Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 043.djvu/816

786 of them in pieces, and scatter their fragments to the winds. The creed of nature concludes simply for enjoyment; but the truer creed of human life, a creed which says little about happiness, was uttered soon after the foundations of the world were laid, and has been proved and perpetuated by the experience of six thousand years. "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou cultivate the earth;" and, it may be added, in a bitterer sweat shalt thou till, oh man, as long as life lasts, the harsher soil of thy own tumultuous and almost ungovernable heart.

This creed is none of nature's prompting, but is the issue of a veritable contest now set on foot between man and her. But how is this creed to be supported? How can we rationally make good the fact that we are fighting all life long more or less against the powers of nature? We have flung aside the logic of physics; where shall we look for props?

Here it is that philosophy comes in. "The flowers of thy happiness," says she, are withered. They could not last; they gilded but for a day the opening portals of life. But in their place I will give thee freedom's flowers. To act according to thy inclinations may be enjoyment; but know that to act against them is liberty, and thou only actest thus because thou art really free. For thy freedom does not merely consist in the power to follow a certain course, or to leave it unfollowed, but it properly consists in the single course of originating a new movement running counter to all the biases which nature gives thee, and in rising superior to the bondage thou wert born in. I will unwind from around thee, fold after fold, the coils of the inert logic of causality; and if thou wilt stand forth practically as nature's victorious foe, and speculatively as the assertor of the absolute liberty of man against the dogmas of physics—breaking the chain of causality—disclaiming the inspiration which is thy birthright, and working thyself out of the slough of sensualism—then shalt thou be one of my true disciples."

But at what point shall Philosophy commence unwinding the coils of fatalism from around man? At the very outermost folds. To redeem man's moral being from slavery, and to circulate through it the air of liberty by which alone it lives, is the great end of philosophy; but it were vain to attempt the accomplishment of this end, unless the folds of necessity be first of all loosened at the very circumference or surface of his ordinary character as a simply percipient being. Make man, ab origine, like wax beneath the seal, the passive recipient of the impressions of external things, and a slave he must remain for ever in all the phenomena he may manifest throughout the whole course of his career. If there be bondage in his common consciousness, it must necessarily pass into his moral conscience. Unless our first and simplest consciousness be an act of freedom, our moral being is a bondsman all its life. True philosophy will accept of no half measures—no compromise between the passivity and the activity of man. We must commence, then, by liberating our ordinary consciousness from the control or domineering action of outward objects. Thus commencing at the very circumference of man, we shall clear out an enlarged atmosphere of freedom around that true and sacred centre of his personality—his character, namely, as a moral and accountable agent.

In returning, then, to the fact of consciousness, we may remark that hitherto we have been chiefly occupied in opening out a way for ourselves, and have hardly advanced beyond the mere threshold or out-works of psychology. Regarding this fact as the great, and, indeed, properly speaking, as the only fact of our science, we have done our best to separate it from any admixture of foreign elements, and, in particular, to free it from that huge encumbrance which, since the commencement of science, has kept it weighed down in obscure and vaporous abysses,—the human mind, with all its facts, which are elements of a fatalistic, and therefore of an unphilosophical character. Imperfectly, indeed, but to the best of our ability, we have raised it up out of the depths where it has lain so long,