1 10 2 https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/a76dab14b694d497a4d05b9d3abb8385.pdf?Expires=1784764800&Signature=FKvLNQ184c6HNjs4eIHvo%7E7-nIV4MGKl6dj091ly7Evp7yGUUXGZFfTRMVC8n0tTxN41x3HBpLr6sORmEP5kl6JseyN0DlyM-E3MiBNiwq3YptP6cJIX9xuCasx8jtSZ8ykJEj5uQy1-Dr9urGGgGu3Q%7Ercq49JDKwE61csarYwQ9czKCZX34ACT1X6oJ0ibiJqsAknQp4dgzBa%7Eg3Aqcb1y0Kq3%7EhExzI5b7St1scCcmTMX9uocHiyX2c0ri6FxYzaI8MmYY42yhCVr8kd7rRVpJK%7Ey3Bu%7ErG--Q9iKGx%7E0G%7ESi67RV3ZFC7NkbFJcBzUEOSdPByPDdfWIYwxZjVQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM 56b9598028b87e8ba51c243b7aa10846 PDF Text Text \v y-C/ (3 94 Abraham Lincoln—Fifteenth Amendment. ABRAHAM LINCOLN—FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT. BY REV. JOHN WEISS. Whoever recalls some of the fa­ mous dates of history, will have a suspicion either that Providence in­ dulges a taste for coincidences, or that the historian has been mytholo­ gizing. It was understood between Xerxes and the Carthaginians that, when he passed over into Greece, they should invade Sicily. The bat­ tle of Salamis was fought on the 23d of September, 480 b.c., and the great victory at Himera, in Sicily, gained by Geton and Theron over Hamilcar, occurred on the same day. Such a nice adjustment of events at both ends of the line of invasion happen­ ed so long ago that it passes for an improbability. But one is ready to believe it since Gettysburg and Vicksburg were announced to Ame­ rica on the same 4th of July, as if God celebrated; and Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge crowned the first Thanksgiving at which all the States sat on the same day. Does a sublime irony also mingle with these grave touches of Providence ? For I remember that the head and cap of the Goddess of Liberty was lifted to its place on the dome of the Capitol at noon on De­ cember 2d, four years after another head with a cap upon it was lifted up to draw all people to it. Fused and moulded in their hearts, the bronze crowns the precise moment, as if to give the country God’s opin­ ion of an execution. But April is America’s month of resurrection. It is full of Easter- days. On the 19th, in 1689, the men of Boston put the tyrannical An­ dros into his own castle, built by him to command the town. On the 19th, in 1775, Lexington retorted sharp­ ly on Governor Hutchinson. And on the 19th, in 1861, Massachusetts went to Baltimore. This month, Fort Sumter challenged, and Richmond surrendered, and Booth finished the lingering treason. We stand in this week of patriotic memories, with the day set apart by Christians for cele­ brating a resurrection, to remember a genuine one in the passing away of Abraham Lincoln’s spirit into the proclamation of the Fifteenth Amend­ ment. Surely this month, when our fields begin to resume their green, marks a springtime of emotions and ideas that puts an accent on the page of history. It is a month when every thing has seemed so often lost just before every thing has been virtually gained. It is the divine vindication of appa­ rent failures; and I do not know that the theory of Providence was ever more precisely stated than by two negroes who had just heard of Mr. Lincoln’s death: Said one, “ Well,I tell you now, human events be one mass of ignorances.” Said the other, 11 Ah! yes ; but de Lord puts in his stick, and stirs them up, and makes a heap o’ wisdom.” So it seems to­ day. If Providence be the grave­ digger, the turf finds nutriment. We should grow tired in mentioning the evidence of this which has been ao' �Abraham Lincoln—Fifteenth Amendment. cumulating ever since the rebellion brought in a series of disasters. It was the last resort of a desperation that defeats itself in taking it. . Paymaster Smith, of the Kearsarge, used to relate that the Alabama’s flag was shot away four or five different times during the action, while our flag was hit but once. Captain Winslow had a battle-flag furled at the mizzen with the stops, ready to let go if victory was ours ; and the last shot that was fired by the Alabama carried away the halyards, and threw it open to the breeze. So treason at last tore away the country’s hesitation, and set liberty broad open over all the States. It seems a good thing for Ameri­ can pulpits to recall on Easter-Sun­ day the character of the man who first proclaimed the emancipation which the nation has just secured and ratified. His own private for­ tune represented what is possible to the poor and miserable, provided they are reared in a republic; if not a station as exalted as his own, or such an opportunity to become en­ deared to the hearts of millions, at least freedom like his own, which brought out his natural capacity. He was a conspicuous symbol of the American idea, born among the poor white trash of Kentucky. He was the country reduced to its simplest terms. When a German soldier, who had been promoted for good beha­ vior in the field, grew very grateful, and tried to show the President, with much garrulity, that it was a safe thing to make him an officer because he came of an excellent family in Europe, and was, in fact, the son of a nobleman: “Oh! never mind Ki^,” said the witty American no- 95 ble; “ you will not find that to be an obstacle to your advancement.” The President meant to say that all the fine qualities of common people eventually get to the front in this country, and all the low qualities of superfine people are eventually or­ dered to the rear, with the mules and the baggage. How grudgingly we conceded administration to the low qualities of his accidental suc­ cessor ! The President’s mind was plain, with a tendency toward metaphysi­ cal speculation so decided that he sometimes told his friends he had missed his vocation. One of his ear­ liest efforts was a rationalistic treatise, which an over-zealous partisan put into the stove, lest it should hurt his political prospects. This quality ap­ peared conspicuously in his early analysis of the sophistries of Senator Douglas, and was always like some cleaner or picker, that frees a staple of its refuse. His common sense kept it in the service of practical questions, and it never interfered with his natural ability to grow up to their level. He did not represent the prophetic thought of a few minds, but the great bulk of thinking, or rather of the popular instinct, which is coming up abreast of the finest in­ telligence. It was not his mission to proclaim the truths which were necessary to America, before there was an America to accept them. His healthy growth was due to the sagacity which waited for the im­ pulses of the country to gather head­ way, and which never mistook a good deal of local feeling for a deli­ berate American conviction. But he had a faith in the ultimate resolu­ tion of the people, that kept him �96 Abraham Lincoln—Fifteenth Amendment, steady all the while. The advanced posts of truth often sighed to hear the trumpet’s comfort and assurance from his lips, and lamented the silence. But his roots were in the prairie, where he absorbed both sun and air; and when he went to the grist, he went full of nature. His temper was not enthusiastic; he never fired the popular heart, any more than the corn and wheat do in growing. He never appeared to yearn after the point which at length he gained ; but, as if he had the instinct of all the country’s staples in him to make the fruit itself put forth its own blos­ som, his feeling could not be hurried to antedate his growth. When the time came, he said something that struck another hour of liberty’s life. For his roots tapped our hearts, and went working all around for every drop, slowly to draw in and change the people’s secret hopes into the people’s unconcealed America, whose eyes this morning beam with majesty and confidence. His fancy was homely, and seemed to point his thought on purpose with the commonest illustrations, as if to satirize the flowery politicians. Fifty years of oratory, self-laudation and arrogance, of corrupt expedients ably recommended, of crimes against the people adroitly argued, of latent treason covered by that flaunting rag called patriotism—this bad dream of a restless country was broken by a rude and honest voice ; as when he said, “ Gold is good in its place ; but living, brave, and pa­ triotic men are better than gold.” There is no chance for bribery in that. How welcome were his sen­ tences, bare as your hand, but clos­ ed firmly on their object, to hold it, and nothing more ; not to play fast and loose with our great ideas, but to win and keep them for the benefit of all. The large, hard-featured hand which tore all our old bunting to the ground, hung out the flag of the com­ mon people of America. Before me as I write there lies a cast of his hand, brought to me from the West, where it was taken. It is closed tight around a willow stick, which he had just been whittling. There is no flesh to spare ; the act of grasping brings out deep wrinkles at the base of the thumb, and the