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670 or the dreams of sleeper's. If any one take this view, it is utterly impossible to refute him; for his theory does perfectly well explain all the facts that he acknowledges or can be led to apprehend. If he once make up his mind that human existence is nothing better than the frightful farce which on his scheme it appears to men of larger and more aspiring souls—what can be said, but that he must make the best of the world which he has chosen for himself?

The Absolute Truth of the philosopher has doubtless never been apprehended, by the mass of mankind, as divested of innumerable, arbitrary, and often absurd adjuncts. Yet there are few who have not been visited by some faint and broken image of an unchangeable Ground, an eternal Reason, an inexhaustible Fount of Life, a pure Love, a perfect Will, a universal God; though doubtless even Christianity has as yet communicated a clear, devout, mature knowledge of this idea to but a small portion of those who profess it. The verdict of the multitude, ignorant as they are, first of what they do mean, and secondly, of what they ought to mean, is, on the whole, in favour of a Reality of Truth. But the seer who does know what he affirms, has a certainty which votes and adherents cannot augment, nor deniers take away. Seeing the truth in itself as it is, he cannot but know that he sees it, and would still possess this insight, though he were the one among a thousand millions who believed that man is more than a phantom of the night.

Any fool, much more any score of fools, can kill the wisest of men. Yet history teaches nothing, if not this, that the final estimation which decides all conflicts is by weight, not tale.

A self-complacent horror of mysticism in speculation, is apt to be the mark of him who cannot see at all what the mystic sees obscurely.

How often is the meaning of any appearance not only different from, but the very reverse of what it seems! Pursue this contrast to its source, and we are not far from the highest truth of speculation.

The greatest instance of the opposition of the apparent and the real is found in the world itself as a whole, which presents to us a mass of fluctuating atoms, and yet reveals an Eternal Oneness as its true origin and life.

Most English persons of liberal education would say that the primary question in philosophy is this: whether the human mind has or has not any capacities but those of sensation, memory, and association; or, in other words, whether from these alone all knowledge and all principles of action are derived? This would perhaps be the statement of those who take either the one or the other side in the controversy. A man of a deeper, ampler, and, as it is called among us, a more mystical mind than can be looked for among men of business and men of fashion, would say that philosophy starts from the assumption of a power in man to arrive at the knowledge of an Absolute Truth, on which the particular truths of experience depend, and from which they receive their explanation. The teacher of association and similar processes, as solving all mysteries into mere commonplaces, says that the sensation of bitter or sweet cannot be imparted by words to him who has not experienced it; so the believer in a fontal reality above all phenomena, and their generalized laws, says that the intuition of this, and the accompanying conviction of its inconclusiveness, cannot be conveyed by mere verbal teaching; and requires a training of the affections, imagination, and will, as well as the understanding, in order to bring it within our reach. Only the one asserts that there is nothing in man which is not obvious in all men; the other, that there is much, and the best, which in most has never distinctly appeared, and shows itself only by vague but unconquerable feeling.

The reductio ad absurdum, the triumphant sarcasm of the follower of Locke, commonly amounts to this, that the asserted truth of the visionary enthusiast cannot be stated in terms of the sensations, and their images and associated results, without manifest self-contradiction; and that therefore it is a mere lunacy. But this is only a ridiculous conclusion from a state-