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ing to make the real more real and better -that to make the best of what is, will be to insure the best that shall be. So there is a kind of identity between the present of the earth and its future, and between time and eternity. Being, in its largest sense, is a growth. But let us see how our recluse, Thorndale, meditates on such themes. Here is an extract from his fragments on the sense of beauty:

"In truth, the earth grows more beautiful, as we grow better and wiser. The sentiment of beauty is no one feeling of the eye or of the mind. It is a gathering of many sensations, many feelings, many thoughts-perhaps taking its point of departure from the exquisite pleasure of color, blended with variety and symmetry of form; for forms, like sounds, appear to have a species of harmony, appealing at once to the sense, whether we regard the several parts of a single form, or the approximation of several distinct forms.

"I am never more convinced of the progress of mankind than when I think of the sentiment developed in us by our intercourse with nature, and mark how it augments and refines with our moral culture, and also (though this is not so generally admitted) with our scientific knowledge. We learn from age to age to see the beauty of the world; or, what comes to the same thing, this beautiful creation of the sentiment of beauty is developing itself in us.

"Only reflect what regions lovely as Paradise there are over all Asia and Europe, and in every quarter of the globe, waiting to receive their fitting inhabitants-their counterparts in the conscious creature. The men who are now living there do not see the Eden that surrounds them. They lack the moral and intellectual vision. It is not too bold a thing to say that, the mind of man once cultivated, he will see around him the Paradise he laments that he has lost. For one 'Paradise Lost,' he will sing of a thousand that he has gained.

66 The savage whose eye detects the minutest speck upon the horizon, is blind as a mole to the Elysium that surrounds him. Ay, and the poet finds a paradise wherever there is a single leaf to tremble against the sky.

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Mark, too, how the sense of beauty reäcts upon the nature of the man, disposing to deeds of gentleness and peace. We tread more softly as the scene grows more beautiful.

"That many reflective men should be solicitous to abstract a cherished sentiment like this of Beauty from all baser admixtures of our sensational nature, and should proclaim it to be a pure intuition of the soul, seems natural and pretty-a sort of poetizing philosophy, but not very wise. All nature is one-one Divine Idea. Let what you call baser be raised in our estimation when we find it a part, or a condition of the higher.

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Analysis destroys nothing that nature grows; it only gives us some little insight into the laws of growth. Did the cell-theory reduce all vegetation into isolated cells? Did flower and the tree? Mental analysis, in like it any thing else than add new wonder to the manner, merely teaches us the order of creation. And whatever is added to the human consciousness is just as new, and just as fresh from the hand of God, whether we can, or can not, trace the prior conditions of its existence.

"Whether it is the metaphysician with his catalogue of Faculties, or the phrenologist with his array of Organs, I have learnt to distrust these our popular distinctions-that is, as scientific distinctions. In popular language, we must always speak of the stem, and the leaf, and the fruit as distinct things, and yet the same few principles of growth may apply to all. I can only conceive of the mind, or human consciousness as one great and amazing growth of all but infinite variety, and yet essentially one. Sensations become memories, and memories combine (according to a few simple laws) to form endless varieties of consciousness. God alone can know into what grander or more perfect forms the consciousness of man shall thus develop itself."-Pp. 34-36.

See again how he looks at the supposed antagonism between poetry and science, and at the relation of the individual man to humanity, to the past every where:

"Some poets, in their verses, have lamented the inroad which science will occasionally make in their favorite associations, or predilections. A weak lament. Speaking largely, the more we know of nature, the more beautiful it becomes. Who has not felt that such knowledge as he had acquired of physiology and comparative anatomy (remote enough at first from æsthetics) has ended by throwing a fresh grace over every limb, a fresh charm over every movement in the animal creation? As to the vegetable world-as to our trees-I have not skill enough in language to describe the mystery and enchantment which modern sciences

whether of light, of chemistry, or of vital growth-have filled them with for me. Their leaves, as they rustle, seem to murmur of the half-told secrets of all creation.

"And take this with you: as science advances, each object, without losing its individuality, speaks more and more of the whole; and this that each living thing gets some beauty from the harmony disclosed in its own structure.

"I ask the mountain, Why art thou suddenly so dark? And the mountain answers, Ask the passing cloud that shadows me. Why, ( most beautiful ocean! art thou so changeful? And the sea answers, Ask the sky above, that showers down, now radiance, now this gloom. Why, O thou eternal sky! dost thou wrap thy

self in clouds? And the sky answers, Ask the valleys of the earth; they breathe this sadness up to me; it is not mine.

