The Flaw in Supremacy

The reader shall be here advised in a rapid appreciation of that higher thought which occasions the name of philosophy in the world, and which has to do with existence secularly as a puzzle or problem.

Philosophy in literature is voluminous and obscure, only because of its errors and its struggles; the outcome of those struggles can be simply told, without the use of that technical phraseology which has rendered philosophical books at once questionable and repulsive.

Most men are not philosophers merely on account of their having missed a certain record of agonistic thought. In the meantime much that is not philosophy is imposing under that name. Thus Solomon and Seneca and Voltaire pass as philosophers, and Locke and Bacon, and Comte and Spencer and Darwin; yet there is but one philosophy, and the names which mark the dominant stadia of it in history are Heraclitus, Plato, Jesus, Kant, Hegel, Schwegler. There are plenty of others of course, but these seem less diverted by the multitude of things; the philosopher in earnest has as yet to do chiefly with one thing, namely the central divine thought of itself, as to its certainty, supremacy and safety. All else will be timely enough after this is determined.

Now here in brief is the puzzle which makes truth hard to be uttered, and existence hard to be understood:

Every immediate assertion is either merely partial or else contradictory; and it is so because everything is ultimately identical with its opposite—identical while different.

If we get on very well, and talk very plausibly in spite of this drawback, it is only because we are easily satisfied far short of the radical explanation of anything. When a man says “the dog is dead,” and one asks why he first says “the dog is,” as a live dog, and then adds “dead,” and so kills him, he regards the question as hyperfinical. If he says “Jesus wept,” and we suggest that if Jesus was a temporal result the Jesus of the allegation did not exist until after he had wept, he may call us hair splitters—which were well enough if only the expression were concerned. But indicating the discrepancy of the expression detects not only a “damned spot” that will not out of any discourse, but a flaw in the reality, on which the devil of all generations has set his seal. The contradiction is true to the fact. You must deny when you affirm. “Strife is the father of things” said Heraclitus—meaning, in modern phrase, that opposition, or at least difference, is the basis of distinction; nothing can show save as against a background; and the whole truth in expression must contain the background. So that when the dogmatist assumes to speak of anything as a whole in and of itself, as if life were one thing and death an entirely other thing, pleasure one thing and pain another, God one consideration and man or the devil a wholly other entity, the expert confronts him with the interdependence, the necessity each for the other, and the ultimate essential unity of all these, and proves his assertion as but a half of the inseparable duplex whole truth of the matter.

It is the first insight of a thinker, that nothing is something, or else all thought is vain. How shall aught know it is alive—alive! with distinction, emphasis, eclat—without appreciating the opposite of life, the dull ground on which it shows? “Being is by nothing more real than not-being.”

The negative has ever been the field of genius. The artist sympathizes with the paper maker as well as with the engraver: he sees as many white as black lines in the picture, and perceives their equal contribution to its effect. Paradise Lost has all the elements of poetry; Paradise Regained is an attempt to paint white lilies on a white ground. The black and yellow gonfalon of Lucifer is the central glory of any spiritual picture. And from the opposite or critical standpoint—the position of “not so black as he is painted,” &c.—the fealty of Richard to his incomparable father sheds to the last a legitimate splendor on the villain of misfortune.

“Ah,” cries the tyro, “if the light were gone out!”

“Aye,” sighs the philosopher, “and if the darkness had gone out?”

And Nemesis murmurs across her even beam, “Nothing from one, lest any should boast.”

Truth was very early seen to be involved in this duplexity of expression. Socrates jested of it: when he was young, two and two made four, but times had changed; for if two and two make four, four is made of the contents of four; but how is it that four halves are as many as four wholes, while their contents are only half so much? Four and four make two, when you are thinking of quarters, and number should not vary with the nature of things numbered.

Let us test the necessity of contradiction. Let us say of motion, whatever moves is stationary as well.

