SOME SEQUENCES OF ABSOLUTE IDEALISM.

Since Kant, we have said, "no philosophy, no rational theology, no ultimate science, not referring to the results of his work, has had any real basis in thought." It must be added that since the fulfilment of Kant's Critique, especially by Hegel, there has not been one stone left as a foundation for "materialism." It goes right on, however, in multifarious forms, its defunct exponents still imagining they live. Surgical psychology, in special, is still as active with scalpel and microscope as if ours were the day of Coudillac and Erasmus Darwin. The knife goes into the brain, and the eye peers after it, with the funny expectation of seeing, with Dr. Cabanis, some spicule or plexus of matter, there, "which secretes thought as the liver secretes bile." The work is excellent as anatomy, and may have a plenty of important uses. But we, here, if we have had the capacity and patience to grasp the findings of Immanuel Kant, know that mind can never be derived from any physical correspondence of its nature and action. We know that every possible attempt at such derivation is merely a side-show of Parson Jasper's great astronomical comedy, which Copernicus exploded four hundred years ago. We know that every fiber, every solid or liquid, of the brain, with every movement of every atom it contains, is a ready-made physical object in a ready-made space and a ready-made time. But if we know Kant, we know, without a misgiving, that space and time, with all things in them, are not only dependencies but are literal creations and manufactures of a universal principle named mind. We know it is this principle which furnishes the form, the unity, and so the very existence of every phenomenon. Hence we know, finally, that the first step in the understanding of matter is the analysis of mind, through which all matter is and is constructed. Without this first step, all other steps are simply a stumble in the dark—the blind-man's buff of children. Or we may say, with a little more dignity, perhaps, that every material law of the cosmos is subject to "The Law of Scientific Idealism."

Now scientific idealism, pursued to the end, merges in absolute idealism. The source and substance of the universe is Intelligent Spirit; or, as the Bible and its Theologians say, this is the All-In-All.

For fifty years—from the publication of Kant's Critique in 1781, along through Fichte, and Schelling, to the death of Hegel in 1831—the vast illumination of thought that has been summed up as "German Transcendentalism" strove to unify natural theology and practical science in "Absolute Idealism." It will yet be seen that the work was done, however ill-comprehended. The good old Kant still had his whole head with him when he said, in 1787, "the danger, in this case, is not that of being refuted, but of being misunderstood." The Comtes, the Hamiltons, the Mills and Spencers—with no end, too, of their German brothers—are illustrious examples in proof of Kant's remark, however greatly they may be respected within the limits of their own work.

Once and for good, the history of philosophy, when understood, and the history of science, when understood, have joined in the proof that the principle of all life—we may say God if we like—is Spirit Principle.

Transcendentalism—a bulky word, but covering much more than the letter of it—was naturally too high and too deep a result to get all at once into the average human head. For thirty-odd years after the close of its epoch in Germany—or until, in 1864, Dr. James Hutchison Stirling produced his Secret of Hegel—not a man stood on the earth adequate to reproduce transcendentalism in basis and system. But the practical gist of it, without the full center or circumference, gradually became a part of the world's literature. In Britain, most notably through Thomas Carlyle, the new light penetrated biography, history, criticism, and even political disquisition. In America, focused in Ralph Waldo Emerson, the same light, whiter and purer if less flaming and burning, both vivified and purified all things on which it was shed. There the Infinite Oversoul and the finite undersoul seemed once again to meet in communion and evolution. Meanwhile, Theodore Parker, with his vast scholarship and overpowering courage, preached Jesus of Nazareth, the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule, with little regard for any organized theology of his day, whether its Unitarianism or its Calvinistic Orthodoxy. Back of all this, as now appears, there was a plain, uncultured, but inquiring and thoughtful man, in the byways of New England, who from the mechanism of clocks turned to the workings of the human mind, and in his own way reached the depth of knowledge and the mysteries of life. From a few practical experiments, he, too, analyzed the things of matter, and found them to be re-presentations, externalizations, of elemental spirit. And then he drew the inference that spirit molds, directs, governs matter, and so that health of mind materializes health of body.

But now, at once, the whole question at issue confronts us—what is the true and full position and power of mind in therapeutics? This question must be answered, here, not from the Quimby standpoint, and much less from that of the shallow muddle termed Christian Science, but from the standpoint of actual, accredited, established metaphysics, now substantially bearing the concensus of religion, philosophy, and the practical investigation of material phenomena.

By aid of Kant, with our short-cut to the logical and necessary end of his achievement, we have grasped the elemental source and solvent of man and his universe. It is Spirit in its evolution. But, in this evolution, man—or say rather and always the principle of sensation and consciousness in which man inheres—is merely the general form, diversely individualized, of the One All-Inclusive Spirit in the activity of self-manifestation. The earth, the sun, moon, and stars, the human body, its house and the landscape, with every particle of all of them, are outwoven of universal Spirit through the loom of subjective being and unity. The forms of matter, with no exception, are fabricated in this way. Thus, not figuratively, but literally and with exact knowledge, we may repeat after St. John:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made."