veins which run up to feed the long, prehensile fingers. Just as you say it is the most virile hand you ever saw, its symmetry strikes you. From the knotted wrist to the perfectly fashioned nails, it is the hand built by a man in whom balance of think­ ing, tenderness of feeling, perception for unaffected beauty, gives shape and artistic finish to a power that could throttle without drawing breath. And the homely willow stick makes this symbol of a great president complete. See this hand in his addresses and state papers. They are filled with something better than rhetori­ cal contrivances. They show a power of divesting the subject-mat­ ter of every thing that is merely ad­ ventitious, either in ornament or in suggestion. The President’s religion was, like his rhetoric, stripped of every incum­ brance ; he was content with God for his day’s march. He woke with that essential in the morning, and had reason to be grateful for the sustenance in his tired bivouac at night. Whenever he took the name of God upon his lips, it became the �Abraham Lincoln—Fifteenth Amendment. utterance of a heart that was filled with a sense of the divine presence in the history of America. The leaders of the rebellion made a co­ pious use of the name of God. Gene­ ral Lee was accustomed to speak of the blessing of the Lord of hosts which rested on his arms; and Jef­ ferson Davis hid the venom of his sting in the sheath of holy phrases. You will see elaborate liturgies in vogue wherever established oppres­ sion seeks to prolong its irreligious life. Bishops and ministers used to prove the divine sanction of slavery by being very evangelical about the Bible, thus literally holding up the crucifix to advertise the auction-block and whipping-post. During the middle ages, a famous instrument of death, called the Maiden, was in use. It was the figure of a beautiful virgin placed in the niche of a prison cell, to repre­ sent the adorable Madonna. The prisoner, exhausted by fasting and torture, and turned into this cell, falls in supplication before this image, which is contrived to open its arms, as if to invite his bewildered fancy to a protecting embrace. He rushes into the trap ; the arms close, and a thousand knife-blades kiss his life away. Such is the religion of every kind of oppression. It is fair with all the forms of Christianity, and its mouth is filled with the di­ vine invitation, “ Come unto me, all ye that labor.” It is a Jesus utterling those words with sinister intent to keep the wretched in its power; and a thousand secret miseries spring forth to drink their blood. The President never traded in the name of Jesus. From the testimony which has been lately brought forvol. i.—7 97 ward by Mr. Herndon, his law-part­ ner, who was the intimate of his opinions, we learn, as we might ex­ pect, that his religion was primitive and simple, as he was ; it consisted in a profound sense of the Infinite, in childlike trust, in absolute devotion to the orders of the day. It will sur­ prise some men that he did his work without a mediator. When John Alden wanted Miles Standish to do a bit of courting for him, the old soldier’s advice was, “ If you want any thing well done, go and do it yourself, John.” The President ad­ dressed himself directly to the source of all beauty and goodness. He never wasted time in speaking well of Jesus, still less in struggling to ima­ gine that his way to the present God lay through this departed person. His sincerity needed miracles as little as Theodore Parker’s did. They were both alike in freeing their man­ liness from the fetters of the super­ natural ; that ball and chain clanked at the ankles of neither. Of what accountto him, in the multifarious tasks of strength and tenderness which he accomplished, would have been a be­ lief in feeding the five thousand or in the raising of Lazarus ? He witness­ ed a truer resurrestion with his own eyes ; a country bandaged from head to foot starting from its noisome tomb at the voice of a great people. He cast out demons with little honest sentences, which they bit and raged at in vain. All the lameness in the country gained sound muscles in his frame, paralyzed liberty leaped up, threw away its crutches as he passed by, and grasped a million muskets. And when, at their approach, he saw the rebellion, reduced to its own shape, rush violently down a- steep �A braham L incoln—Fifteenth Amendment. 9S place and disappear, the mythologi­ cal swine must have seemed less im­ pressive. Let us commend to the churches the problem of this religious man, who got along so well on sim­ ple integrity, and never met a mo­ ment so critical as to claim the aid of a supernatural mediator. Strange to say, God himself sufficed from the first gun at Sumter to the proclama­ tion of the Fifteenth Amendment. Abraham Lincoln never played the diplomatist with God’s name ; he never used the airy phrases of reli­ gion to feather public documents, or conciliate the respectability of our theologies. For God was in the camp of his armies, and claimed a seat at his council-board, and thun­ dered in the great majority which bade him occupy till death. •7V *7V TV dfc 'TV Now the people must bring all these homely qualities of the great President to the work of the Fif­ teenth Amendment; the same pa­ tience and tenacity ; the same good sense; the same placability; ele­ ments that wait for results before they put on lustre. They are like the rough gems which catch the light in noble flashes when long grinding proves their temper. The amend­ mentwill drain our manliest qualities before it becomes a fact as well as a law. ***** We must see that the personal re­ ligion of Abraham Lincoln is fur­ nished to these men, instead of the forms of sectarianism. We must in­ sist that the missionary shall have his theology reduced to marching rations as he goes among those chil­ dren in religion to distribute to them the plain truths of morals, of health and order, of a practical knowledge of God, of hopes less fantastical than their crude feelings now claim. But first, some missionary must visit us. What Northern sect cafi invite them into its meeting-houses with the text, “ The rich and poor meet together; the Lord is the Maker of them all ” ? Only those can meet together who are able to offer pre­ miums for the best seats. It will be long before a black man with money in his pocket can compete at this new auction-block, where religion is knocked down to and by the highest bidder. May it be long, indeed ! What sect can venture to proclaim to the negro that Christianity means brotherhood, when it does not mean that in horse-cars, hotels, railroads, theatres, and concert-rooms, and on­ ly means it to the extent of about four of the worst pews in a meeting­ house. It does not mean that in the very places where our chances for contact are the best. It is a glitter­ ing generality that keeps its own coupe ; the seat for the other person is not yet put in. Will the China­ man, whose Buddhism received its first inspiration from the heart’s na­ tural recoil at caste, be much im­ pressed with the equality that has forgotten the first lesson in optics, that yellow is a constituent of white ? The day will come when white itself in this country will depend upon a harmonic gradation of all the cheeks that the sun kisses. The sun has no sallies of contempt, of which these are the hues. It loves to divide its unity. Whatever form this naturali­ zation may assume, the missionary must be its first preacher, and if he will insist upon it that one is our Lord and Master, let him at least sweeten �Abraham Lincoln—Fifteenth Amendment. the assumption by confessing that all of us are brethren. In this respect the Catholic starts with an advantage over the Protestant of a thousand years of ministry among all races and tolors. Rome has no squeamishness that turns on nationality. It knows hdlv to put a black bishop over a black diocese ; and in course of time the country will discover that the whole diocese will vote to please the bishop. The pope does not go into a cathedral and put up seats at high mass to be contended for by prospe­ rous dry-goods merchants ; he pre­ fers to collect his Peter’s pence by making the whole building the home and solace of the miserable. The more meagre and bloodless the fly is, the more sumptuous is the invita­ tion to walk into the pope’s parlor. You may claim that he is fallible, but you can not deny that such diplo­ macy will have infallible results. It will bring all the pariahs of America to their knees before Rome’s confes­ sionals. Of all the incidents in the New Testament, the baptizing of the Ethiopian has been most dear to the city that loves to propagate the dra­ matic faith of eighteen centuries. The South has already been selected for a special field. Politics and re­ ligion powerfully combine to guide the operations of the priest among this people of ardent feeling, picto­ rial fancy, flashing emotions. Music