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Nothing stands circumscribed within itself. There is no self that is not half another's. Or say that every individuality is but the power of the whole manifesting itself thus and thus.

"Amidst all this beauty I catch sight, at an angle of the shore, of a solitary monk. He surely thinks himself alone. He is separated from the world. He has cast it all aside; even, perhaps, the unoffending beauty of this scene. He surely is alone. Not so. That corrupt and boisterous city on which he turns his backwhich, even in resolving to forget, he must incessantly remember-lo! its vanity and lies have made this hermit of him. This sadness is not his. Nay, even the dead in their graves, and bygone ages, and past centuries, of which he knows nothing, have helped to make him the strange creature that he wanders there. The wicked world has given him half his piety, the cloister the other half.

"You take a single soul, and tax it with its single guilt. It is right and fit to do so. And yet in every single soul it is the whole world you judge.

แ "Yes! it is right, and fit, and reasonable that the man, whilst living with his kind, should be treated as the sole originator of all he does of good or of evil. Cover him with honor! Stamp him with infamy! Thus only can man make an ordered world of it. And are not this reciprocated honor and dispraise, given and received by all, great part of human life itself? But in thy hands, O Rhadamanthus, judge of the dead! what is this solitary soul? It is but as a drop from the great ocean of life-clear, or foul, as winds from either pole have made it. Ay, and the very under-soil on which it lay, on which it was tossed to and fro, had been broken up by forgotten earthquakes and extinct volcanoes. A whole eternity had been at work where that drop of discolored water came from.”—Pp. 40, 41.

It is a favorite maxim with Thorndale that faith in God brings with it, as its natural corollary, faith in immortality. The usual arguments on this subject are, with him, more plausible and pleasant than substantial. But he attaches great weight to the moral, or rather the Divine argument, which rests on the fact, that the more intelligent and pure the soul of man becomes, the more does it desire to know God as he ought to be known, and to be assimilated to him as we ought to be assimilated:

"This appears to me to be the only desire that justifies the hope of immortality. The ability to apprehend partly the divine nature, and the desire that springs up in the thoughtful mind for the divine and the eternal in truth and

in life, form together a strong presumption in favor of a perpetuated existence.

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I do not find that desire for other knowledge affords such a presumption. A philosopher who should claim to live on merely to enlarge his chemical science, might be thought just as illogical in his reasoning as the more passionate children of the earth, who are desirous of perpetuating their happiness, or of having a second chance for it. Why should he know more? Is he to know all? Is he to live on as long as there is any thing to be learned ? And live where? How is he to pursue the thread of this inquiry in some other world?

"But this especial aspiration after knowledge of God stands on a quite different footing. Other knowledge, you may suppose, may increase from age to age; if we have it not, our posterity may; but here is a want felt imperatively by each reflective soul, and which never will be gratified on earth.

"If I were therefore asked for my ground of belief in the second great doctrine of religion, I should say it was involved in the first: it follows, I think, as a corollary from a belief in God.

66

Nay, even the terrible anxiety which sometimes seizes us to know whether a God exists or not, brings with it a sudden and imperious conviction in some future condition of our being in which we shall know. It would stand alone in nature if a thinking being should be born into this great scheme of things, where all is fit and harmonious, with one burning question forever in his heart, which was never to be solved. If I ever touched for a moment the borders of complete skepticism, I felt at that moment the impossibility that I could altogether die—that I could become extinct with this unremoved ignorance upon my soul."-Pp. 50, 51.

These passages may be taken as a sample of the religious spirit which pervades the meditations of Thorndale. But the jottings in his manuscript relate to the possible future of humanity in this world, as well as to the possible state of departed spirits in the next; and it may be well to tions on the first of these topics before we look to the substance of its representameddle with the second.

Of Clarence, the speaker who takes the brighter view of the destiny of our race, Thorndale thus writes:

hope. Where I have ventured, only for a mo"Clarence's philosophy is full of faith, full of ment, to place my foot-placing it tremulously and soon retracting it, he takes his stand boldly and firmly. He has an unconquerable conviction in the progress of Humanity; he will not hesitate cordially to adopt the last truth of the reason, because this seems at variance with the present wants of a progressive society. When an antagonist objects to some of his religious

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doctrines, that they are fit only for the climate of Utopia,' his answer is, 'I will believe, then, in the religion of Utopia; and be you assured of this, that if its religion is true, and is already here amongst us, what you call Utopia is following on behind.'

