Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX.

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We say without reserve, that this book of Mr. James's, if we except a
small and unpretending treatise by the same author, published a few years
since, on the "Nature of Evil," is the first we have met with, in the
range of modern religious controversy, which goes to the heart and marrow
of the subject.

To see into what straits we had been brought, call to mind the essentials
of the Kantian and Scotch philosophies, which have dominated the German
and English mind, and partially the French mind, for the last quarter of a
century. Kant resolves all our knowledge into the science of phenomena.
Our faculties give us nothing but the phenomena of consciousness; and the
phenomena of consciousness are not noumenal existence, or existence _in
se_. Nor have we any right to reason from phenomena to noumena, or to say
that the former authenticate the latter. We know only the Ego. The Non-Ego
lies on the other side of a yawning chasm,--if, indeed, there _is_
anything on the other side, which is doubtful. The Ego becomes the centre
of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on
the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral
instinct. Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism,
or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that
either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute. He and his
disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such
thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, and that to attempt such a
philosophy leads us into inextricable confusion and self-contradiction.

In thus degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only
to deal with the Finite,--in other words, making her the lackey of mere
Science,--they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation. Very
well,--we are ready to say,--having scourged Philosophy out of the temple,
will you please, Gentlemen, to conduct us yourselves towards its hallowed
shrine? If Philosophy cannot yield us a knowledge of the Infinite, we take
it that Revelation, as you apprehend it, can. We, poor prodigals, have
been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a
little nourishing food.--The answer we get is, that Revelation does not
propose to give us any such fare. Not any more than Philosophy does
Revelation disclose to us the Infinite. It only gives us finite
conceptions and formulas about the Infinite. The gulf between us and God
yawns wide as ever, and is eternal. We must worship still an unknown God,
as the heathen did. But we have this consolation,--that we have
creed-articles which we can get by heart, though ignorant of what they
mean, and under what these philosophers call a "regulative" religion
repeat our paternosters to the end of time.

"These be thy gods, O Philosophy!" exclaims Dr. Mansel to the German
Pantheists, pointing to the bloodless spectres which they have evoked in
place of Christianity. "These be thy gods, O Scotch Metaphysics!" the
Pantheists might reply, when called upon to worship the wooden images in
which avowedly no pulse of the Infinite and Absolute ever beats or ever
can beat.

Mr. James's whole argument, as he deals with the German and Scotch
philosophies, is profound and masterly. He uses two sets of weapons, both
of them with admirable skill. One set is awfully destructive. He clears
off the rubbish of the pseudo-metaphysics with a logic so remorseless that
we are tempted sometimes to cry for mercy. But, on the whole, Mr. James is
right here. If men pretending to add to the stock of human knowledge
treacherously knock away its foundations, and bring down the whole
structure into a heap of rubbish, leaving us, if not killed outright,
unhoused in a limbo of Atheism,--or if men pretending to hold the keys of
knowledge will not go in themselves, and shut the doors in our faces when
we seek to enter, no matter how sharply their treachery and charlatanry
are exposed, however famous are the names they bear.

But Mr. James is quite as much constructive as destructive. He shows not
only that there must be a philosophy of the Infinite, but that herein is
its high office and glory. Sense deals only with facts,--science deals
with relations, or groups phenomena; and when these usurp the place of
philosophy, they turn things exactly upside down, or mistake the centre
for the circumference. This is the glaring fault both of the German and
the Scotch metaphysicians, that they swamp philosophy in mere science; and
hence they grovel in the Finite, and muddle everything they touch even
there. Revelation, on the other hand, does unfold to us a true philosophy
of the Infinite. It shows how the Infinite is contained in the Finite, the
Absolute in the Relative, not spatially or by continuation, but by exact
correspondency, as the soul is contained in the body. Mr. James
demonstrates the supreme absurdity of the notion of noumenal existence, or
of any created existence which has life _in se_. God alone has life in
Himself. All things else are only forms and receptacles of life, sheerly
phenomenal, except so far forth as He is their substance. The notion of
Creation as something made out of nothing, having life afterwards _in se_,
and so holding an external relation to Deity, falsifies all the
theologies, and degrades them into mere natural religions." It is the
mother-fallacy," says Mr. James, "which breeds all these petty fallacies
in the popular understanding." Those familiar with Dr. Mansel's argument
will see that he has not the remotest conception of Creation, except as an
exploit of God in time and space, or of the Infinite, except as an
unbounded aggregation of finites. That God reposed alone through all the
past eternities, but roused some day and sent forth a shout, or six
successive shouts, and spoke things out of nothing into "noumenal"
existence, were absurd enough, to use Mr. James's nervous English, "to
nourish a standing army of Tom Paines into annual fatness." The utter
childishness of the theological quarrels over the first chapter of Genesis
is obvious enough, so long as both parties swamp the spirit in the letter,
or deny that the Finite can reveal the Infinite.

