[11]. “Had man withstood the trial, his descendants would have been born one from another in the same way that Adam—i. e. mankind—was, namely, in the image of God; for that which proceeds from the Eternal has eternal manner of birth.”—Behmen.
[12]. “It is a miserable thing to have been happy; and a self-contracted wretchedness is a double one. Had felicity always been a stranger to humanity, our present misery had been none; and had not ourselves been the authors of our ruins, less. We might have been made unhappy, but, since we are miserable, we chose it. He that gave our outward enjoyments might have taken them from us, but none could have robbed us of innocence but ourselves. While man knew no sin, he was ignorant of nothing that it imported humanity to know; but when he had sinned, the same transgression that opened his eyes to see his own shame, shut them against most things else but it and the newly purchased misery. With the nakedness of his body, he saw that of his soul, and the blindness and dismay of his faculties to which his former innocence was a stranger, and that which showed them to him made them. We are not now like the creatures we were made, having not only lost our Maker’s image but our own; and do not much more transcend the creatures placed at our feet, than we come short of our ancient selves.”—Glanvill.
[13]. “I maintain that the different types of the human family have an independent origin, one from the other, and are not descended from common ancestors. In fact, I believe that men were created in nations, not in individuals; but not in nations in the present sense of the word; on the contrary, in such crowds as exhibited slight, if any, diversity among themselves, except that of sex.”—Agassiz.
[14]. “Thou hast possessed my reins, thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb. My substance was not hid from thee when I was made in a secret place, and there curiously wrought as in the lowest parts of the earth: there thine eyes did see my substance yet being imperfect: and in thy Book were all my members written, which in continuance were fashioned when as yet there was none of them.”—Psalm cxxxix: 13, 15, 16.
[15]. “Man feeds upon air, the plant collecting the materials from the atmosphere and compounding them for his food. Even life itself, as we know it, is but a process of combustion, of which decomposition is the final conclusion; through this combustion all the constituents return back into air, a few ashes remaining to the earth from whence they came. But from these embers, slowly invisible flames, arise into regions where our science has no longer any value.”—Schleiden.
[16]. In this connection, permit me, dear friend, to mention a discovery which I made concerning my son Isaac, now three years old. Just imagine my surprise when I found that every book in my possession—Webster’s Spelling-book not excepted—is a perfect riddle to him, and mystifies him as completely as ever the works of Goethe, Hegel, Emerson, or any other thinking man, do or did the learned critics. But my parental pride, so much elated by the discovery of this remarkable precocity in my son—a precocity which, at the age of three years, (!) shows him possessed of all the incapacity of such “learned men”—was shocked, nay, mortified, by the utter want of appreciation which the little fellow showed of this, his exalted condition!
[17]. From this a variety of facts in the character and history of the different works of art become apparent. The degree of the effect produced, for example, is owing to the degree of validity attached to the two sides of the contradiction. If the duties which the individual owes to the family and the state come into conflict, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, and the consciousness of the age has not subordinated the ideas upon which they are based, but accords to each an equal degree of validity, we have a content replete with the noblest effects. For this is not a conflict between the abstract good and bad, the positive and the negative, but a conflict within the good itself. So likewise the universality of the effect is apparent from the content. If this is the self-consciousness of a nation, the work of art will be national. To illustrate this, and, at the same time, to trace the development of the particularity spoken of into a collision, we may refer to that great national work of art—the Iliad of Homer. The particularity which distinguishes the national self-consciousness of the Greeks is the preëminent validity attached by it to one of the before-mentioned modes of the actualization of self-conscious intelligence—the sensuous. Hence its worship of the Beautiful. This preëminence and the consequent subordination of the moral and the rational modes to it, is the root of the contradiction, and hence the basis of the collision which forms the content of the poem. Its motive modernized would read about as follows: “The son of one of our Senators goes to England; is received and hospitably entertained at the house of a lord. During his stay he falls in love and subsequently elopes with the young wife of his entertainer. For this outrage, perpetrated by the young hopeful, the entire fighting material of the island get themselves into their ships, not so much to avenge the injured husband as to capture the runaway wife.”
But—now mark—adverse winds ensue, powers not human are in arms against them, and before these can be propitiated, a princess of the blood royal, pure and undefiled, must be sacrificed!—is sacrificed, and for what? That all Greece may proclaim to the world that pure womanhood, pure manhood, family, society, and the state, are nothing, must be sacrificed on the altar of the Beautiful. For in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, all that could perish in Helen, and more too—for Iphigenia was pure and Helen was not—was offered up by the Greeks, woman for woman, and nothing remained but the Beautiful, for which she henceforth became the expression. For in this alone did Helen excel Iphigenia, and all women.
But how is this? Have not the filial, the parental, the social, the civil relations, sanctity and validity? Not as against the realization of the Beautiful, says the Greek. Nor yet the state? No; “I do not go at the command of Agamemnon, but because I pledged fealty to Beauty.” “But then,” Sir Achilles, “if the Beautiful should present itself under some individual form—say that of Briseis—you would for the sake of its possession disobey the will of the state?” “Of course.” And the poet has to sing, “Achilles’ wrath!” and not “the recovery of the runaway wife,” the grand historical action.
[18]. Thus, for example, it becomes very clear through the whole course of our inquiry, that, in order to render the dynamic organization of the Universe evident in all its parts, we still lack that central phenomenon of which Bacon already speaks, which certainly lies in Nature, but has not yet been extracted from it by experiment. [Remark of the Original. Compare below, third note to “General Remark.”]