But the principle of animal apprehension and human apperception—or say just the conscious and the sub-conscious—is not the Ultimately Creative One, but is, in us, only a sub-creative power and agency. We simply individualize it in endless degrees and variations, all of us framing the same general world of objects, conceptions and feelings, but no one of us being, seeing, or feeling, in all respects, exactly like any other incarnation of our common identity.

But while the form—the unity, and thus the individuality—of all things, is materialized from Spirit through sensation and consciousness in subjectivity—while this is the secret and genesis of all creation—we must ever hold fast to the equally basic and universal fact that the filling of the form—the infinite variety of impact on subjectivity which furnishes the diversity of objects—all this comes from that ultimate spirit-background crudely called "the unknown and unknowable."

Now this background of Absolute Spirit, the very withholding of which from finite creatures constitutes them such, institutes their law of progress, and gives movement of expression to the Infinite Itself, can only be absorbed and mastered by human beings through study, work, and experience. While genuine metaphysics, then, assures us of our spirit-origin and relative oneness with God—of being God's children far more directly and intimately than most of us have ever imagined—it teaches us that for practical purposes, in our condition of existence called "matter," it makes no difference what we call this condition. 'Tis something actual, something definite, something fixed, just as long as we are in our earthly relation to it. From this point of view, Dr. Johnson's kicking of the stone to refute Berkeley was a deserved kick, and even Byron's fun was justified in his tipsy lines,

"When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,
And proved it, 'twas no matter what he said."

All things are spirit surely enough; but the phenomena of matter, as transformed spirit, are related to each other under the laws of what we necessarily designate as material nature. Little by little, through long and hard exertion, we find out what these relations are, and how they are fitted to the human center of them. Some things are good to eat and to nourish us; others to poison and kill us. A cold or fever may be a manifestation of spirit, and an herb or drug may be another; but if the herb or drug counteracts and destroys the cold or the fever, and experience proves it ten thousand times, who cares to analyze a dose of aconite or a cup of saffron-tea into a draft of "mortal" or "immortal" mind? The process is a mere fooling with ideals—hysterics jumping at the moon. On metaphysical grounds—as far as anybody knows what metaphysics really means—there is no need that our physicians, if they are "good physicians," should trouble themselves much about a Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy. Esculapius came into the world long before her, and his followers will stay in it long after her materialized divinity has risen into a more spiritual and a more intelligent state.

The same may be said of our theologians. Their creeds have not come out of nothing, however much the spirit of them may have grown thick and muddy through crude understandings. The Christian Church, surely, can yet offer to mankind something better than the Eddy "Church Scientist"; and if it can, it is in no ultimate jeopardy from a few, or a few hundred, congregations of half-educated faddists.

For a student of history—not in its moments, but in its decades and centuries—it is easy to see that "Christian Science" has the reason of the fact and the spread of it, in its being a protest against the depressing materialism around it—a materialism which, though rationally decapitated by Kant, has shown marvelous activity, for a corpse, ever since the execution.

The medical profession, too, has partly, if indirectly, been responsible for Mrs. Eddy's crazy horse of "metaphysics," running away in the dark, and butting its own brains out. From Dr. Mesmer to Dr. Charcot, it took about a hundred and twenty years for "animal magnetism," under the softer names of "hypnotism" and "suggestion," to achieve full and final standing in the French Academy of Medicine; and the mental phenomena attending "mesmerism" have still but little "respectability" among "regular physicians." But, that curative agencies are not confined to drugs has long been settled in the public mind—such part of the public mind, at least, as permits itself any considerable reading and thinking.

Has the pulpit itself—orthodox and not so orthodox—contributed to the success of Eddy "Science"? We must say it has. The practise, among the sects, of twisting the Bible out of its straight, historical, natural significance, and fitting its texts to every sort of whim, folly, and malefaction—this general practise has at last culminated in Mrs. Eddy's Key to the Scriptures, with pretty nearly the dissolution of them in the abomination of interpretation.

But "Christian Science"—the Eddy misfit for a specious name—has had its rise, and it has probably risen about as high as it can reach, notwithstanding its rapid extension for the moment. Only its protrusion from insignificance and non-attention was needed to uncover its foundation on the sands of ignorance, its strength in the perennial weakness and credulity of mankind, and its business success in ordinary, or more than ordinary, business cupidity. Has it done no good in the world, then? Ah, that is another question. Whatever may have been the chief motive of its founder, and whatever may have been its "comedy of errors," it has forced the inception of a movement that, as a whole, may have vast results for the human mind and the human body. Whatever material medicines may be necessary to mankind while they themselves are in a material condition, psychic forces in the cure of disease can no longer be ignored. What is the extent, and what the limit, of these forces, is a problem that must be examined. As conditionally—here and now—man is both spiritual and corporeal—it would seem to be a self-evident conclusion that he must have both material and spiritual aids to health. That we can "jump" our condition, before we get out of it, is the most tremendous paradox ever presented to the human mind; but the sequences—even physical—of systematically opening the finite soul to the Infinite Spirit may be incalculable. The revival, or definite rediscovery, in modern times, of healing the sick by the soul and the laying-on of hands, came to pass some fifty years ago, in the United States, through the honest, single-minded, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. If the spirit of evil—of hypocrisy, selfishness and avarice—has entered into the movement of mental healing through another source, the frequent necessity of very human means to divine ends is once more illustrated.