Many of the ancients denied motion altogether, especially one of them in the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, alleging that the former could never overtake the latter. For the athlete would have to first cover a half of the space between them, then a half of the remaining space, and so on forever he could cover only the halves of a persistent remainder; indeed he could not make a start at all, for of the least measurable portion of space he must traverse the theoretically divisible hither side.

This was no jest, for the conclusion has never been refuted, not even by the historical assumption that the hero bit off the tail of the reptile. That proof was rendered by an older man, in many respects different from the Achilles of the proposition, in a new world, very different as to the make-up of the race course. Given a certain thing in this world to-day, and a different thing in another world to-morrow, you will hardly prove the two things the same, much more hardly that the same thing moved from one world to the other. Motion in the present tense would require of a thing that it be in two places at once. Let us not depend too confidently upon the evidence of those senses which the immortals may have left behind.

The assertion of motion will show its contradiction when applied mechanically, as to a wheel. The wheel being assumed as a solid mass, if it moves it must all move, or else go in pieces. If the track is still, and if that part of the wheel which touches the track moves, the wheel will either grind or slide upon the track; yet it does neither, for, as we see when we strip the felloes from the wheel and roll it on the spokes, the bottom is pivotal to the top. If we lift the wheel from the track and revolve it on its axis, the motionless part at the bottom flies to the centre, and the other parts go up and down and right and left around it, but the wheel as revolving cannot be said to move as a whole; the truth is either way as partial, and both ways as a whole, and so contradictory.

The careful reader will have observed that in making these assertions in regard to assertion generally, each new allegation is, and in our contention should be liable to the same charge of contradiction; for instance in the use of the terms bottom and centre as applied to a wheel. The perimeter of the wheel is a curve; the smallest conceivable portion of it is curved up from the track, and contains the properties of both top and bottom. So of the centre: no physical atom of a wheel can be small enough to be a centre, for if any part have size at all it must have superfices, and when assumed as a centre must involve contradiction.

All assertions of direction, as applied to the earth, involve contradiction. To the east is also to the west, and down is up when you pass the centre of the planet in the same straight direction.

The doubt here raised as to motion of a part as of a wheel, or of a planet, is pertinent to the same as a whole. Any point may be assumed as the Copernican centre—the papal chair as well as another, and new astral circles will conform thereto, and all astronomical calculations will be feasible therefrom.

This discrepancy appears especially when we make assertion of being itself. Is anything, any-way? Well, if it is, it is now—in the present tense, between the future and the past, partaking of neither. If between the future and the past—between the coming and the departing time, there is complete being in time, that being shall have its becoming and its departing sides in a process which does not pause, and between these can be not a divider but only division as process or activity; there is no precipitate of the process of becoming, no residuum of the process of departing, no room for aught that is not either becoming or departing, and hence no room for aught assumed to statically be, save as it both is and is not in any portion of time here or elsewhere.

Observation of our practical life, demonstrating the necessity of a constant vibration of attention and rest, being and not being, confirms the contradiction in this mystery of ours as equally of life and death.

We might exemplify contradiction in many other ways, and the reader may assure himself as well first as last that its shadow will cover all that we may utter—the shadow of the secret of the world.

Thought struggled on for how many ages we know not, during all of which the external or material world was a thing alien to intelligence so far as humanity was concerned; there was ever a notion of its having been made by intelligence, but intelligence was hardly suspected as being involved in the stock and substance of it, until Plato began teaching that color is commensurate with sight—bringing the inference that but for eyes there would be no color, and that in this respect what is known is indebted to the knower.

Aristotle afterward advanced a similar suggestion as to form—an intellectual consideration, being necessary to bring matter, as an eternal substrate, up into appearance; but Jesus and St. John, some 400 years later, seem to have been the first to identify intelligence, as we participate it, with the general creative ground, and to grace the doctrine with a moral force—still, however, in a dogmatic and mystical style. It is to be greatly regretted that they had not a better audience to draw them out, and to record their words; nevertheless the world-contradictions of Jesus and the prologue of the gospel of St. John carry all the divine philosophy between Aristotle and Kant.

