Page:Philosophical Review Volume 4.djvu/36

20 attributed to the Unconscious. "If it is said that human life can be directed by reason," Tolstoi almost growls, "then the possibility of life is annihilated." A painting, or even a poem, cannot be brought under the category of clear ideas or reason. Hence, unless art and religion are to be handed over to the Unknowable, the conception of consciousness must be widened, so as to include not only clear reflections, but aesthetic and religious feelings. And these ideas, feelings, and emotions must not be placed one over the other inside of consciousness, as if to imply that we pass through feeling up to emotion, and finally reach ideas, but must on the contrary be placed side by side, so as to suggest that the clearest thought is also the strongest feeling and the most profound emotion; in other words the highest consciousness is a unity of thought and feeling. The philosophy of evolution had meant to do away with the human spirit by holding it under the dark waters of the infinite and the unknowable. But what was intended to kill it has in the end given it life. As a result, the human mind is no longer viewed as a self-consciousness for which feeling is merely an imperfect stage, but as a self-consciousness of which feeling is a permanent factor. Nothing has been said about 'natural selection' or survival of the fittest,' and if these principles are to appear in philosophy, they must certainly undergo a change of meaning. Such an alteration has been suggested in the course of this article. Nature is not to be considered as an unknown and unknowable power, bending man into conformity with its secret purpose. Nor is it fully revealed in the thought, expressed so well by Matthew Arnold in prose and rhyme, that we are in the keeping of some power not ourselves which makes for righteousness, a thought of which Emerson also is so clear an exponent, when he says—

The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity;