proceed in form to legislate them out of it, as useless, fantastic, and injurious to religion; to what would such legislation amount in the end, more than to expose the impotence and folly of the congress from which it might spring? The fine arts might say to such a convention: "What have we to do with thee, vain, wretched apparition of an hour! Is the nature of man to be thus made or unmade, at thy puny pleasure? Our authority is broader, and deeper, and far more ancient than thine." And can it be any more reasonable, I would ask, to think of legislating philosophy out of the world or out of the church, in any similar way? Philosophy is no subject for human arbitrament and legislation, in such magisterial form. The question of its being tolerated and allowed, is not just like the question whether we shall have, or not, a tariff or a national bank. It asks no permission of ours, to exercise its appointed functions in the vast world-process of man's history; it has exercised them through all ages thus far, and it will continue to exercise them, no doubt, to the end of time, in virtue of its own indefeasible right to be comprehended in this process, as an original necessary part of its constitution. able surely to cry out against science in any of its subordinate departments; as some, indeed, most consistent in their fanaticism, have at times pretended to do, in blind homage to a life of sense, or in the service, possibly, of a blind religion. All science has its chaotic disorders and revolutions, its sources of danger and its liabilities to corruption and abuse. But what then? Must we cease to think and inquire, in order that we may become truly wise? Shall we extinguish the torch of knowledge, that we may have power in the dark to fancy ourselves secure from harm? To do so were only to commit violent wrong upon our human nature itself. Man was made for science; he needs it, not as a means simply to something else, but as a constituent, we may say, in the substance of his own being. But his relation to science, in this view, is his relation at the same time to philosophy; for, as we have just seen, science can have no reality, except as it includes in itself a reference at least to philosophy, as that in which alone it can become complete. Man then is formed for philosophy, as truly as he is formed for science; and if we did but consider it properly, we should see and feel that to undervalue and despise the first, is as little rational as it is to undervalue and despise the second. Philosophy is not a factitious interest, artificially and arbitrarily associated with our life, which we may retain or put away from us altogether at our own pleasure; it is the perfection of our intelligence itself, the necessary summit of self-consciousness, towards which all the lines of knowledge struggle from the start, and in which only they are made to reach at last their ultimate and full sense. Philosophy is the form, simply, in which all Science is required at last to become complete. It is not, as sometimes supposed, one among the sciences only, in the way in which this may be said of geography for instance, or chemistry, or mathematics; it is emphatically the science of science itself the form in which science comes to master its own nature, in the way of conscious self-apprehension and self-possession. It belongs to the very conception of knowledge, that however distributed into manifold departments What has now been said, does not imply and spheres, it should nevertheless be at of course that all men are called to be phithe last the power of a single universal losophers, and to exercise the functions of life. All science is organic, and falls back philosophy on their own account. When finally upon the unity of self-consciousness we say of art, that it forms an original as its centre and ground. This is, how-constituent sphere of our general human ever, only to say that it comes to its true life, we do not mean certainly that every general end in the form of philosophy, individual is required to be a painter, or which is for this very reason the mistress musician, or poet, or all of these together, in and mother of all sound knowledge in order that he may fulfil his proper destiny every other view. What can be more in the world. Non omnia possumus omnes ; irrational, then, and absurd, than to cry out the life of the world is something far more against philosophy as something unpro- comprehensive and profound than the life fitable and vain? It were just as reason- of any one man, or any ten thousand men included in its course. Humanity has its measure in the whole, and not in the separate parts of which the whole is composed. The perfection of the individual does not consist in his being all that the general idea of human life requires, but in this, that he shall truly fill his own place in an organism, which is complete for the purposes that belong to it as a whole. In this sense we say, that art is a necessary constituent of humanity, though few comparatively may be fitted as organs to exercise the functions for which it calls: these functions belong to the organic constitution of our life, as a whole, and for the use of the whole; and where they are not acknowledged or fulfilled, the life itself must be regarded as, to the same extent, mutilated and shorn of its true sense. So in the case before us. Science and philosophy are not necessary for all men, individually and separately taken; but they are necessary at all times to Man as an organic whole. The great fact of humanity, the process of the world's life, cannot go forward at all without their presence. It may be enough for the mass of men perhaps to be borne along by the spirit