and symbols may attract them intp a fetichism, or idol-worship, no more emancipating than what their an­ cestors in Guinea practiced ; and per­ haps some day all these dusky millions at the elevation of the host will bow down to a policy that is. at war with republics, that watches to gg throw our Bible out and bring our money in, to found sectarian schools and a feudal system on the soil which free blood has so often ran­ somed. Crucifix in hand, the priest will point to the symbol of sorrow as he walks among the despised and re­ jected ; they will recollect their stripes and perceive our prejudice, and throng into the gate which the man who was acquainted with grief will seem to throw open to them; and the cross will again become a club to dash out the brains of revering hu­ manity. Protestantism has no chance short of instantaneous and absolute equality, North and South, practical fraternity that makes exclusion a crime, and opportunity a claim to the country’s gratitude in every man who offers it. Then your Fifteenth Amendment will be ratified, not by mere bluster of cannon, but by the sincere welcome of thirty million lips. After the battle of Gettysburg, the grateful heart of Abraham Lincoln compromised itself to all our hopes in these sentences : “ Thanks to all, peace does not appear so distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay, and so come as to be worth the keeping in all future time. It will then have been proved that among freemen there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet, and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case and pay the cost. And then there will be some black men who* can remember that with silent, tongue, and clinched teeth, and. steady eye, and well-poised bayo­ net, they have helped mankind on to' this great consummation. Let us bequite sober. Let us diligently ap­ ply the means, never doubting that a. just God in his own good time will1 give us the rightful result.” It seems to be a message from him on an Easter morning, “ Let us be quite sober. Let us diligently apply the means.” �We f an dahL JUNE, 1870. THE NEW POWERS OF CON­ the force, intelligence, and capacity for organization to use that power GRESS. efficiently, he can command any The pretense of State sovereignty thing and every thing that rightfully vanished at Appomatox. It disap­ belongs to him. That, therefore, is peared when Lee sheathed his per­ our primary reliance. If the negro jured sword. The Tenth Section of neglects to avail himself of this Article First of the Constitution for­ means of self-defense, it is his own bade the States to exercise the usual fault. If he proves incapable of powers of sovereigns : those touch­ using it efficiently, that will be his ing treaties, the raising of armies, misfortune. But whether such a re­ the coinage of money, the laying of sult comes from his weakness or his taxes on imports, etc. The Thir­ neglect, it is the same peril to us; teenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth and we can not afford to let this Amendments still further cut down ready weapon of the nation’s de­ the powers of the States. Following fense drop from our hands. Whe­ in the line of that Tenth Section, ther weak or neglectful, we must, for and carrying out its policy still fur­ our own sakes, for the nation’s sake, ther, these amendments define who protect this ally to the fullest extent shall constitute the citizens of a that the circumstances allow. In State, and prohibit the State’s in­ the present transition state, for seve­ terference, in certain respects, with ral years to come, the new citizen the civil and political rights of its must have the special intervention citizens. Still further, these amend­ of Congress. The most explicit ments intrust Congress with the duty laws, such as can not be evaded of providing for the enforcement of or transgressed with impunity, are their provisions. As to the matters the debt the nation owes to the new specified in these amendments, voter. therefore, Congress is empowered It is not for us to suggest the de­ to exercise legislation in the am­ tails of such laws. One or two prin­ plest manner. ciples we may presume to point out We do not rely, in the last resort, —principles which should underlie on any legislation for the protection all legislation on these points. All of the black race. Every voting will admit that the difficulties in this class, in the long run, protects itself. class of laws are—first, to initiate The negro has the ballot. If he has proceedings; secondly, to secure � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. 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Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text. Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Abraham Lincoln - Fifteenth Amendment Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Weiss, John Description An account of the resource Place of publication: [Chicago] Collation: 94-99 p. ; 24 cm. Notes: From The Standard, Vol. 1, no. 2, June 1980. The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". It was ratified on February 3,1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available [s.n.] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1870] Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G5446 Subject The topic of the resource Race Suffrage Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Abraham Lincoln - Fifteenth Amendment), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Abraham Lincoln American Reconstruction Conway Tracts Race Racism United States Constitution https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/506365bfd993ae330dbb7a7db58c8a4c.pdf?Expires=1784764800&Signature=bC-A6TY7npUpxOxTRRv7iX0bYFBetbAKehySITuCth4xc1S7TImgIYfYmykjsHpQuuEc0ULp52X-09FuWmNQitBW4SdqMrp6n5vgH7mpI9upassRiqqmXb2eYyWMJOFLoITO8wPYRkxu-xy2mYmqdnpCh6musVjUBeVmo7ooeTIUUIYOUFKHzUGrjfG0H6qRd-rroAXKM60rTOOz-qmW-gSk3AyNAy7DAp9gk22kooyEY8GDNcnRPSJG-9k6usebGGabQCCrj27EZ1g4cZXGH7Tam0FDVGvi8xm8m6s8JZr-noJVyJXutEK3xN7xUsq3L5WjDLbrvp98jzP8fIDw0A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM df43c61f976e091e5638ddbfc8d09491 PDF Text Text Theories of Mental Genesis. 197 8. Under the process of correlation, wherein real forces lose lheir individuality, only abstract or general force abides. Iriris may be called ideal force when contrasted with par­ ticular real forces; it is cognized only by inference, and not By immediate sensuous perception. It is a really-existent Universal or generic entity — an Actuality whose manifesta­ tion is the correlation of forces. The particular forces are ^its reality, but not their own; for their manifestation is their S destruction, but both phases give evidence of the reality of the Universal. In the entire round from one force through all -the others back to the same force again, we have the succes­ sive annulment of all the characteristic distinctions of the several forces, and thus we have left force in general as the pure negative might whose constitution or nature is self-made by its activity in the play of forces. Its universal nature — its ascent out of particularity — refusing to be limited to a special form—appears in the negative side of the process, wherein it perpetually annuls special characteristics. Its positive affirmative side appears in the perpetual production ..of the special out of the negation of (old forms of) the same. 9. Wherein this Universal force, which is a self-determined, .'differs from the thinking activity or Mind is a profitable inquiry. But the sole point we had in view here was simply to show the new doctrine of Realism now arising in place of the dismal nominalism and stifling conceptualism in vogue. THEORIES OF MENTAL GENESIS. By John Weiss. The later scientific method derives the conscience from Selected experiences of the useful and agreeable. In the finest minds the moral sense is only the clarified residue of the experiences of people in learning to live safely and com­ fortably with each other. It sums them up, but can add nothing to them. It becomes, like a family resemblance, a permanent trait acquired by inheritance. A fresh experience may compel a fresh adjustment, and the moral sense can be �198 Theories of Mental Genesis. modified from without by a social exigency, but it has attained to no independent power to force its own adjust­ ment upon experience. It is never conscious of an exigency of its own, which may transcend experience, and dictate to it; such a faculty is as inconceivable as that a fountain should rise higher than its source. Acts of moral heroism are suggestions of an ultimate utility which persuade the individual to sacrifice himself. But what is the origin of such suggestions which contradict the average sense derived from human experience ? The scientific method insists upon its derivation of conscience from empirical observation, yet proceeds to explain transcendent morals which reform