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with a sledge-hammer upon this objection, is here: The development of the individual, you say, is to suffer, is to be repressed. Now, I maintain that it is precisely the development of a noble individuality which will lead to this more social society. And, again, it is precisely "But his Utopian views are as safe, and, in this society that must develop the highest indiconser-viduality. the only rational sense of that term, as vative' as they are hopeful. For he constantly maintains that it is only by advancing under our present system of social economy that we can rise into a higher. It is the gradual development of a higher system, from causes already in operation, that he delights to proclaim. No sudden transition of a permanent character seems to him possible. How quietly slavery or serfdom vanished out of Europe! Changes as great and as gradual may be accomplished in the future-may be now in the process of accomplishment.

"At Oxford, if I remember right, he was not quite so patient in his expectations: he brought the golden vision nearer to the eye. He could then with marvelous rapidity throw up into the air the light towers and gilded fanes of his At a later period he was Utopian architecture. contented that the slow builder, Time, should build on according to his wonted fashion. But he was as confident as ever that the glorious structure would arise, and he assigned to it even more magnificent proportions than before. What the arrangements and method of life would be in that Future Society, he was far too wise to think of predicting. A great principle would, in part, work out its own details; in part, those details would be determined by circumstance, varying in every age and country. The extended action of a principle well known amongst us that of mutual cooperation designedly entered into for mutual good-was all that he confidently prophesied."-Pp. 151, 152.

"Who feels so intensely his own personality, who has so large and grand an individuality, as the patriot whose whole soul is given to his country? But to descend to common-place men and times, let any man but join a club, or any association for a common purpose, and he feels his self-importance augmented directly. How can it be otherwise? Our life and our personality are coëxtensive. We live only as persons. If I am a citizen of Athens, all Athens, so far as I can embrace it, has gone to swell my personal or individual existence. There is no possible antagonism between the Individual and Society, none of this kind, that there can be a great society and little minds; for just in proportion as the relationships of the individual to others, or to the whole society are augmented, in precisely the same proportion is the individual being of each man augmented.

"I see you acquiesce in this as a general principle, and you are preparing some some yet and but. Stop them for a moment, and let me say a word on that other popular objection, that if we had not the present inequalities of fortune, the same trials, the same dependence upon each other's voluntary aid, there would not be the requisite means for cultivating the affections; our friendships would grow cold; and even the opinion of others would have little effect upon us, since we should no longer have to solicit favors of each other.

"We meet with this style of objection from and men who claim to be eminently practical; just note how eminently theoretical or hypoOf course this principle of a general co-thetical it is. Look at our existing society. operation in order to the general good, was open to many and strong objections, those and Thorndale did not fail to urge objections. But Clarence had his manner of meeting them:

"I am not," he would say, "contemplating a society of learned Jesuits on the one hand, and a people of Paraguay Indians on the othersuch a society is a type of weakness and imbecility, not of strength--but a society where the rule which governs all is made by all, understood and voluntarily obeyed by all. An intelligent obedience to such a rule I do most unhesitatingly aver to be the most desirable element in each man's character and happiness It implies no undue that you could name. submission, (as you object,) no absorption of a man's individuality-any more than citizenship or patriotism. A rule which our own reason approves of is not a restraint; it is a chosen course of action; as freely chosen as any course of social action can be. But where I strike, as

"The services which cement friendship are scarcely compatible with friendship. reciprocal services. A feeling of dependence is

"And again, where do we see the desire of esteem in the opinion of others acting most powerfully? Precisely where it seems to have little to bestow, except this very esteem. In fact, it is the thousand subtle and indefinable services that men who live together must always be reciprocating that constitutes the great value to us of the good opinion of the society in which What does an English gentleman we move. suffer in his substantial or material comfort from being black-balled at a club, or excluded from any particular circle of society? And yet the power of public opinion to punish could hardly be better illustrated than by just such a case.

To the cultivated mind the esteem of The mankind becomes valued for itself. Nay, we need not go to very cultivated minds. common soldier knows no greater pleasure in life than to be praised for his courage by his fellow-soldiers. The praise adds nothing to his rations.