of the age to which they belong, without any clear insight into its constitution and course; but this is not enough for the age itself. Through organs proper for the purpose, it ought to come if possible to a clear understanding of its own spirit and will, so as to be self-conscious and not blind. As we have already said, however, this self-consciousness is philosophy; and towards it at least all human life must continually struggle, so far as it is vigorous and sound. Nay, a bad life must rest in some consciousness too, often, to be sure, very dark, of its own meaning and tendency; and so far this also will have its philosophy. Philosophy and life, in fact, whether men consider it or not, go ever hand in hand together. It is perfectly ridiculous, therefore, to think or speak of the world as having power to accomplish its history without philosophy; as much so, as though we should dream that society might exist without government. It would be indeed something most strange and unaccountable, that the human mind should have shown such an inveterate propensity through all ages to speculate in this way, in spite of all discouragement and seemingly bad success, if there had been no reason for it other than its own vagrant curiosity or lawless self-will. The world has never been without its philosophy, as far back as we find it exhibiting any signs whatever of a moral or intellectual life. Christianity wrought no change in it, with regard to this point. Many in modern times have charged the early Church with unfaithfulness to her Master, in permitting the great truths of the Gospel to become a subject of school speculation; as though it might have been possible to have handed them down as mere traditional articles of faith, without their being made to enter thus, with new informing power, into the actual thinking of the world as well as into its actual life. And yet is not the thinking of the world, at all times, inseparably identified with its life; or rather, is it not the very soul through which this itself lives, the central stream that carries all forward in its own direction? If Christianity were to be something more than a religion of blind mechanical tradition; if it should at all make good its claim to be the absolute truth of the world, the eternal consummation of humanity itself; it must introduce itself into the actual process of the world's history as it stood, so as to fulfil and not destroy the original sense of it, in all its complicated parts. We might as well ask, that it should not meddle with the sphere of politics, as that it should abjure all interest in philosophy. The early Church soon found herself compelled to speculate. It was part of her mission in the world, to regenerate its intelligence and reason. And so in all periods since, we find philosophy closely interwoven with the activity of the church under other forms, and refusing to part with its authority for the human mind, so far as this can be said to have made any historical progress at all. The Reformers, in the sixteenth century, imagined at first, indeed, that their cause required its entire banishment from the territory of religion; but they were soon compelled themselves to have recourse again to its aid; and in the end, the old order of things in this direction was fully established throughout the Protestant world. How vain, in view of all this, to quarrel with philosophy, as though it were an | religion as well as reason; since in no interest false and pernicious in its own other view can we conceive of the world nature. We might, with as much reason, as carrying in itself a divine sense and quarrel with the waters of the Susque- meaning, so as to be the mirror truly of an hannah, for making their way towards the idea in the mind of God. God is not the sea. The world must think; would not author of confusion, either in nature or hisbe true to itself, if it ceased to think; and tory. He upholds and rules the world by it is not possible that it should be thus plan; and this plan takes hold of the end actively intelligent, without moving at the from the beginning, bearing all life steadsame time in the channel of some philo- ily forward as a process in its own service. sophical system, that may represent more In this way, every sphere of our general or less clearly the unity of its general life. human existence comes to its proper evoIt will follow, moreover, from this view | lution only in the form of history; and so of the necessary relation in which philoso- we should expect to find it pre-eminently phy stands to the life of the world, that in the case of philosophy, representing, as it is not so entirely without rule and this does, the inmost consciousness of the method in its course, as is taken for race itself from age to age. The idea of granted by the wholesale objection we are an absolutely stationary philosophy, menow considering. If it form an original chanically at hand as something ripe and and essential part of man's constitution, it done, for the use of the world through all must have a history, comprehended in the time, is an absurd contradiction. How general flow of human history as a whole. could it then represent the world's life, in But history implies organic unity and pro- its ever-flowing actual form? Change and gress. It is just the opposite of chaos. revolution here are not at once contradicSuch onward movement, exhibiting the tion and confusion. May they not be but present always as at once the birth of the the necessary action of history itself, as it past and the womb of the future, belongs forces its way onward continually from one to the very conception of humanity; as stage of thought and life to another? For