A theosmeter—an instrument of instruments—he gathers in himself all forces, partakes in his plenitude of omniscience, being spirit’s acme, and culmination in nature. A quickening spirit and mediator between mind and matter, he conspires with all souls, with the Soul of souls, in generating the substance in which he immerses his form, and wherein he embosoms his essence. Not elemental, but fundamental, essential, he generates elements and forces, expiring while consuming, and perpetually replenishing his waste; the final conflagration a current fact of his existence. Does the assertion seem incredible, absurd? But science, grown luminous and transcendent, boldly declares that life to the senses is ablaze, refeeding steadily its flame from the atmosphere it kindles into life, its embers the spent remains from which rises perpetually the new-born Phœnix into regions where flame is lost in itself, and light its resolvent emblem.[[15]]
“Thee, Eye of Heaven, the great soul envies not,
By thy male force is all we have, begot.”
VI.—IDEAL METHOD.
“It has ever been the misfortune of the mere materialist, in his mania for matter on the one hand and dread of ideas on the other, to invert nature’s order, and thus hang the world’s picture as a man with his heels upwards.”—Cudworth.
This inverse order of thought conducts of necessity to conclusions as derogatory to himself as to Nature’s author. Assuming matter as his basis of investigation, force as father of thought, he confounds faculties with organs, life with brute substance, and must needs pile his atom atop of atom, cement cell on cell, in constructing his column, sconce mounting sconce aspiringly as it rises, till his shaft of gifts crown itself surreptitiously with the ape’s glorified effigy, as Nature’s frontispiece and head. Life’s atomy with life omitted altogether, man wanting. Not thus reads the ideal naturalist the Book of lives. But opening at spirit, and thence proceeding to ideas and finding their types in matter, life unfolds itself naturally in organs, faculties begetting forces, mind moulding things substantially, its connections and inter-dependencies appear in series and degrees as he traces the leaves, thought the key to originals, man the connexus, archetype, and classifier of things; he, straightway, leading forth abreast of himself the animated creation from the chaos,—the primeval Adam naming his mates, himself their ancestor, contemporary and survivor.
VII.—DIALOGIC.
If the age of iron and brass be hard upon us, fast welding its fetters and chains about our foreheads and limbs, here, too, is the Promethean fire of thought to liberate letters, science, art, philosophy, using the new agencies let loose by the Dædalus of mechanic invention and discovery, in the service of the soul, as of the senses. Having recovered the omnipresence in nature, graded space, tunnelled the abyss, joined ocean and land by living wires, stolen the chemistry of atom and solar ray, made light our painter, the lightning our runner, thought is pushing its inquiries into the unexplored regions of man’s personality, for whose survey and service every modern instrument lends the outlay and means—facilities ample and unprecedented—new instruments for the new discoverers. Using no longer contentedly the eyes of a toiling circuitous logic, the genius takes the track of the creative thought, intuitively, cosmically, ontologically. A subtler analysis is finely disseminated, a broader synthesis accurately generalized from the materials accumulated on the mind during the centuries, the globe’s contents being gathered in from all quarters: the book of creation, newly illustrated and posted to date. The new Calculus is ours: an organon alike serviceable to naturalist and metaphysician: a Dialogic for resolving things into thoughts, matter into mind, power into personality, man into God, many into one; soul in souls seen as the creative controlling spirit, pulsating in all bodies, inspiring, animating, organizing, immanent in the atoms, circulating at centre and circumference, willing in all wills, personally embosoming all persons an unbroken synthesis of Being.