Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/255

 William T. Harris 237 gave his writings an amount of influence far beyond what the reader might expect. Sweetly generous, devout, and en- terprising, Harris was an ideal apostle of philosophy to the | American people, calling upon them to enter the world's great intellectual heritage and assuring them that the truths of religion — God, freedom, and immortality — have always been best pro- tected by true philosophy and are in no need of the ill-advised guardians who, by discouraging free inquiry, transform religion into fetishism. Just as the work of Chauncey Wright may be summarized in its attack on the pretentiousness and inadequate scientific basis of the Spencerian evolutionary philosophy, so i'the work of William T. Harris may be summed up as an attack against agnosticism. On its psychologic side Harris's argument is directed against Spencer's assumption (directly derived from Sir William Hamilton) that we cannot conceive the infinite. Against this Harris clearly points out that Hamilton and Spen- cer are confusing the process of conception and the process of imagination. It is true that we cannot form a picture or an image of the infinite, but neither can we form an image of any motion or process as such. This, however, need not prevent us from grasping or conceiving any universal process of which the imagination fixes the dead static result at any moment. On the objective side Harris reaches the same result by the dialectic argument that the finite particular cannot be the ultimate reality. Particular things are given in sense perception, but the scientific understanding shows us that every object depends on other things to make it what it is; everything depends upon an environment. Science in its development must thus em- phasize dynamic processes, and its highest point is reached in the discovery of the correlation of all forces. But the moment we begin to reason as to the nature of these processes or activi- ties, we are inevitably led to the idea of self -activity; for since every finite object gets its activity from some other object, the ultimate source of all activity must be that which is not limited by something else, and that is an infinite or self-limited Ac- tivity. Thus the stages of sense-perception, understanding, directing genius, thus represented the union of New England transcendentalism with Germanic scholarship and idea.lism. As such its history is a significant incident in the intellectual life of America.