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"I can not suppose that any one contemplates | men who could live in their own Utopia. They a state of society in which there shall be no remind me, in this respect, of the battle-loving such thing as property, and no such thing as crusaders of olden times. These steel-clad warmutual gifts and services. But the gifts which riors, armed to the teeth, went forth to fight for pass between wealth and poverty might be sup- the Madonna-went forth, mind you, to fight posed to cease, and they would cease without any meanwhile the Paradise they were to win by detriment to our social affections. What is more their swords was of the most peaceable descripnotorious than that wherever a pecuniary inter- tion. These valiant pikemen never once asked est appears upon the scene, friendship retires? themselves whether indeed they greatly desired Whether you take money from me, or whether to sit down quiet and docile, like good children, you give it, the transaction is alike fatal to our in the presence of that sweet Mater Dolorosa, whose picture they constantly saw in their churches. old bond of amity."-Pp. 153, 155.

Clarence's maxim is, that it is from the disparities of fortune-dependence on others want, that the great mass of feud and crime has its origin. Get rid of these evils, and the root of nearly all evil will be destroyed. But Seckendorf, the man representing the spirit of denial in our time, makes sad havoc of these theories. Here are his words:

their own nonsense.

"There are persons, my dear Clarence, who find it a very interesting occupation to plan imaginary communities, and shape for all others some precise methodical existence which it pleases them to approve. Harmless occupation, since, thank heaven! they shape nothing but It is a very poor fragment of human life that any one mind can embrace, and mould, and organize. The real organization of society is accomplished for us, much as the seasons and the climate that we live in have been organized. The infinite variety of nature laughs to scorn your little garden-plots. You may hedge and ditch as you will, you will not turn into little garden-plots all our great world of wastes and forests, and redundant vegetation. For me, I would rather be a wild dog in a forest, with the chance of being devoured by the first bigger dog I met with, than I would live shut up in one of these model moral communities. I become a rebel to all morality when I am so bemoralized. All very well if we were a parcel of polyps, and had one stomach in common, and your only task was to drench this well with black broth. But we happen not to

have one stomach in common, much less one mind.

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CLARENCE.

"But I am no Communist.

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SECKENDORF.

What they were to do-these steelSimply clad pikemen-amongst the doves and the cherubs-never crossed their thoughts. to fight for. they loved fighting, and here was the Madonna work of piety! what could the heart of man deOur own enthusiastic champions sire more? of some millennium of perpetual peace and social industry are much of the same temper. Here is something to contend for-here is their Madonna-and they contend zealously enough. But how would they look if they were really transported to their industrial paradise, where work and playtimes should be meted out t them with due regularity, and their docile la bors be rewarded (let us be liberal in our conjectures) with unlimited supply of plain clothes and plain diet? I think they would be curiously disappointed at the aspect of their sad Madonna. Was this the lady that had so often inspired their intellectual combats?

Battle! and the battle itself a

"Idea of the good of the whole ! All this, my dear young friend, is but the old pastoral fable tricked out in philosophic phrase. It is some foolish Arcadia you promise us, and you think to justify the prediction by placing it a or the next age, as well as some centuries great way off. Why not promise it to-morrow, hence?"-Pp. 254-256.

Clarence rejoins that education in its largest sense is slow, especially the education of the race, and he can wait. Seckendorf replies, we know what education does where it exists, and we thus have the means of judging as to what it would do if it were general. Now its effects, as far as our experience goes, is not so much to make man see alike, as to make them see differently.

แ What, according to your own account, does this much-talked 'education of the people' consist in? what is the simple fact? Certain books "You are for new organization of some kind now read by the leisure class will be read by a -you are for binding us closer than before-class who have less leisure, read at least not forging new chains for the coupling of us to- more attentively than they are at present. gether. I wish that some of you schemers of Meanwhile choose me any half-dozen of the new societies could be caught in your own trap best books whose circulation is to be extended -caught and penned in your own Dutch Ely-by the increased activity of the Printing Press sium. These ardent schemers contend and you will not find that any two of them are in fight for their idea, their scheme; and the fight-perfect harmony or agreement-you will have ing for it is pleasant enough: they are the last (taking them together) a perfect Babel of con

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flicting doctrines, tastes, sentiments, opinions. What new or surprising unanimity of action will you get out of this? Lay hold of the first handful of books that may be now standing on your library table, and proceed to consult them as your oracle-what a din of yes! and no! Just as education will assail your ears! spreads, diversity of opinion will spread with it. One sees no unanimity except amongst a multitude who do not think, and perchance amongst a priesthood who think for that multitudeThe think how to guide and govern them. moment men begin to reflect, they begin to differ, and precisely on those subjects which affect the institutions of society. Suppose all men became readers and thinkers, we should have a scene of interminable controversy opening wider and wider. What especially good result -what novel unanimity of action, I repeat-do you expect from that?