much so as it does also, that it should this process, it should be remembered, is exist by resolution into a vast system of not by uniform movement, in the same dinations, families and individuals. Distri-rection and under the same character. bution in time, and distribution in space, are alike necessary, to represent the one vast, magnificent fact, through which the idea of man is made real. To be human, then, is to be at the same time historical, in the sense here explained. If we should say that the world is not bound together by the force of a common life, at any given time, but is made up of nations and men confusedly thrown into one mass in an outward and mechanical way; it would not be a greater wrong to our nature than it is made to suffer, when this life is not apprehended as a continuous process also, always different and yet always the same, extending perpetually from one generation over to another. In fact, the two conceptions cannot be held asunder. There is no alternative here between cosmos and chaos. To be organic at all, the world must be historical; and its history must show itself especially in the progressive development of humanity, as a whole, towards its appointed end. This we might seem justified to assume, as a postulate of It goes by stadia or eras; not unlike those great world-cycles which geologists undertake to describe in the primitive formation of the earth, only compressed into much narrower dimensions. Each period has, of course, its own history, including the rise and decline again of its particular life, and the breaking up of its whole constitution finally, to make room for a new spiritual organization; and all this must necessarily be attended with some show of chaotic confusion, to the view, at least, of the superficial thinker; while it is still possible that the whole may be, notwithstanding, in obedience throughout to the same great law of development and progress. Such an onward movement is found to characterize in fact the course of human thought, as it may be traced from its cradle in the ancient Oriental world, down to the present time. Philosophy has its own history, capable of being studied and understood, like the history of any other sphere of human life. This may be so dark still indeed as to leave room, at many points, for uncertainty, and controversy, and doubt. All history is open more or less to the same difficulty; but still its general sense, and the force at least of its great leading epochs, are sufficiently clear. It is only the unphilosophical and uninquiring, who pronounce the record of the world's life in this form, a farrago of unmeaning, disconnected opinions and dreams. In proportion as any man can be engaged to direct his own attention to the subject, in the way of earnest thought, he will feel the deep unreasonableness of this presumption. The history of mind he will see to be something more than chaos, "without form and void." Alas for us indeed, if that were all the world here offered to our faith! Order in its outward material structure, only to make room for an interminable soul-chaos within! It would go far at once to break the force of much of the prejudice that is entertained against philosophy, if only this idea of a historical development in the case of our world-life generally, as its necessary and proper form, were fairly familiar to our minds. We should then understand, that the very same life, in passing upwards through different stages, may be expected to show itself under different phases or aspects, without yet falling for this reason into any self-contradiction; and in this way we would be rescued from the narrow bigotry of measuring all past ages by our own, while at the same time we might be prepared to estimate intelligently the actual advantages of our position, in its advanced relation to the past. As the self-consciousness of the individual has different contents in childhood and riper age, and must necessarily migrate through a succession of forms in order that it may become complete; so we say of philosophy, which may be denominated the self-consciousness of the world as a whole, that it too can assert its proper reality only by living itself, from age to age, upwards into new and higher forms, till the process shall become complete in the full completion of humanity itself the glorious, all-harmonious millennium of creation. It does not follow, then, that a system of philosophy has been nugatory and null in its own time, because it has come to be exploded, as we say, and superseded by some fol lowing system. We have no right to declare the wisdom of Plato and Aristotle vain, and just as little to deride the speculations of the medieval schoolmen as learned nonsense, merely because their authority has long since passed away. The Greek philosophy comprehended both truth and power for the use of the world, in its own time. It entered largely into the growth and education of the human spirit. And in this way it still continues to live also, in the organic progress of human thought. The acquisitions of the past in this form are not lost by the downfall of the systems in which they may have seemed originally to inhere; they are simply translated into the constitution of other systems, and so carried forward in the vast intellectual process to which these belong. In a deep sense we may say of all history, that it is thus a perpetual metempsychosis of the world's life, by which it is always new and yet always the same. We may easily see, now, how little room there is for the fashionably vulgar imagination, that philosophy has little or nothing to do with the realities of actual life. There is indeed a latitude of meaning sometimes allowed to