AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
part iii.
chapter i.
What is philosophy? Look at man struggling against the fatalistic logic of physics, and thou shalt best know what philosophy is. In the hands of physical science man lies bound hand and foot, and the iron of necessity is driven into the innermost recesses of his being; but philosophy proclaims him to be free, and rends away the fetters from his limbs like stubble-withs. Physical science, placing man entirely under the dominion of the law of causality, engulfs his moral being in the tomb; but philosophy bursts his scientific cerements, and brings him forth out of "the house of bondage" into the land of perfect liberty.
If we look into the realities of our own condition, and of nature as it operates around us, we shall be convinced of the justness of this view. We shall see that the essential character of philosophy is best to be caught in contrast with the character of physics; just as man is best read in the antagonism which prevails between him and nature as she exists both without him and within him—this strife conducing in the former case to his natural, and in the latter to his moral aggrandisement.
Without a figure, the whole universe may be said to be inspired. A power not its own drives its throbbing pulses. All things are dependent on one another—each of them is because something else has been. Nowhere is there to be found an original, but everywhere an inherited activity. Nature throughout all her vicissitudes is the true type of hereditary and inviolable succession. The oak dies in the forest-solitudes, having deposited the insignia of its strength in an acorn, from which springs a new oak that neither exceeds nor falls short of the stated measure of its birthright. The whole present world is but a vast tradition. All the effects composing the universe now before us were slumbering, ages ago, in their embryo causes. And now, amid the derivative movements of this unpausing machinery, what becomes of man? Is he too the mere creature of traditionary forces?
Yes—man in his earlier stages violates not the universal analogy: but lives and breathes in the general inspiration of nature. At his birth he is indeed wholly nature's child; for no living creature is born an alien from the jurisdiction of that mighty mother. Powerless and passive, he floats entranced amid her teeming floods. She shapes his passions and desires, and he, disputing not her guardianship, puts his neck beneath their yoke. All that he is, he is without his own co-operation: his reason and his appetites come to him from her hand, he accepts them unconsciously, and goes forth in quest of his gratifications in blind obedience to the force that drives him. All the germs that nature has planted in his breast owe their growth to her breath, and, unfolding themselves beneath it, they flourish in blessedness—for a time.
Hence this view of human life being the first to present itself to observation, the genius of physical science has ever been foremost to attempt to fix the position of man in the scale of the universe, and to read to him his doom. She tells thee, O man, that thou art but an animal of a higher and more intelligent class—a mere link, though perhaps a bright one, in the uninterrupted chain of creation. No clog art thou, she says, in the revolutions of the blind and mighty wheel. She lays her hand upon thee, and thou falling into her ranks, goest to swell the legions of dependent things—the leader, it may be, but not the antagonist of nature. She bends thee down under the law of causality, and, standing in her muster-roll, thou art forced to acknowledge that law as the sovereign of thy soul. The stars obey it in their whirling courses, why shouldst not thou? She either makes thee a mere tabula rasa, to be written upon by the pens of external things—an educt of their impressions—or else endowing thee with certain innate capacities, she teaches thee that all thy