the race and abolish any wrong that average experience has incorporated in its social system, by endowing certain indi­ viduals with the capacity to conceive of a more beneficent system, to anticipate the future, to sacrifice peace, the feel­ ing of approbation, the immediate security of society, life itself, for the sake of a finer idea of Right. These individuals are moved thereto, perhaps, by seeing outrages, or by suffer­ ing from them. But what impels a man who suffers from a wrong which is upheld by society, to increase his suffering by protesting against it in behalf of other men ? Every feeling of the useful and the agreeable would counsel him to keep his suffering and that of his fellows at a minimum. Expe­ rience has gradually founded the system which surrounds him: it can no more furnish him with the seeds of his revolt than the nut of a beech can provide the acorn for an oak. When the empirical method is held strictly to its own logic, this absurdity is perceived, of something resulting from objective experience different from all the objects which coni stituted that experience. A state of morals at any epoch is only the state of comfort, happiness, usefulness, and mutual approbation of the majority; it is an average attained by the exigencies of the people who are forced to live together. Logically that average is insurmountable; but practically it is constantly surmounted, and society is compelled to assume a higher average by men of a forlorn hope who propose a conception of religion, of worship, of human rights and happi­ ness, which nowhere exists, and which could not therefore be suggested by empirical sensations. They are frequently men �j Theories of Mental Genesis. 199 | who conceive these things from afar, without the stimulus of | personal suffering, quite removed from that into calm regions I of meditation. They emerge from the solitudes of thought | to proclaim the advent of a fresher and more just society: i but the sense of justice, the instinct of order, devastates the things that men hold dearest, and, if the thinkers are obsti­ nate, demands their life as a sacrifice to existing order. One thing is “ said by them of olden time ” ; but these men, the products of no time at all, step out of a purer conception, and ■are heard, “ But I say unto you.” What an unaccountable I j phrase if morals are nothing but the silt which time brings -down and deposits. There must be somewhere existing an 11 Absolute Righteousness, the inspirer of every more righteous future, as there must exist a Plan of Absolute Intelligence, the continuous cause of every developing epoch of creation. The hero of Right and Absolute Religion is not maddened by suffering into forgetfulness of self, but possessed by a higher Self which his fortunate structure invites into him and to which he responds. Or, shall we suppose that his struc­ ture develops an exceptional Self? At any rate, the empirical method does not account for him, because he is essentially different from all the materials and sensations which it has to work with to produce notions of utility and social appro­ bation. We may concede that such results may be derived from such materials; but the burden of showing the genesis ■of prophets and reformers rests with those who would restrict us to these materials alone. \ In Mr. Huxley’s book, entitled “ More Criticisms on Dar­ win,” I find the following paragraph: “ Assuming the posi­ tion of the absolute moralists, let it be granted that there is w *a perception of right and wrong innate in every man. This means simply, that when certain ideas are presented to his mind the feeling of approbation arises, and when certain �200 Theories of Mental Genesis. duty is to earn the approbation of your conscience, or moral sense; to fail in your duty is to feel its disapprobation.” Of course: but the question is of simple perception of an idea of a right act and of a wrong act; the idea of doing either personally is not involved. So that there can be an absolute perception of an act as right or as wrong, pure and simple, without any mixture of personal satisfaction or pain. The un­ biased moral sense can simply recognize right and wrong, as the mind perceives that two and two make four; both recog­ nitions are an organic necessity. If the recognition of a right thing is reflected on, then approval of it arises: a feeling closely bordering upon the mental satisfaction which accompanies the perception of truths and facts of the exact sciences. But the pleasure and pain of self-approbation and disappro­ bation cannot arise until the Self transfers or fails to transfer its moral perception into private action. So that there is something in man besides the “ something which enables him to be conscious of these particular pleas­ ures and pains.” Now the origin of this moral Something is a distinct question. It may have descended from obscure traits of anticipatory moral action which reign in the animal world. Transferred into human and social circumstances, they may have filtered through a developing sense of the useful and the salutary, till they were deposited in average habits of behavior. But these traits reach at length in the finest brains a capacity of being self-perceived as immutable morality, dis­ tinct from motives of utility, or of pleasure and pain, whether they travelled manward by those routes or not. There is no objection to the theory that they did, until it undertakes to insist that they have not emerged from those routes upon a broad land of a Conscience which transcends all selfish feelings, to sacrifice them to a more arduous Right yet unattained, whose attainment may involve the hero of Conscience in ruin. The latest scientific method derives the Imagination, as it does the Conscience, from accumulated sensations. But its language here struggles painfully to bring its phrases up to the level of the whole function of Imagination. It is quite inadequate to say that a brain well compacted with images X jl <i J | V’j X g |j S J f.| 'M I ! j �Theories of Mental Genesis. 201 derived from natural objects, spontaneously creates the asso­ ciations between them and human moods, passions, and emotions; that a sense of symmetry and beauty, a feeling for landscapes, a power to evolve them out of the crude assem­ blage of natural features, a gift of constructing all the sensa­ tions derived from life and nature into the sublimity of poetry and song, results from the number and variety of these sen­ sations taken into a temperament of sensibility, where they are moulded, fused by personal passion, and express cerebral felicity of structure. These phrases mix up the raw mate­ rial in which the poet, artist and composer work with other phrases which are assumptions that it also generates their working faculty. That is the very point involved. No doubt the poet has received a multiplicity and variety of sensa­ tions. The difference between him and other men is first a capacity to receive them ; second, a capacity to transform them into his own personality; third, a capacity to express them, thus transmuted, with a rhythmical flow that involves the whole of Nature and man in its course, and converts Na­ ture into a metaphor of his private vitality. No number of empirical sensations derived from Nature, no experience of mankind, no recollection of its history, can account for this result. A brain of rare structure incorporates a world, but gives it back to us another world; or, rather, the world’s secret is fathomed and betrayed: we see it not as it always seemed to us, but lifted into a passionate and symmetrical vitality, which transcends every empirical sensation, and is, in fact, its reason for being: and that is something which nere sensation cannot supply. Held to strict logic, the mate‘ialist has no right even to the phrases he employs in speakng of this subject. j H. Taine says that there is a fixed rule “for converting into ne another the ideas of a positivist, a pantheist, a spiritualit, a mystic, a poet, a head given to images, and a head given to formulas. We may mark all the steps which lead simple philosophical conception to its extreme or violent state,” as in the passage which he quotes from Sartor Resartus, begin­ ning, “generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body, and, forth issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heav­ en’s mission appears.” “ Take the world as science shows �202 Theories of Mental Genesis. it,” continues Taine, “ it is a regular group, or, if you will, a series which has a law; according to science it is nothing more. As from the law we deduce the series, you may say that the law engenders it, and consider this law as a force. If you are an artist, you will seize in the aggregate the force, the series of effects, and the fine regular manner in which the force produces the series.” In this connection Taine evi­ dently recalls the novels of Balzac, who develops the