the term, especially in England and our own country, by which it is supposed to be saved from this reproach in part; though only in such a way as to fall more clearly under the power of it beyond the bounds of such exception. In the sense to which we refer, philosophy is taken to be a scientific insight simply into the nature and force of things empirically considered, as we find ourselves surrounded by them in the actual world. In this way we may have a philosophy of mind, by a sort of spiritual anatomical dissection, and then a philosophy of nature also as something altogether different; and however it may be with the first, it can easily be shown that this last is capable of being turned to many important practical uses. Witness only the wonders that are now wrought by steam, and the brilliant, though silent, action of the electro-magnetic telegraph. Philosophy in such shape means something, and has a value that can be made tangible to the world's common sense. It is the glory of our own age, too, in particular, that it is made to carry its salutary power into every nook and corner of our common material existence. We have a philosophy of farming, a philosophy of manufactures, and a philosophy of trade. We make our shoes and bake our bread philosophically. We talk, with equal ease, of the philosophy of the heavens and the philosophy of a plum pudding. We can go still farther, and admit also the practical use of philosophy, as occupied with the laws of our own reason and will, in the same Baconian style-provided always the process be not pushed too far. The science of mind, as handled by Locke, may help us possibly to think correctly; while the science of ethics, as unfolded in the same way by Paley, may serve to assist us occasionally in distinguishing between right and wrong. But here the concession is required to stop. For philosophy, as the science of ideas, or as it is sometimes called, the science of the absolute, which is after all the only proper sense of the term, our common system of thinking is apt to entertain no respect whatever, in the general view now noticed. It is regarded as unprofitable metaphysics, of some service possibly for dialectic practice in the schools, but of no conceivable use besides in our ordinary mundane experience. For does it not in fact profess to go beyond the bounds of this experience; showing itself thus to be transcendental, as we say, and more fit to be referred to the visionary moon, than to this solid material earth we now inhabit? Is it not, by its own confession, the science of ideas and not the science of facts? It is in reference to such philosophy especially, that the question has been triumphantly asked: What has it done to improve the actual life of the world, from the days of Plato down to the present hour? Has it ever manufactured, not a steamboat, not so much as a pin only, in the service of the world's comfort? Has it descended at all into contact with the real wants of man? Has it added one luxury to his table, or coined a single dollar of new wealth for his pocket? The whole force of this plausible representation, we say, is broken by the view we have now taken of the true nature of philosophy, and its necessary relation to the onward historical explication of the great mystery of humanity. The "chief end of man," after all, in this world, is not to create railroads, and telegraphs, and great Lowell establishments, for his own comfort; to seize the reins of nature in a merely outward way, and force her chariot wheels to move subservient to his simply physical accommodation. All this is right, indeed, in its place, and we mean not to undervalue or condemn the march of improvement in such outward form. Man is appointed to be the tamer and subduer of nature, and it is reasonable and fit that this should be brought to serve him, with absolute and universal submission. It is the proper prerogative of Mind, its grand moral vocation, we may say, in the world, thus to assert and proclaim its supremacy over Matter; as it is the true glory of this last, again, to be ruled and filled by the self-conscious presence of the first. But this lordship, to be true and right, must be moral as well as physical, inward no less than outward; it must be the supremacy of man over nature as man, and not simply as the potent magician of science, at whose bidding the spirits of the vasty deep stand ready, in shape of steam, tempest and lightning, to execute his pleasure. The only true mastery over the world at last, is that by which man is brought at the same time to master himself, in the clear apprehension and spontaneous election of goodness and truth in their absolute form. This is something more than agricultural chemistry, or the rattling machinery of cotton factories and rolling mills. It is by the power of the spiritual at last, that the full sense of the world, whether as spirit or nature, is to be evolved, and the full triumph of humanity, as sung in the eighth psalm, carried out to its grand consummation. The chief end of man is, not to know and rule the world simply as it stands beyond his particular person, but to know and rule it in the form of reason and will, as the inmost constitution of his own life. As in the case of his person separately considered, the skillful use of his bodily organs for mere bodily ends is in itself no argument of either strength or freedom, but can become of account only as such active power may be itself comprehended in the higher activity of the soul, moving always in obedience to its own law; so here, also, it is nothing less than the same moral self-consciousness and self-government, that can impart either dignity or value to any dominion we may |