Following out his favorite postulate, that God alone has life in Himself,
and all things else are only phenomena of life, Mr. James evolves the
doctrine of Creation, of Man and Nature, and of Redemption, steering clear
alike of the shoals of Atheism and the devouring jaws of Pantheism. In his
constructive argument he draws upon the vast wealth of Swedenborg, and
herein, as we conceive, he has done a rare service to our literature. Both
the popular and ecclesiastical conception of Swedenborg would be
ludicrously, if they were not shamefully inadequate. He has been known but
little, except as a ghost-seer, or as a Samson grinding painfully in
sectarian mills. Mr. James has done something like justice to his broad
humanity, and his incomparably profound and exhaustive philosophy. It was
Kant who first called him a ghost-seer; but while Kant was doing his best
to turn all realities into the ghastliest of spectres, and remove all the
underpinning of faith, till the heavens themselves should tumble through,
Swedenborg was laying the foundation of all knowledge on the solid floors
of Nature, subordinating sense to science, science to philosophy,
philosophy to revelation, each serving as the impregnable support of its
superior, and all filled and quickened with the life of God, and lighted
up with those divine illuminations in whose illustrious morning the first
and faintest cock-crowing would scare the ghosts of the Kantian philosophy
out of the universe.

We have regarded Mr. James for some time as among the first of American
essayists. There are few writers whose thought is more worthy to be
spoken, or whose grand and nervous English displays it in finer shades and
nobler proportions. The present volume is his crowning work, and he has
coined his life-blood into it. But as honest critics we have some grounds
of quarrel with him. A man has no right to be obscure who can make words
so flexible and luminous as he can. In the present volume, his readers who
here make his first acquaintance will inevitably misconstrue him, simply
because he alters the fundamental nomenclature of religion and chiefly
Ritualism, and we find only by the most wide-awake searching that he means
anything else. Morality means the Selfhood, not social justice, not that
which binds the individual in his relations to society and to humanity.
Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the
purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some
sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched
buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But
religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in
loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to
his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all
divine charities flowing through them. So Swedenborg uses the word
morality. See his noble chapter on Charity in the "True Christian
Religion." And for ourselves, we have not the least idea of abandoning
these honored words either to superstitious formalists or handsome
scoundrels.

We have no such respect for the Devil as Mr. James has expressed for him,
even when transformed into the gentleman and utilized for beneficent
purposes. Nor do we see how the gap in Mr. James's argument is to be
closed up, while he avows his belief in the eternity of the hells, and yet
holds that we are _ab intra_ the unqualified creations of God. Again, we
should take exception to his favorite position, or, rather, the batteries
he opens from it, that saints and scoundrels are not different in the
sight of God, allowing the sense which alone, of course, he intends,
different _in se_.

But the merits of the book, as one of the noblest and profoundest
contributions to philosophy which have been produced, are undeniable. Mr.
James possesses two qualities in very rare combination, the power of
subtile metaphysical analysis and the power of picturesque representation,
so that, while he tasks the thinking faculty of his readers to the utmost,
he chains their attention by the fascination of his rhetoric. His sturdy
honesty is everywhere apparent, and his success the most complete which we
have yet witnessed in rescuing Philosophy from her degrading bondage to
Sense, and restoring her to the divine service of Revelation.