charac­ ter of various human passions as primitive forces, which appear in objective facts of men and women, who are to be observed, without praise or dispraise, as beings who develop organically their whole moral disposition, and whose joy or grief may be inferred according to the judicious rule laid down by Hegel, that every work of art depends for its moral upon the person who is studying it. Elsewhere Taine shows how Thackeray, for instance, violates this rule. “To my ■mind,” continues Taine, “this sympathetic representation is of all the most exact and complete; knowledge is limited as long as it does not arrive at this, and it is complete when it has arrived there. But beyond, there commence the phan­ toms which the mind creates, and by which it dupes itself. If you have a little imagination, you will make of this force a distinct existence, situated beyond the reach of experience, spiritual, the principle and the substance of concrete things.” By the simple intensification of this quality, the metaphysi­ cian and the mystic are evolved. But notice here how Taine has smuggled in the phrase, “ if you have a little imagina­ tion,” as if that faculty were something excrementitious, whose products are what alimentation abandons and expels. It occurs to us to inquire, at the lowest, if imagination may not be a mode of force: if so, it must be taken into the account of mental development, where it appears to be some­ thing quite as positive as any passion which Balzac describes. It is then a legitimate object whose products cannot be re­ jected merely because they deposit in the mind a sense of Spirit. They push out a horizon filled with images and cor­ respondences which are different from visible things, and which those things, left to themselves, could not procreate, any more than a garden of flowers could impregnate itself. A viewless wind must stir the celibate stalks—a ranging bee �Theories of Mental Genesis. 203 must make its geometric cell an excuse for these promiscuous Carriages. Here is the point where the scientific method, which is complemented by Taine’s artistic method, fails to account for all the facts that a universe provides. As soon as the word Spirit appears, or phrases hinting at the Invisi­ ble put in their claim, or a capacity that transcends inherited effects is supposed, the empirical method disclaims it all, as Conscience is explained to be the cumulative result of expe­ riences of utility. Yet the scientific method itself is indebted to the faculty of imagination. That is a twofold faculty: it performs two functions. First, it anticipates subsequent epochs of scientific inter­ pretation by incessant proclamations of the essential unity of all things. Its instinct is for similarities; it floats at so great a height that objects appear blended, but the horizon from that height is so enlarged that a hemisphere of objects is spread out. It selects on one meridian the counterpart of an object upon another, though it may skulk, and imitate the color of its neighborhood, hoping not to be swooped upon and assimilated. Its prey runs in forests and multiplies in all seas. The ocean is a saucer, and its bottom scarce skin deep. And the distances which lie within the galaxy are sanded with the gold dust of its imagery. The firmament is a solid floor on which this sense of unity can walk. This instinct appears first in poetry, where Nature is rifled of all the features that can correspond to our emotions, or serve as symbols of our thought. ‘•The forest is my loyal friend; Like God it useth me.” And like God we use the forest. Its million leaves dance in the anticipation which our mind has that this “sense sublime of something interfused” will turn out to be the ^identity of law and object, of the creature and the Creator, of the scenery and the seer. And all the images of the Poet, so far from being the bastards of an irresponsible impulse rwhich ravishes an idiotic universe, are the healthy children I of the only realism that dare aspire to his feathered hand. See it tremble in moments of conception ! God remembers His rapture. There is not an object which is not a passion— �204 Theories of Mental Genesis. not a passion which does not overtake itself in objects. What is my thought like ? Whatever it be like, that is my thought, or else it could not be like it. How irrational and fantastic seems this conclusion to which the imagination leaps with the faith of a child in his “ make believe” ! How futile this hysteric passion which mounts to the eyelid and inundates the cheek at the happy rashness of some image that abol­ ishes time and space, and makes the dirty earth a lens' We put our eye to it. Thou Deity, our eyes have met! There is no sense in this transubstantiation of poetry, ex­ cept to the senseless communicants, until the epoch of scien­ tific Synthesis arrives, and the imagination is justified in ransacking the' universe for symbols. Synthesis is imagina­ tion secularized. I mean that every one of the old symbols * the old confidences with Nature, the old obscure sympathies, the artless pretences that objects are personal and vital, and all related through the observer, are now proved to be the mind’s expectation that there is but one kind of intellect, but one object, and but one law or mode of divine manifestation. Synthesis builds a hive for imagination to dwell in ; the structures planned by the original Geometer are filled with myriad meadows of sweets distilled to sweetness. This leads me to say that, secondly, the imagination some­ times anticipates, at any existing epoch of information, a subsequent epoch, when all the facts collected up to that date justify the anticipation. They are interpreted by a law, or by a mode of Force which put them forth. They arrive at length in sufficient number, and in relations obvious enough, to vindicate the previous divining of the imagination. Hardly a great man, from Pythagoras downward, can be mentioned', who did not have fore-feelings of the genuine scientific direc» tion, in Number and mathematical relation, in the qualities of Motion and their application to planetary phenomena, in the sphericity of the earth and stars, in the law of musical intervals, in the applications of the arc and conic sections, in the position of the earth in the solar system. Before the facts were in, the method was surmised; sometimes the law itselF was hinted at, and imperfectly formulated. Now, no uncon­ scious cerebration, or automatic sorting of impressions de­ rived from the number and similarity of facts, can promulgate �Theories of Mental Genesis. 205 or anticipate a law, because that is something essentially dis­ tinct from Object. There may be simultaneousness in the Lppearance of law and object; we may admit that the two are really one, a moment in which identity appears, a focus of correlation. But there is not any feature of this intimacy which can proclaim itself; that is not done for a long time, nor until an independent mental faculty appears of such a divining nature that it is not at any epoch a common human faculty. It is the result of rare structural qualifications, which recur to Creation with the gift that made creation possible, with a power to repeat by a sense of Cause the logic that caused, to create a mental synthesis that sweeps all observa­ tion into the unity of a Law, to show that all the sciences are Protean moods of one eternal moment of correlation, to speak at length in human language the plan which without speak­ ing planned. That ineffable creative word becomes flesh in the divinings of imagination. They precede any collection or arrangements of objects, just as infinite Will must have pre­ ceded its own going into objects. Or, if Will and Object be continually identical, it is not in consequence of Object. We cannot eradicate or explain away that aboriginal habit of the scientific imagination to ask Why ? as the child does; and to answer, Because! as the child does. “ Of such is the king­ dom of Heaven.” Object cannot ask nor answer, because it cannot originate. But the intellect does not wait till all the facts are in, any more than the divine Mind did in order that the facts might be created. Luther said, “ the principle of marriage runs through all creation, and flowers as well as animals are male and female,” before botany was dreamed of, or the principle of vegetable life divined. This was an anticipation as remarkable as that of Swedenborg, who clearly posited the nebular hypothesis before he or any other man had an inch of standing ground to show for it. Now, if at any epoch the finest brains—those, namely, whose synthetic method is rarefied by imagination—are only deposited by empirical contact with the world, so that their state of intelligence is nothing but juxtaposition of facts, and their structure nothing but a result of microscopic packing of sensations, such brains could not discharge the functions of �206 Theories of Mental