"I make no moan about it. Life develops itself thus. The more complexity in the whole society, the more variety in the individuals.

The individual can less and less embrace all that is developed in humanity.

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where the diet is low, and the dwelling is dark,
and the air is stagnant. In some constitutions,
whatever may be the surrounding circum-
stances, the fever will break out, and then it
makes of the man--as chance or the multitude
will have it-a god or a demon.

"Your Cheap Book! your sheet of printed
paper! A sail blown by all winds—nothing
Gossamer sail, and a stowage
but this rag of canvas, and a hull to move huge
as a mountain.
like Noah's ark. Not much navigation here, I
think."-Pp. 257-259.

This is rough handling, and Clarence does not recover himself well under these heavy blows. Seckendorf insists that the pensive labor of the brain must ever belong to comparatively few; that the wants of humanity, if to be provided for on the present scale, must necessitate that for one instance in which the being man refines into the philosopher, there will be many in which he will roughen into the In the mean "I can not expect, in the most complex de- smith or the plowman. velopment of life, to be able to trace that order, while, the very complexity of society in method, regularity, which I trace in the simplest which this alleged progress consists, natu-that method and regularity which is the rally breeds diversity of opinion, diversity foundation of scientific prediction. If I prick a of opinion detracts from the force of opinman, he will bleed; what form his anger will ion, and to detract from the force of opinassume, is not so clear. As we rise in com-ion is to detract from the force of moraliplexity, prediction becomes less possible. When we observe in the tentacula or limbs of some simplest specimen of animal life a quite rhythmical movement, we pronounce such movement to be automatic, not voluntary or instigated by passion or desire, because of its exceeding regularity. If you could show me a society whose movements were quite rhythmical, I am sure I should see before me the very Increased lowest form of human society. thought and increased activity will not display themselves in a rhythmical society.

"Men and women are to be all very wise, and therefore very good, and therefore very happy! Such very moral philosophy we teach to little children, and do indeed leave for the practice of a most remote posterity. On the ears of an old man nothing falls so light as these ethical abstractions, these vague eloquent moralities. They are pretty and teasing, as the snow-flakes that blind you for an instant with their brightness. Nothing lighter or colder falls through the air.

"You are speculating, Clarence, on the development of the thinking faculty amongst all classes of men. Pray look around you. Scarcely one in a thousand of any class, under any circumstances, can be got to think. I have lived in most capitals of Europe; I have seen your highest and your lowest; I have mingled with all classes. I tell you that men do not love the labor of thinking; rich or poor, they love it not; it is a toil, a disturbance; it wearies, it afflicts them. Here and there the propensity is developed, and chiefly, like some other plagues,

ty, which must depend on opinion. Seck-
endorf finds only too much in history,
and in the present posture of affairs,
which seems to corroborate these gloomy
philosophizings. There is profound truth
in the following sentences
who have ears to hear on such subjects:

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for those

"Two years ago, (1848,) a democratic movement shook most of the thrones of Europe. Was this in the programme of your development?

Was this the 'march of intellect?' If so, there has been a counter-march. As I read this last chapter in our history, wealth took the alarm at certain prophetic announcements of

social progress,' of 'equitable reorganization,' and threw her weight upon the side of monarchy. Wealth enlisted the despot; wealth reënlisted and exalted the priest. Men, to save themselves from your philanthropic regeneration, sacrificed political liberty and intellectual liberty; they submitted to imperial government, and shuffled on in haste the cloak of hypocrisy.

"England is almost the only country of Europe that at this moment can boast of republican institutions, (for the government of England is practically a republic under the forms of monarchy;) but how long is she likely to retain this distinction? Some little time ago, I be held paraded through the streets of London an enormous banner, followed by a multitude of Chartists. On this purple banner, and in letters of gold, one might read the motto-' A fair

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