_The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on
Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation._ By SIR CHARLES LYELL,
F.R.S., Author of "The Principles of Geology," "Elements of Geology,"
etc., etc. Illustrated by Wood-Cuts. 8vo. Philadelphia: George W. Childs.

Human bones from time to time have been discovered associated with those
of extinct hyenas and cavern-bears, and specimens of them were in the
Museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris as long ago as 1829; but there was
then a doubt among geologists as to the human bones being coeval with the
bones with which they were associated, it being supposed that they might
have been washed into crevices of the rocks in which the bone-breccias are
found, and there, being incrusted with carbonate of lime, had the false
appearance of being as ancient as the fossil bones of extinct animals.

The indefatigable labors of Prestwich, in the basin of the Somme and among
the gravel-beds of Picardy, first called the attention of geologists to
the fact that works of men's hands were also found in undisturbed alluvial
deposits of high antiquity, and he had the honor of bringing to light
proofs of the existence of man in Europe in more remote times than had
been previously admitted, and of demonstrating the stone age of France.
Goss, Hebert, and Lartet followed in the same track, and added many
valuable facts, and a host of other laborers in the same field have since
appeared. So extensive have been the discoveries of the works of man
buried with the bones of the _Elephas primigenius_ and of cavern-bears and
extinct hyenas, that we are forced to recognize the fact of the
coexistence of man with those ancient animals, for the occurrence of
deposits containing the bones of the two cannot any longer be regarded as
doubtful; and certainly stone tools fashioned by man have been found so
widely spread in the ancient alluviums and deposits of the post-Pliocene
age, as to remove all doubt of the fact, and to destroy the objection that
they might be local accidents of an equivocal character.

More recently,--namely, within four or five years,--the discovery of the
habitations of lost races of men on the borders of the Swiss lakes, and of
remains of various articles which those people once used,--tools, weapons,
ornaments, bones of animals they fed upon, seeds of plants they cultivated
and consumed,--has given a new impetus to these researches into the
antiquity of the human race. Borings into the alluvial deposits of the
Nile have proved the existence of man in that valley more than thirty
thousand years ago, as estimated by the known rate of deposit of the
alluvium of the Nile. Considerations as to the origin and spread of
languages also seem to require a much greater antiquity for the human race
than has been popularly allowed; and geologists have always claimed
myriads of years as required for the sedimentary formations of the globe.
Sir Charles Lyell, ever an active collector of geological facts, and an
excellent writer on the science of Geology, has engaged with his usual
zeal in verifying the researches of the French, Swiss, and German
geologists, and has written a very readable book on these new revelations
concerning the ancient history of the human race. It is the best English
presentation of the subject, and is written in a style that every one can
read and understand.

We regret, however, that he has abandoned his former views as to the
persistency of species, and has adopted Darwin's theory of transmutation
and development by variation and natural relation, and must say, after
carefully reading his book, that he has not given any geological proofs of
the correctness of Darwin's opinions, but, like that distinguished writer,
he is obliged to take refuge behind the deficiency of the geological
record, and to suppose facts and proofs may hereafter be discovered, when
few are now known to favor the new hypothesis. We can see no more reason
why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the
leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because
in all times both children and men have wished to fly. Nor do we think Mr.
Wallace's opinion any better founded, that, owing to a dearth of leaves on
the lower branches of trees, all the short-necked giraffes died out, and
left the long-necked ones to continue the species. This theory reminds us
of the "_astronomical expirimint_" proposed by Father Tom to his
"_Howliness_" the Pope, of the goose and the turkey-cock picking the stars
from the sky. As to the ape-like skull of Engis Cave, and the human
skeleton found near Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be
difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad
forms in skeletons now walking about. To us they are no evidence that the
first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin's argument
convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes. This question, however,
is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse
themselves in thus tracing back their ancestry.

To this class of inquirers Sir Charles Lyell's book will furnish food for
reflection; and they will see that even so enthusiastic a writer as this
new convert to the Darwinian doctrine can furnish but very slender support
to it from his geologic lore.