It remained for Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804,) to exhaustively classify those elements in the world, as a theoretical result, for which it is indebted to intelligence as we are informed by or partake of it. To him the world is no longer an alien and external mass, to be found and known, or haply missed altogether by a visiting observer, but, hanging as it does, an apparition on that thin division which we have indicated between the future and the past, intelligence is in part at least the stuff and fibre of it. He proved that so far as quantity, quality, mode and relation are extant, the world as having these exists only in experience, intelligent life—whether of innumerable sympathetic monads or centres, or of one great intelligence which we as monads identify. As to what the world is fundamentally, and why it is as it is, Kant shared the speculation of other men; but his genius like a vise grasped the immortal surety that in the properties mentioned it is made of thought alone.

The immanent hints of this revolutionary and troublesome conclusion—for it is like a Tartar caught, hard to hold and harder to let go—would seem to have been plentiful enough, before it was exhaustively thought out. After a man had observed that a ring around the flame of his lamp was accompanied by a blear in his eye, he should have suspected that the ring around the moon had some dependence on his personal vision. The long line of light which comes to him across the waves from sun or moon goes with him as he strolls the shore; it is for him alone, and he makes or helps to make it,—not designingly, but some way as a co-product of that which he is. But it is a long and uneven route from this observation to the satisfaction that the moon and stars themselves, with their history and poetry and all the rest of it, are of this stuff which dreams are made of, and that the eternal heaven is not outward alone but correspondently within us.

The study of illusions helped greatly to this ideal result. Consider a vase of flowers six feet in front of a mirror hung on the wall next to the street. In the mirror, six feet back from the glass, is an apparition of the vase and flowers. This apparition, what is it? Explicitly, what is IT?—Analytically, IT is color and form—real color and real form; you never saw color or form more real, and you never in your life saw anything else but color and form; and you never saw or conceived of better or purer space than the six feet between the glass and IT. But really, (as the world is real,) nothing is there as there appears, intruding five or six feet on the street; IT is an illusion, a deception—deceiving whom? We may not say matter is deceived, and so IT proves to be behind the eye—at least as truly as before it.

One comes to think very differently of these things after he has taken a good look through a microscope. We are made all alike in some respects, possibly for some social convenience; our eyes take about the same measures of things, and in a thousand ways we approve and confirm each other in the conceit of our perceiving all things visible at their true and only size; but the microscope dispels our measure and our conceit at once. For the object in the microscope grows, not as a bladder expands at the expense of its walls, but as the womb grows, intrinsically; the lens does not merely exagerate those features which are apparent to the unaided eye, but it brings into vision features and creatures for which the unaided eye has no capacity.

The reader will probably grasp at once and for his lifetime the enormous deduction necessarily due from this the most important fact of human experience. The size of the outer world, and all majesty of every physical greatness, impose not in the least degree upon our intelligence, they being creatures of so base a contingency as the flesh and form of the eye. Were your eye as large as the earth, (as it might be without change in its generic nature,) then the thousand miles per hour through which the earth revolves would shrink to half the speed of the hour hand of a watch, and become like that unappreciable; Uranus or Neptune might run his orbit on a dinner plate, and you would be a god, by this world’s estimation, compared with what you now are.

When we consider the hopes of science, and believe that the divine has no envy—that we are as welcome to control the clouds above as to guide the streams below—welcome to the throne if we can mount it—there is a comfort in the thought that we need no generic change for the highest hope or ambition; we were born in the purple.

We should notice, in passing, that the power to focus on the great things forfeits the beauty of the less, save for the microscope again. Even now we are gods, in the estimation of the infinitesimals—as far above them as any Jove is above us—yet we seem not divinely happy.

