Thou hast destroyed it,
The beautiful world!
It reels, it crumbles,
Crushed by a demigod’s mighty hand!”
and I cannot see how we are to understand these spirits, or the poet who gave them voice, unless we attack this very general expression “The beautiful world,” here said to have been destroyed by Faust.
I am, however, somewhat reconciled to this by the example of my neighbor—a non-speculative, practical farmer—now busily engaged in harvesting his wheat. For I noticed that he first directed his attention, after cutting the grain, to collecting and tying it together in bundles; and I could not help but perceive how much this facilitated his labor, and how difficult it would have been for him to collect his wheat, grain by grain, like the sparrow of the field. Though wheat it were, and not chaff, still such a mode of handling would reduce it even below the value of chaff.
Just think of handling the wheat crop of these United States, the two hundred and twenty-five millions of bushels a year, in this manner! It is absolutely not to be thought of, and we must have recourse to agglomeration, if not to generalization. But the one gives us general masses, and the other general terms. The only thing that we can do, therefore, is, in imitation of our good neighbor of the wheat field, to handle bundles, bushels, and bags, or—what is still better, if it can be done by some daring system of intellectual elevators—whole ship loads of grain at a time, due care being taken that we tie wheat to wheat, oats to oats, barley to barley, and not promiscuously.
Now, with this example well before our minds, and the necessity mentioned, which compels us to handle—not merely the wheat crop of the United States for one year, but—whatever has been raised by the intelligence of man from the beginning of our race to the time of Goethe the poet, together with the ground on which it was raised, and the sky above—for no less than this seems to be contained in the expression “The beautiful world”—I call your attention first to the expression “form and matter,” which, when applied to works of intelligence, we must take the liberty of changing into the expression “form and content,” for since there is nothing in works of this kind that manifests gravity, it can be of no use to say so, but may be of some injury.
The next is the expression “works of art,” which sounds rather suspicious in some of its applications—sounds as if it was intended to conceal rather than reveal the worker. Now I take it that the “works of art” are the works of the intelligence, and I shall have to classify them accordingly. Another point with reference to this might as well be noticed, and that is that the old expressions “works of art” and “works of nature” do not contain, as they were intended to, all the works that present themselves to our observation—the works of science, for example. Besides, we have government, society, and religion, all of which are undoubtedly distinct from the “works of art” no less than from the “works of nature,” and to tie them up in the same bundle with either of them, seems to me to be like tying wheat with oats, and therefore to be avoided, as in the example before our minds. This seems to be done in the expression “works of self-conscious intelligence,” and “works of nature.”
But if we reflect upon the phrases “works of self-conscious intelligence” and “works of nature,” it becomes obvious that there must be some inaccuracy contained in them; for how can two distinct subjects have the same predicate? It would, therefore, perhaps be better to say “the works of self-conscious intelligence” and the “products of nature.”