There is much interesting matter in the book besides the generalizations
we object to, and enough to render it welcome to the library of any one
interested in the study of Geology and of the antiquity of the animal
creation.

_Spurgeon's Sermons._ Preached and revised by the Rev. C.H. SPURGEON.
Seventh Series. New York: Sheldon and Co.

Spurgeon is emphatically of the earth, earthy. This we say, not as
anything against him intellectually or spiritually, but simply as
indicating the material ballast, which in this man is grosser and heavier
than in most men, pulling forever against his sails, and absolutely
forbidding that freer movement of the imagination which usually belongs to
minds of a power equal in degree to his. Not that this freedom flows
necessarily out of a great degree of mental power, or by any organic law
is associated with what we term _genius_. Every one would admit that
Luther was a man of genius; yet Luther was in this respect no better off
than Spurgeon,--he was as totally destitute of wings, of the possibility
of aerial flight. His power we consider to be far higher than that of
Spurgeon; but this we argue from the fact, that, although equally with
Spurgeon he was excluded from the sovereignty of the air, although he was
equally denied both the faculty to create and the capacity to receive
subtile speculation, he had what Spurgeon has _not_, an almighty,
irresistible _impetus_ in his movements,--movements which, though
_centripetal_, forever seeking the earth, and forever trailing their
mountain-weight of glory along the line of and through the midst of
flesh-and-blood realities, yet never found any impediment in all their
course, but swept the ground like a whirlwind. This distinction between
Spurgeon and Luther in the matter of _strength_ is an important one; and
it is, moreover, a distinction which may easily be derived--even if no
other source lay open to us--from a palpable difference between their
faces. But the resemblance between these two men as to tendencies and
modes of operation is still more important, and especially as helping us
to draw the line between two distinct orders of human genius. Upon this
resemblance we desire to dwell at some length.

Luther and Spurgeon are both grossly _realistic_. They are both
_groundlings_. In their art, they build after the simple, but grand style
of the Cyclops; they have no upward reach; with no delicate steppings do
they haunt the clouds; because they _will_ not soar, they draw the sky
down low about them, and, wrapping themselves about with its thunders and
its sunlights, play with these mysteries as with magnificent toys. In them
there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human
faith. All these maintain their alliance magnetically, by channels seen or
unseen, but forever _felt_, with the earth, and, Antaeus-like, from the
earth they derive all their peculiar strength as sentiments of the human
heart.

How widely different are these men from Bacon, Kant, or Fichte,--or, to
compare them more directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms
of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer,
who, although he was a _realist_, yet had eagles' wings, and was at home
on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed
nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods! In these latter the movement of
imagination is _centrifugal_, it sustains itself in the loftiest
altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it
finds the materials from which it wreathes its climbing, "cloud-capped"
citadels. The opposite order of genius is, as we have previously called
it, _centripetal_, gravitating earthward.

Both orders are to be found among those celebrated as pulpit
orators,--all, indeed, who have ranked as powers in this department of
human effort belonging eminently, nay, we may almost say _exclusively_, to
one or the other. If we take Spurgeon, Whitefield, Bunyan, and Luther as
representatives of one order, we shall have also representatives of the
other in such orators as Jeremy Taylor,--the Shakspeare of the
pulpit,--and, though in a very different sort, Henry Ward Beecher. That in
which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their
movements,--the one hardly lifted above the earth's surface or above the
level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere of the ideal
and impalpable. In the latter class there are vast differences, but
uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love
are _exhalant_, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the
interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought and
imagination. In Beecher this ideality is of a _philosophic_ sort. Thought
in him is forever dividing and illustrating truth; and that which is his
great peculiarity is that he is at the same time so strictly
philosophical, even to a metaphysical nicety, and so very popular. We have
heard him, in a single discourse, give utterance to so much philosophic
truth relating to theology, as, if it were spread out over a dozen sermons
by doctors in divinity whom we have also heard, would be capital
sufficient to secure a professor's chair in any theological seminary in
the country. Yet he is never abundant in analytic statements of truth:
these in any one of his sermons are "few"--as they should be--"and far
between": the greater portion of his time and the most mighty efforts of
his dramatic power being devoted to the irradiation and illustration of
these truths. This is the fertility of his genius, that, out of the roots
which philosophy furnishes, it can, through its mysterious broodings,
bring forth into the breathing warmth of life organisms so delicate and
perfect. Here is the secret of his popularity. Jeremy Taylor, without
being at all metaphysical, without ever diving down to examine the
beginnings of things in Nature or in men's hearts, had an infinitely more
fertile imagination, and the result was therefore more various and
multiplex; it reached a higher point in the graduated scale of ideality,
it was the _afflatus_ of a diviner inspiration, and was more akin to the
effects of the most exalted poetry: yet it was of far less value as
something which was to operate on men's minds than the result of Beecher's
more pointed, more scintillating discourse of reason. The fact is, that
both Henry Ward Beecher and Jeremy Taylor must of necessity depend, for
any beneficial effects which they may seek to bring about in the lives of
their hearers, upon certain _intellectual_ qualities already existing in
their audience. Even in order to be appreciated, they must have at least
partially educated audiences. Give either of them Whitefield's auditory,
and these effects become impossible. Here we come upon the inert masses,
which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in
any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way upon a
thoroughly dead level.