These two vital conceptions together—first, that the world is made of thought, second, that it should be made by thought, if made at all—were said to be hard to hold. If color is according to the eye, and form is according to the brain, (or the mind or whatever, for names are not important,) still they are not thus by design or effort of ours; proof of things being made in that way is not explanation. Either there is a grade of intelligence higher than ours, or else intelligence as here assumed has an involuntary element, and is not entirely transparent and self-related. And here comes in all the confusion of “finite” intelligence as contrasted with “the infinite,” the universal, absolute, eternal, divine.

Certainly intelligence, as we are accustomed to it, has a dynamics of its own, and its negative has positive forces. “The mind” works more by permission than by coercion, and much in spite of volition. If one could forget! But the memory is almost as involuntary as are the lungs, and the senses all are passive in some degree. We cannot sleep and wake at will; we cannot force poetry from the dull environment; and only here and there a man can be calm at an unusual elevation. Against our most positive intelligence, assumed as self-related and transparently explanatory, fate, necessity, “the nature of things,” or whatever it may be called, puts a part of explanation in the negative—the stock of the multiplication table.

This negative force shows itself one way in life as the strength of weakness: as when a lock of faded hair from a dead woman’s head shall make a ruffian cut his throat in a bed room at five o’clock in the morning. It revenges appearances: as when experience admonishes us to seek Portia’s picture in the leaden casket; or as when our multi-million capitol resounds with legislation, and the governor signs, and the seal is set—but in a modest office up in Johnstown or Herkimer the little henpecked judge sits in his shirt sleeves, as with a look of sorrow he slowly writes on the page before him the word unconstitutional, and the glory of the capitol has faded.

A scientist will not admit such illustrations as these; he will call them stuffed clubs. But they are as good as any, and better than his own. He would have the exact, the absolute; philosophy answers, Nay, anything you please, but not quite! There is no positive science. The headlong current charges past the rock in midstream, but the eddy turns back and apologizes. Given a force, the west wind, and the indifferent sea; there is in the statement no westward force of wind or wave, yet the ship beats to the west, and no positivist can account for her arrival.

It is here that the philosopher is thrown on his mettle. When the doubt of his own intelligence, as having an involuntary or a negative factor, calls for a universal intelligence different not only in degree but in kind, he perceives that his acknowledgment of such an intelligence would disinherit him forever. However many the things he may not know, he will not have a different intelligence to know them. If there is a universal kind, he shall be of that kind; and if the sphere is cracked it shall be cracked to the centre.

What is intelligence? Sought and found as one might find a diamond, or a light or a song, what is it like. Well, the best other word for it is distinction, with this proviso, that it is distinction of other, or others, and of its identical self. To know and not know that you know, were mechanical; to know, and afterward remember the knowing, were also mechanical; but perfect intelligence would involve instant self-relation—a proposition to which we may well say, not quite.

Now the ostensible basis of distinction is difference; for without contrast, opposition, background as affording detailed relief, nothing can be known, nor known to be. But we must not assume difference as the sole ground of distinction, for there are the identical things distinguished; and, (remembering our contradiction,) difference and identity are at their highest tension the same—and different. Sameness has all the difference in the world—from difference; and difference is identically that. If intelligence were distinction only—or by limiting only, then only particulars could be known, and not the universal; but as identifying and distinguishing at once, we know both the particular and the universal. This is the only possible nature of intelligence, and if there be assumed a preeminently universal and self-related intelligence it shall be a particular to itself—to itself who should best know it.

Possibly this is rather close work for the eyes, but it is necessary for our assurance against any fundamental flaw in our title to divine sufficiency. We are both universal and particular.

Dogmatism and positivism have mistaken the theoretic ultimatum in satisfactory explanation, and the acme of supremacy and safety. The myths and poems are deeper than the creeds, yet we may quote from all the creeds of the world declaring that against the highest self-sufficiency still stands the negative—fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will. Reason is but an item in the duplex potency of this mystery, and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, Reason and Wonder blushed face to face. The legend sinks to burlesque if in that great argument which antedates man and his mutterings, Lucifer had not a fighting chance.

