, to account for Nature’s mishaps, or Man’s. Since, assuming man to be Nature’s ancestor, and Nature man’s ruins rather, himself is the impediment he seeks to remove; and, moreover, conceiving Nature as corresponding in large—or macrocosmically—to his intents, for whatsoever embarrassments he finds therein, himself, and none other, takes the blame. Eldest of creatures, and progenitor of all below him, personally one and imperishable in essence, it follows that if debased forms appear in Nature, it must be consequent on Man’s degeneracy prior to their genesis. And it is only as he lapses out of his integrity, by debasing his essence, that he impairs his original likeness, and drags it into the prone shapes of the animal kingdom—these being the effigies and vestiges of his individualized and shattered personality. Behold these upstarts of his loins, everywhere the mimics jeering at him saucily, or gaily parodying their fallen lord.

“Most happy he who hath fit place assigned

To his beasts, and disaforestered his mind;

Can use his horse, goat, wolf, and every beast,

And is not ape himself to all the rest.”[[11]]