It is just here that the _realistic_ preaching of the Spurgeon school is
available, and nothing else is. Here things must be taken just as they are
found,--must be taken and presented in their natural coloring, in their
roughest shape. Polish the thought here, or let it be anything save the
strictest rescript from Nature, and you make it useless for your purposes.
Here it is not the crystal that is wanted, but the unshapely boulder. And
provided you wield your weapons after a masterly fashion, it matters very
little what your manner or style may be as regards the graces of
composition; if only a giant, you may be the most unseemly and awkward one
of all Joetunheim.

Now these elements of success Spurgeon has in an eminent degree. He deals
not simply with realities of the grossest sort, but with those which are
forever present to common humanity; he seeks to move men to religious
feelings through precisely the same means that they are daily moved by,
the same things which daily excite whatever of thought is transacted in
their cramped-up world of mind. This is particularly evident in the
material structure upon which his sermons proceed.

Preaching from the text, "But the God of all grace, who hath called us
unto His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered
awhile, make you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you," he causes the
whole matter to be indelibly impressed on their minds by the very
mechanical comparison of Perfection, Establishment, Strengthening, and
Settling to four sparkling jewels set in the jet-black foil of past
suffering. This is just that kind of illustration which his audience
craves. It matters not whether he meets this audience through a vague or a
transparent medium, provided the vagueness or the transparency be common
both to the speaker and his hearers. Nothing, for instance, could have
better accomplished the end designed, yet nothing could be more vague,
than such an appeal as the following:--"Have ye never on your bed dreamed
a dream, when your thoughts roamed at large and a bit was taken from your
imagination, when, stretching all your wings, _your soul floated through
the Infinite, grouping strange and marvellous things together, so that the
dream rolled on in something like supernatural splendor_? But, on a
sudden, you were awakened, and you have regretted hours afterwards that
the dream was never concluded. _And what is a Christian, if he does not
arrive at perfection, but an unfinished dream?_" Now there is nothing more
universal among the most unintellectual of the children of earth than just
this sort of mystical reverie, thus grand and thus inconclusive, where the
mind, moved, perhaps, to this enthusiastic rapture by that infusion of
animal force which comes from a hearty dinner, remaining always just in
the same place, seems to wheel away, it knows not whither, but seemingly,
and as it flatters itself, into the regions of the Infinite. Really there
is no mental movement at all,--nothing but an outgoing through the myriad
channels of animal sensibility; yet there is always associated, in such
minds, with reveries like these a spiritual elevation approaching to
inspiration. "Oh," think they, "if the dream might only be completed,
_that_ would be the consummation of a divinely spiritual being!" On this
association Spurgeon founds a comparison, which, though utterly false when
analyzed, is yet no less effective as illustrating the particular idea
which he wishes to convey. Such associations, where he cannot correct
them, it is the business of the popular preacher to inherit as if they
were his own, and to build upon as if they were gospel truths.

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