(And what mattered that event to us?

This is our salvation, such as it is: that pain and pleasure are inseparable and equal.)

There is no need to shock the common sense with a claim of watches made by chance, etc. Watches are made by watchmakers; but in the mechanism of the mechanics themselves, as well as of their works, may not the springs pull of their own accord?

The world sides easily with David Hume: there is no fertile principle. Intelligence is no more explanatory than matter. Causes are cited after effects. The popular thought mistakes the primeval in time for the primordial in reason; yet even a “great first cause” were but a general postulate of comprehensibility.

And as there can be no wholly rational origin, so can there be no undeviating purpose to a cumulative end.

It was here the lamented Schwegler called down Hegel from his proposition of a philosophy of history, popularly inferring a plan and an end, of course for the best. But contingency forbids any inevitable history, and conclusions are absurd. Nothing in Hegel has kept the planet from being blown to pieces. Be there never so much reason, never so much good, only as against “a certain existent unreason,” as Schwegler states it, can they be known, or known to be. “History will only in the last of days declare itself as a work of reason.”

The only modern advance of thought—after the attempt of Hegel to place the absolute in process, (which has resulted only in a process toward an understanding,) is in the anæsthetic revelation. It is given to the writer and to others for whom he is permitted to speak—and we are grateful that it is the custom of gentlemen to believe one another—that the highest thought is not a milk and water equation of so much reason and so much result—“no school sum to be cast up.” We have realized the highest divine thought of itself, and there is in it as much of wonder as of certainty; inevitable, and solitary and safe in one sense, but queer and cactus-like no less in another sense, it appeals unutterably to experience alone.

There are sadness and disenchantment for the novice in these inferences, as if the keynote of the universe were low, but experience will approve them. Certainty is the root of despair. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true—ever not quite.

It is strange indeed that the minds most contemptuous of miracle are most clamorous of law, as less miraculous. As the astronomers reason, gravitation is a universal law; but since any set of planets pervaded by gravitation would all come together, therefore the stars are numberless, and the attraction is as much outward as inward, and—what becomes of it?

And how, it might be asked, would a philosopher sustain the stars? He would say, with Lady Macbeth, these things must not be thought after these ways. The stars are but a show. There is nothing inside of a brick. And as to the numberless and the infinite, answer: is there not room for another star between the earth and the sun? there might be one more? And if there are not so many as there might be, then there are just so many and no more, and they have a number which may be increased or diminished.

“The infinite” is a kind of wind on the stomach, Said Parmenides, “that that which is should be infinite is not permitted.” Things have not number of themselves. Here are six apples: if they are six in and of themselves, then each is in itself a sixth; but when we take one away we do not change the natures of those which remain, yet each of the others has become a fifth; and if a thing is not different in itself as changing from a sixth to a fifth, or from number six to number five, it has not number in itself. Number is an intellectual achievement. There is no infinite number.

So of space; it does not “go on and on” of itself. There is no more space without thought than pain without feeling. Space is not extension of itself, but the possibility of liberty to extend; it is only as it is realized. There is no object without subject.

Jesus ignored the infinite, and possibly he never mentioned the stars. Greatness has central reference, its measure is within. What folly it were, trying how many ciphers a lifetime might add to a unit, while the unit itself affords all the significance! A man may as easily generalize the gambols of an ape as make a science of the variety which nature escapes into, as the identity of all possible difference.

The sadness of the Nazarene, as he contemplated the trivial recurrence of the grass and leaves, and of those millions of orientals in whom, as Clive averred, honor had no part,—as he forecast the time when “evolution,” clipping the tails of tadpoles and promoting them to toads, would bear the name of philosophy—was a portentous comment on the glory of this world.

There is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it? There are no fortunes to be told, and there is no advice to be given.—Farewell!