Genesis. which they are conscious. The problem is to build a brain. Let us build it after the fashion of the materialist. The animal kingdom slowly elaborated the cerebral matter, and roughly mapped out the relation of its parts. Nature, cautiously feeling her way from species to species, from simple to com­ plex forms, from a dot of plasma to the complicated lobes which respond to external circumstances and record them, contributes the whole of the process to the progenitors of man­ kind. What had their brain become by that time ? It was an agglutination of sensations. What must have been the re­ sult of the first sensible impression which was made upon the earliest rudimental nerve-matter? That question is answered by the discovery that the nerve-matter was a part of the ob­ jective world which produced the impression. It did not lose or modify its character by being eliminated from that world ; it was still one of its discrete forms, and identical in sub­ stance. Then the object which impressed it and the impres­ sion were identical. The object was the sensation. There is no infinitesimal rift into which you can thrust your surmise of a difference and pry apart a sameness into duality; that is, into the supposition of an object to impress and an object to be impressed—one to become by means of that impression something different in kind from the object that impresses. Brood upon that primitive relation of plasma to all the rest of elemental matter. You cannot hatch it into a different kind of vitality by merely saying that plasma was a more highly organized matter. You cannot establish a schism in matter by determining grades of organization. Every grade preserves, prolongs, embodies the original identity in which it was contained; just as oxygen by aerating the blood im­ presses it with the character of oxygen, but does not liberate it from the materiality which they both share. A nerve­ sensation is not a leap from Object into Subject. If it is not, as.the materialist alleges, then it makes no dif­ ference how many sensations the accumulating brain receives and registers. Their number cannot change their quality. On the long route of developing mankind there is no station where independent mentality may step on board. The train stops for refreshment, wood, and water. But the food and the fuel still correspond to their own motive power and digestive �Theories of Mental Genesis. 207 ability. Stomach and food, brain and object, are convertible expressions. All objective circumstances remain unaltered; nerve-matter accumulates because sensations do. The first word of human speech, the first musical cadence, the first J smatter of the natural language of human emotions on the [ face, the first prattling of social intercourse, the first fumbling | for a tool of bone or flint, the first sparkle kindled in the dry pith of the fennel — all these rudiments of society were only the sensations of Sensation, the objectivity of Objects. The brain was but another object set up by the concurrence of objects, a self-registering world in the compass of a skulk Even if the cerebral capacity should cease to expand, while the perceptions continued to accumulate, it never can be filled; for the method of packing them is economical of room. If a drop of water is capable of containing 500,000,000 ani­ malcules endowed with locomotive limbs, there must be room > enough in any brain for any number of objective residues. But so long as the world does not swerve from its own objeci tivity and change its climate, so long does the human brain continue to be its odometer, or automatic tally. “ The Holothuriae living in the South Sea, which feed upon coral sand, spontaneously eject their lungs and intestine (through the anus when they are transferred to clear sea­ water ; then they construct new bowels corresponding to the new conditions.” But Object does not transfer the human brain into the element of Subject, so that it can void its assi­ milative structure, and set up the liver, lungs and lights of Subjectivity. I think this is a correct presentation of the latest materialJ Ism, which derives all mental functions from an automatic | /system of storage of objective impressions. But its advocates fl Yhave not yet looked in the glass of their own theory. I have tried to reduce it to the absurdity which lies latent in it. It . . is this. It has nothing but objects to start from, nothing but Ji them to accumulate, and yet it assumes to arrive at somep thing which is not object; for instance, its own capacity to is make any assumption at all, and to deny that the capacity * i, demonstrates independent mentality. It will deduce and preFrfi" sume; something which a skull commensurate with the sky, i and crammed with objectivity, could never do. It will refuse | �208 Theories of Mental Genesis. to a human being an independent personality: something which nothing but such a personality could do. It started with speechlessness, and had, of course, nothing but aggluti­ nated dumbness to end with: yet it invents words, and com­ mits to them its affirmations and denials; lends them to the poet, who makes whole landscapes share the breath of their life; turns them over to the prophet, who puts them in his thwarts, casts loose from actual states, and pulls into the possible and the desirable; yields them to the synthetic imagination, and hears its own best guesses before it has pro­ claimed them, and its own experimental method suggested before objects could muster strong enough to raise a whim­ per; consigns them to the moral sense, and is refuted by a style of speech which transcends the latest moment of utility and social advantage, pronounces in divine men their own death-warrant, and sighs out selfishness upon a million crosses. Was that bit of plasma, then, nothing but one object more in a world full? or, was it an anvil upon which objective impact flew into a spark? Now a myriad hammers of the many-handed Cosmos crash through our skull, and we see stars —abysses full of them! Is it an optical illusion? They appear to attain orbits—they move in definite and har­ monious relations—they create distance, deepen it with per­ spective: flat objectivity is broken up as a thinkable Uni­ verse comes pondering through. Let me have recourse to an illustration. A planetary motion is the result of two causes : first, a force that acts in the direction of a tangent; second, a force that attracts. What happens when the mind has observed that there are these two forces? Something which discovers their'laws. This may be an inductive process, derived from prolonged and numerous calculations, adjustments, and cor­ rections, based upon as many planetary directions as can be observed. Then suppose we wish to ascertain the motion of a planet which is submitted to the influence of these laws. That is a deduction based upon calculation. There is an astronomical duplication of the planetary facts, a mental re­ hearsing of orbital motions. The facts recur to their Cause through our intellect. Their mere objectivity is not compej tent to achieve this result, which is something causative, and �Theories of Mental Genesis. 209 therefore essentially different from themselves, which are caused. They are occasions for addressing, stimulating and developing in us a quality which is not themselves, not their counterpart, but which is identical with the quality which caused them. They stand between, and could as soon have originated cause behind them as our causality beyond them. What is the mental fact which takes place when this medi­ ate Object recurs to Subject? Something besides cerebral registering of the succession of sensations produced by the phenomena. That only succeeds in confirming succession or simultaneousness. We call the mental fact Deduction. But that is only a word, and not an explanation. It does not put us into possession of the actual occurrence when objects are mentally fitted with the laws of their causes. It does not explain the nature of that mental moment. To say that it is the result of cerebral movement and waste, of changes in the grey matter in the brain, does not explain it. That is only a dynamical accessory. In like manner, what happens when an imaginative per­ son, seeing some features of a landscape, or some combina­ tions of light, sky, sea, color, at morn or sunset, invests the scene with his own personality ? In fact, the combination called a landscape exists nowhere; it is a pure ideal con­ struction of his own. The scene without is only a palette or a pot of paint. A poetic symbol, a simile which encloses a trait of nature in the amber of thought or emotion, is a men­ tal process unaccountable on any theory of empirical accu­ mulation of sensations. But we seldom find a materialist who is willing to accept a statement of his method which shows that it really starts with a term that is incapable of starting. Bald matter is im­ potent to proceed except into fresh forms of matter; and even that process requires that Force should be assumed. And something has to make that assumption. That assuming faculty cannot be merely a form of matter, for no thing can step outside of itself and become what is not Thing. No number of things can do that, though the sensations pro­ duced by them accumulate for centuries. They may be irri­ tants, as a drop of acid on a frog’s bare muscle after his head is cut off; but they cannot conceive that they irritate, any Vol. vi.