Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/647

Rh the new religion preached that the great exterior existence, the Something Is, the awful "" can alone be presented intelligibly to man. For "No man shall see Jehovah and live," says the Old Testament: "No man hath seen God at any time," says the New Testament; the Son of man, who is εὶς τὸν κόλπον το~ν πατρὸς —projected on the bosom of the absolute "I am"—he hath declared him.

Of this language in St. John's Gospel, it is obvious that Hegel's doctrine—echoed afterward by Comte and the positivists—is a sort of variation set in a lower key. In humanity, said he, the divine idea emerges from the material and the bestial into the self-conscious. Humanity presents us with the best we can ever know of the divine. In "the Son of man" that which lies behind, and which no man can attain to, becomes incarnate, visible, imaginable. But it can not surely be meant by these philosophers that in the sons of men taken at hap-hazard the Divinity, the great Cosmic Unknown, is best presented to us. It can not possibly be maintained that in the Chinese swarming on their canals, in the hideous savages of Polynesia, or in the mobs of our great European capitals, the "Something is" can be effectively studied, idealized, adored. No, it were surely a truer statement that humanity concentrated in its very purest known form, and refined as much as may be from all its animalism, were the clear lens (as it were) through which to contemplate the great Cosmic Power beyond. It is, therefore, a of man, and not the ordinary sons of men, that we require to aid our minds and uplift our aspirations. Mankind is hardly to be saved from retrograde evolution by superciliously looking round upon a myriad of mediocre realities. It must be helped on, if at all, by a new variety in our species suddenly putting forth in our midst, attracting wide attention, securing descendants, and offering an ideal, a goal in advance, toward which effort and conflict shall tend. We must be won over from our worldly lusts and our animal propensities by engaging our hearts on higher objects. We must learn a lesson in practical morals from the youth who is redeemed from rude boyhood and coarse selfishness by love. We must allow the latent spark of moral desire to be fanned into a flame, and, by the enkindling admiration of a human beauty above the plane of character hitherto attained by man, to consume away the animal dross and prepare for new environments that may be in store for us. What student does not know how the heat of love for truth not yet attained breaks up a heap of prejudices and fixed ideas, and gives a sort of molecular instability to the mind, preparing it for the most surprising transformations? Who has not observed the development of almost a new eye for color, or a new ear for refinements in sound, by the mere constant presentation of a higher æsthetic ideal? And just in the same way, who that knows anything of mankind can have failed to perceive that the only successful method by which character is permanently improved is by