—14 �210 Theories of Mental Genesis. more than the frog can conceive that he is irritated. They cannot formulate ■ their unconscious function of exciting our senses. What does the materialist say when his empirical method is boned in this way, and sinks on the floor of creation a help­ less huddle of Object, every articulation and vertebra of his own mentality withdrawn from it? He disclaims the result, cannot tolerate being defrauded of his own analytic and clas­ sifying skill, and declares against materialism in that sense. But it has no other sense. The moment he declares against it, he declares in favor of an intellectual perception of an ob­ jective sensation, that is, in favor of something which Object cannot generate. His own idealism rises against its jailer, and breaks out of prison in this declaration. This ought to startle him into making a more distinct defini­ tion of the word Matter than he has yet undertaken. He uses that, and the word Object, in the ordinary sense; but he will not recognize all that it connotes when it is pressed to ultimates. And it is astonishing that he can invent such >\ ords as Vitality, Force, Correlation, to account for phases of ob­ jects, elemental modes, conditions of existence, without feel­ ing compromised. He is obliged to assume something which is anterior to objects and their phenomena, anterior to the sensations produced by them; he speaks of correlation, but says nothing about something previous which does the corre­ lating. If that something be another objective condition, a more tenuous tenuity, it involves the necessity of something still beyond, since mere condition cannot conditionate itself, and no thing can do itself. So that, sooner or later, the words employed by the empirical observer justify an ulti­ mate ground of Being, an absolute Cause; and that, too, jus­ tifies Cause in the observer, for Being goes into Object, and not Object into Being. Perhaps the materialist will take refuge in the Hegelian phrase, “Matter is Being outside of Itself,” in order to endow Matter with a causative capacity, and secure perpetual vital­ ity to its plastic germs. Then he may suppose that objective phenomena, in their gradual achievement of the human brain, lent it their primitive endowment as Being outside of Itself, and made of it another animate object. But what becomes �Theories of Mental Genesis. 211 of Being outside of Itself when this object disappears, is dis­ integrated, ceases to be a focus of Being ? It either must re­ cur to Being in Itself, or must be correlated in some mode of Force. Both suppositions make the human intellect only a phenomenal phase of Absolute Being; it is only caused mat­ ter, it is on the footing of every other object, its root imbibes the identity of Object and Being, its self-consciousness is only an increase of animateness, but not a differentiation of it into Person. It invents the phrase, to be sure—claims to have or be a self—and that the unconscious animal, reaching man’s estate, comes to the line where consciousness begins; man separates to that extent from the world of Object, be­ cause Object has been Being all the time. But if it has been Being all the time, one of two things must be true, either that self-consciousness resided all along the route in organic ob­ jects, or at no point of it at all; the reputed consciousness of Self is only a phenomenon of Object. Perhaps the materialist will thank us for such a reduction of the Hegelian phrase to another form of Matter, because it makes Soul and Person impossible on any terms; and per­ haps the idealist, discontented with any style of the doctrine of Evolution, will be driven to the notion that there is outside of us an ocean of germinal soul-monads which become allied with human structures. There are insuperable objections, lying mainly in the direc­ tion of the facts of inheritance, to this attempt at spiritual­ ism. In the meantime, the Doctrine of Evolution cannot be dispensed with. The burden does not rest upon us to in­ dicate the point in time and the method of appearing of independent mentality. But we can show that Object can propagate only Object; nor that without something assumed which Object cannot propagate. Let us take, however, a word which the materialist is com­ petent to invent and is obliged to use—Vitality. He must assume it in spite of the objectivity of every point of his empirical method. Then, in the interest of Idealism, we suggest, taking a statement used by us in another place, “whether there can be any germinal soul-substance except the mysterious force which we call Vitality wherever we see it in the human state. It went into creation allied with �212 Theories of Mental Genesis. all the germs which have subsequently taken form. It carried everywhere a latent sensibility for the creative law out of which it came. It swept along with a dim drift of the Personality that first conceived and then put it on the way to self-expression.. It mounted thus by the ascending scale of animals, and its improvements in structure were prepara« tions to reach and repeat Personality, to report the original consciousness of the Creator that He was independent of structure. At length it became detached from the walls of the womb of creation, held only for nourishment by the cord of structure till it could have a birth into individualism. Then the interplay of mind and organism began, with an in­ herited advantage in favor of Vitality. Now Vitality, thus developed and crystallized into personality, tends constantly back towards its origin. The centrifugal movement through all the animals is rectified by the centripetal movement in man. The whole series of effects musters in him to recur to an effecting Cause.” Prof. Haeckel of Jena, in his Biological Studies, makes the * following statement: “ Protoplasm, or germinal matter, also nailed cell-substance or primitive slime, is the single material basis to which, without exception and absolutely, all so-called vital phenomena ’ are radically bound. If the latter are re­ garded as the result of a peculiar vital force independent of the protoplasm, then necessarily also must the physical and •chemical properties of every inorganic natural body be re­ garded as the result of a peculiar force not bound up with its .substance.” Very well, why not? Even the vague motions, like the incoherent simmer of a crowd of people on a great sqm re, which take place in the molecules of the densest sub ance, are dumb gropings of some Force, arrested for the present in the substance, and not to be detected transgressing its. lim­ its. But something is there which shares and testifies to a universal tendency towards evolution into other substances and into organic forms. Physical and chemical forces attest the presence of Vitality, as well as the mental functions which use the structural results of those forces. Something * See Toledo Index, April 29, 1871. �Theories of Mental Genesis. fit, [ ift ft! 1'1 b » Tfj í| 213 independent of the material basis must have endowed it with its movements and qualities. It certainly could not have originated itself or its forces. Something anterior to the ma­ lerial basis must include and transmit a tendency of Vitality towards mental and moral functions, which are at once inde­ pendent of the basis and yet closely allied to it. Let us observe now if any contribution may be made to idealism from another quarter. The empirical method has not busied itself much with the phenomena of musical sensi­ bility, though, to be consistent after including the imagina­ tion in its genesis of mind from external sensations, it ought to construct the sense of Harmony and the inventive genius of the composer in the same way, since imagination plays so large a part therein. Some physical facts which at first threaten to support a pure empiric origin for mental func­ tions, turn out upon cross-questioning to belong to the other side of the case, and to contribute toward some more ideal statement. The German Helmholtz, who has made some profound studies of the laws of Harmony, in his examination of the structure of the human ear, found that the cochlea, or snailformed cavity, contained a fluid, across which three membranes were thrown — an upper, middle, and under. In the middle compartment he discovered innumerable microscopic disks, lying next each other • like the keys of a piano : one end of each of them is attached to the vessels of the auditory nerve, the other end to the outstretched membranes. These disks are the sensitive points which receive the vibrations of musi­ cal instruments, and transmit them to the brain in the form of notes and tones. A single string will give off different vibrations from its upper and its middle section. Does the ear solve the sound of a complex vibration made by these waves of different length, or does it receive the sound as a whole ? Answering this, Helmholtz says that the physical ear funds the wave-forms into a sum of simple waves, which is the result of their concurrence; since any wave-form you please can be constructed out of a combination of simple waves of different lengths. And as in the instruments, so in the ear, the ground tone wakes the corresponding upper tone. When vibrations play upon the disks in the ear, it is as if �214 Theories of Mental Genesis. they played upon banks of keys; and the first physical im­ pressions are produced, sorted, combined, and then transmit­ ted as so much seasoned material to be used in manufacturing music. Then occurs the wonderful moment when Something beyond these microscopic feelers digests the prey they catch into human moods and emotions. What leaps the genius takes, through and across what an unbridged abyss, upon these stepping-stones of disks, to gather the waifs and strays that float upon the manifold sea of Harmony! There is no such startling proof that Nature has at length developed a transcending Person in mankind; perhaps whole races died for it, dissonances and partial chords, or constructed upon vicious intervals, before Harmony could respond to its own laws. At length an essential differentiation seems to have taken place, an abstraction which compels sensations to subserve its subtlest emotions. For at one end of this process is nothing but the disks vibrating in their fluid: at the other end is something rarely and radically different—the gamut of the human heart, the symphony upreared by intellect and feeling, the song exhaling into the mist that sheathes the eye, the lyric whose silvery trumpets summon bravery and nobleness from every drop of blood. Now, atmospheric vibrations and the structure of the ear enclosing the microscopic disks are the objects which provide empirical sensations. The temperament, culture and inher­ ited susceptibility of the musical composer’s brain collect and organize these, sensations into the modes of harmony, and reject all dissonance. But when, and by which of the two parties in this transaction, was the earliest step taken toward such a complicated result ? There was a time when there was nothing but an atmosphere capable of vibrating, and nothing but an ear capable of receiving the accidental throng of natu­ ral noises. There was a time when the first fibre of a plant, the first tense string of some creeping vine, twanged to some chance touch: when the wood of the forest first revealed its resonant capacity, when the dried reeds first sighed and whis­ tled in the wind. This was all the appeal which Nature had to make. Did it originate the sequence of melodies and con­ struct the theory of harmony ? What is a dissonance ? Is it merely a physical repugnance of the disks for interfering and �Theories of Mental Genesis. 215 •contrarious vibrations ? Whence, then, the repugnance of the «disks ? There are tribes of men whose ears have not been furnished with it. There are civilized Indo-Germanic peo­ ple who cannot tell a chord from a discord. It is not credible that the crude objectivity of natural vibrations gradually ■selected out of Nature a harmonious ear. Nature has no harmony which could effect such a selection ; she has never ¿sorted and combined and weeded out her noises. She is uni­ sonous, monotonous, or full of jar and clash; she has no art to reconcile the voices of the sea, the air, the birds of the for­ est: each creature has its note and its key, and the air itself is a Babel of cross-purposes. The empirical sensations pro­ duced by modern music are drawn from things which vibrate by a law that the things do not possess, and never could have •suggested. Harmony has been imposed from within upon their isolated qualities ; and an orchestra, so far from being ■an induction, is an intuition. The Composer listens to its combinations before they are played. His subjectivity has imparted to every instrument its peculiar quality by gradual selection among the woods, reeds and metals of Nature, and by discovery of the isolated shapes which correspond best to .atmospheric conditions. His inductive experiments have been presided over by a sense which no induction could have fur­ nished. What, for instance, is the temperament of a piano but a metaphysical compromise between the imperfections of the material and the law of intervals ? Harmony, in short, is a refutation which the materialist himself might welcome; but it kills his theory as effectually as the poison poured into the auditory tube, which made a ghost of Hamlet’s father. It is much easier to tolerate the doctrine that a slice of meat, well-assimilated, becomes the poet’s happy thought, than to understand how wafts of common air could be transformed into the mighty uplifting of the soul when the orb of music passes over our fiat life, and draws emotion into every barren •creek, and dashes its tonic against the heart. Physics must allow an essential difference between a vibration and a welli cooked mutton chop; and it is in favor of the stimulating and edifying quality of the chop. Music has been called the image of motion. But when the ear is struck, something else than a wave is propagated. It would be more just to say that Music is imagination set in motion. �216 Anti-Materialism. The sea-tide writes its diary accurately enough in the sand­ ripples. But air did not imprint these footsteps so massive and deep that our own are lost as we try to follow ; yet there is no dismay, for in the bosom of each trace lies home’s direc­ tion,—by which we know that a Beethoven had just passed. I claim, then, against a strictly logical empirical method, three classes of facts. First, the authentic facts of the moral sense whenever it appears as the transcender of the ripest average utility. Second, the facts of the Imagination as the anticipator of mental methods by pervading everything with personality, by imputing Life to Object, or by occasional direct suggestion. Third, the facts of the harmonic sense as the reconciler of discrete and apparently sundered objects, as the prophet and artist of Number and mathematical ratio, as the unifier of all the contents of the soul into the acclaim which rises when the law of Unity fills the scene. ■ Upon these facts I chiefly sustain myself against the the­ ory, consistently explained, which derives all possible men­ tal functions from the impacts of Objectivity. * ANTI-MATERIALISM By G. S. Hall. To a concise though popular restatement of the younger * Fichte’s, Fontlage’s, and Leopold Schmidt’s construction of' the ego as person, modified as he believes it to have been by Lazarus and Lotze, the author joins a vigorous and original polemic against “ materialism in natural science and theol­ ogy” which he calls an “ absurd and therefore impossible form of subjective idealism.” This he does in the interest of speculative philosophy, which he would rescue from present discredit and neglect, and to which he would restore an ulti­ mate character as the mediating unity of theology and natu­ ral science. The barren abstractions of the absolute philosophy carried thought into so rare an atmosphere that its utmost effort was * Five Lectures on Philosophical Subjects, by Ludwig Weis. Berlin, 1871. & � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Victorian Blogging Description An account of the resource A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library &amp; Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. 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Original Format The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Pamphlet Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Theories of mental genesis Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Weiss, John Description An account of the resource Place of publication: [St Louis] Collation: 197-216 p. ; 24 cm. Notes: From the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (Vol. VI, no. 3, 1872). From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available [The R.P. Studley Company] Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource [1872] Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context G5353 Subject The topic of the resource Objectivism Philosophy Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource <a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Theories of mental genesis), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Conway Tracts Objectivism (Philosophy) Philosophy and Religion Science and Religion